The Natural Patriot

Just now I felt the need, as I sometimes do, to just step outside and stand quietly for a while. Letting my breathing and heart rate ease into a quieter rhythm, allowing the soft breeze to wash away the cloud of small things clamoring for attention, gradually becoming aware of the slower turnings of the world around me.

It’s still dark in the early October morning, on the cusp of daybreak, and my first sensation is the smell of damp earth, always welcome and nourishing after a period of dry weather. Crickets drone all around, seemingly hidden somewhere distant and just within earshot. A few birds beginning to rouse. Overhead, thick clouds churn slowly in the first gray light, my neighbor’s great towering pecan tree silhouetted against them. A crow calls, the melancholy soul of autumn in these parts.

In front of me, only beginning to emerge in the dim light, is the new bed we planted a couple of weeks ago, the latest step in the gradual reclamation of the suburban yard and its transformation back to something resembling American Nature. The little perennials, looking forlorn in a sea of mulch, are fading as they go to sleep for the winter. But they’ve set in well and I’m happy knowing that we can look forward to the tiny first sprouts of a prairie of sorts beginning to come to life in March or April.

I learned a few lessons from the earlier phases of the experiment. This time, I used a flat-edged spade to cut the lawn sod into a grid and then overturned the chunks, pulling out what grass rhizomes I could. Then, to discourage the grass from coming back, covered the tumult with a layer of broken down cardboard boxes, pizza boxes, and old newspapers that have been accumulating in the shed for months before dumping a thick layer of mulch on top. That was a good vigorous day’s work.

Then, over the course of the next week, came the planting. Twenty-nine pots in all: 3 bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana), 5 purple milkweed (Asclepia sp.), 3 doll’s daisy (Boltonia asteroides), 5 star tickseed (Coreopsis pubescens), 5 purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), 3 aromatic aster (Aster oblongifolius), 3 Virginia cup plant (Silphium connatum), and 3 false indigo (Baptisia australis). Plus I had to dig up and move the old butterflybush, not a native but spared because it’s so good at attracting butterflies.

It’s an exercise in patience, since this will look much like any other planted garden bed for a year or three and won’t really come into its own as a diverse wildish landscape for probably several years. Nevertheless, we can certainly expect flowers in the spring, and butterflies and birds. Probably also varmints, which hammered some of my earlier native plantings — will have to remain vigilant there. Lots of hard physical work digging, turning sod, wheelbarrowing mulch, and so on, but it’s surprising how good that feels after sitting for weeks behind a computer.

Alan Weisman recently published a book that got a lot of press attention for its novelty idea of considering The World Without Us — that is, what earth would look like if some unlikely event wiped out humans and left everything else more or less intact.

An interesting topic for cocktail party chat. But let’s consider the much more germane and pressing question: what will a world with us look like , meaning a world filled with the additional four or five or six billion descendants we as a global society are likely to produce in the coming decades before we bump up against the limits to global human population growth and the numbers stabilize?

As the old warning goes: this is not a test. This is not a parlor game question or an academic question. This is arguably the fundamental question at the root of all others. Consider the words of the father of capitalism himself, Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations in the fateful year 1776:

“The desire for food is limited in every man by the narrow capacity of the human stomach; but the desire for the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage and household furniture, seem to have no limit or certain boundary.”

The implications of those desires, and what might be done about them, are well laid out in a recent special theme issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London dedicated to “The impact of population growth on tomorrow’s world“. It is sobering and thought-provoking reading (and, importantly, for my readers who don’t happen to have access to a full-service university library, the issue is open access). The issue has everything from fossil fuel limits to the demographic transition, to refutations of revisionist claims that population growth is unimportant, to accounts of how policy has reduced population growth humanely in a variety of countries, to what we should be thinking about to fix the problem, on a global scale. The table of contents is shown below, with links to the articles, but here is the bottom line, and I quote:

“This statement, prepared by the organizers, summarizes some conclusions of the meeting without committing every participant to support of every detail.

Rapid population growth in some regions, combined with increasing affluence and explosive growth in fossil fuel and natural resources consumption throughout the world, is seriously endangering a broad range of natural systems that support life. For the first time in history, much of the natural world is adversely affected by human activity. Global warming is just one among many threats to sustaining human life, wildlife and the natural environment.

The United Nations projects that the human population will increase from the current 6.8 billion to between 8 billion and 10.5 billion in 2050. Although more than half the world’s women now have an average of two children or fewer, the global population is still growing rapidly and this year there will be 78 million more births than deaths (a number slightly less than the population of Germany). Over 95 per cent of this growth is in low-income countries least able to provide for these numbers. Despite deaths from AIDS, much of the fastest population growth is in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2007, Western donor contributions to family planning were less than a quarter of the inflation-adjusted target set at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. Shrinking family planning budgets have been associated with stalled fertility decline in a number of countries, leading to serious adverse effects on the health of women and their families and the stability and progress of civil society. In Kenya, as a result of diminished focus on family planning, the projected population in 2050 has been increased from 54 million to 83 million. Some observers predict that an increase of this magnitude may lead to food scarcity and crumbling infrastructure and, potentially, to violent conflicts over scarce resources.

With over 80 million unintended pregnancies each year, there is already a large unmet need for family planning. Surveys show that 200 million women wish to delay or stop the next pregnancy and over 100 million are not using any contraception because they lack access to it or face other barriers to its use. Even in the USA, one of the most affluent nations in the world, half of all pregnancies are unintended.

Meeting the unmet need for family planning has been highly successful in slowing rapid population growth. Ready access to contraception and safe abortion has decreased family size, even in illiterate communities living on less than a dollar a day. Increased access to family planning will make it easier for countries with rapidly growing populations to expand education. Education, in turn, particularly of women, makes an important contribution to fertility decline and a crucial contribution to development. However, rapidly growing countries cannot always expand education fast enough to keep pace with the growing number of children each year.

The coming decade should be dedicated to the needs of the one billion young people aged 15–24 in the world, the majority living in low-income settings with limited educational and employment opportunities. Every young person should have full access to contraception and the knowledge of how to use it. The burden of ill health associated with unsafe abortion must be confronted, especially among young people who are often most vulnerable to unintended pregnancy.

The unmet need for contraception in low-income countries is calculated to increase from 525 million couples in 2000 to 742 million by 2015. It is essential that national leaders and international donors, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, understand the imperative to invest in education and improved access to family planning.

All women should be protected from unintended childbirth. Making every birth a wanted birth is a goal that can be approached through improved access to family planning.

Reaching this goal is vital to creating a healthier and more equitable world.

Theme Issue: ‘The impact of population growth on tomorrow’s world’
Roger V. Short: Population growth in retrospect and prospect.

Malcolm Potts, Anne M. Pebley, and J. Joseph Speidel. Editorial.

Adair Turner. Population priorities: the challenge of continued rapid population growth.

John Bongaarts. Human population growth and the demographic transition.

Alex C. Ezeh, Blessing U. Mberu, and Jacques O. Emina. Stall in fertility decline in Eastern African countries: regional analysis of patterns, determinants and implications.

Adair Turner. Population ageing: what should we worry about?

Steven W. Sinding. Population, poverty and economic development.

Wolfgang Lutz. Sola schola et sanitate: human capital as the root cause and priority for international development?

J. Joseph Speidel, Deborah C. Weiss, Sally A. Ethelston, and Sarah M. Gilbert. Population policies, programmes and the environment.

Richard Nehring. Traversing the mountaintop: world fossil fuel production to 2050.

Bradley A. Thayer. Considering population and war: a critical and neglected aspect of conflict studies.

Ndola Prata. Making family planning accessible in resource-poor settings.

Martha Campbell and Kathleen Bedford. The theoretical and political framing of the population factor in development.

Malcolm Potts. Where next?

One of these days I really have to write another real post, instead of sending out hat tips to other sites (as important as that is), rehashing my own posts under different cover, and other sleight-of-hand.

But for the moment, I note that Wren has invited me to answer a few questions in association with kindly featuring the Natural Patriot at the Nature Blog Network, a cool site that aims to be the “nexus for the nature blog community, the portal through which readers and publishers alike can locate the very best nature blogs on the net.”

The interview is here. Thanks Wren!

. . . is up at Cephalopodcast — this month’s round-up of blue bloggers (meaning ocean-themed, as opposed to morose and crooning about lost love or some such ill).

[Over the last year, through a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, euphoria and despair, exciting breaks, wild goose chases, dead ends, dark nights of the soul, and so on, we have been working to develop a project to employ wild algae to simultaneously help clean up pollution on the one hand and provide a feedstock for environmentally sustainable biofuels on the other. It has been a long road. But we have cleared the first hurdle. 

As the authoritative news anchors used to say back in the day, with a sense of controlled urgency, “This just in“:]

Algae initiative aims to produce fuel while helping the environment

By Joe McClain, The College of William and Mary
30 September 2009

The College of William and Mary and its Virginia Institute of Marine Science have formed a collaborative research initiative to investigate a promising new technology to produce biofuel from the algae growing naturally in rivers and the Chesapeake Bay.

The enterprise, called ChAP—the Chesapeake Algae Project—is an integrated research approach to algae-based energy production and environmental remediation. It includes a number of corporate partners, notably StatoilHydro, a Norwegian energy company. StatoilHydro has seeded the enterprise with an initial $3 million investment. Other key partners are the Williamsburg energy advisory firm Blackrock Energy, the University of Maryland, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of Arkansas and HydroMentia, a Florida company that works with water-treatment technologies.

“This is the kind of collaboration at which William & Mary excels,” William & Mary President Taylor Reveley said. “It is a powerful extension of our own drive toward a more sustainable campus community.”

StatoilHydro representatives met with William & Mary officials and other partners in Williamsburg recently to sign a formal agreement to proceed. Other partners, private and public, are expected to join the initiative as work progresses.

“By taking the first step in close cooperation with some of the most skilled researchers the U.S. has to offer in this field, we feel confident that we have the best starting point possible for reaching a successful result and a good basis for attracting new private and public partners in the future,” says Lars Nordli, head of StatoilHydro’s biofuel division.

The William & Mary/VIMS group is investigating a process that not only is environmentally sustainable, but if used on a large scale, can help to reverse a number of environmental problems such as excess nutrient enrichment that produces “dead zones” in the Chesapeake Bay and other waters.

However, Dennis Manos, William & Mary’s vice provost for research and graduate and professional studies, said the main environmental benefits of ChAP will derive from the central goal of the project: to find a way to produce algal biofuel on an industrial scale.

“We would like to help companies put a significant dent in the world’s thousand-barrel-per-second appetite for oil,” Manos said.

Lead researchers at VIMS involved in ChAP include J. Emmett Duffy, the Loretta and Lewis Glucksman Professor of Marine Science, and Professor of Marine Science Elizabeth Canuel. At the Williamsburg campus of William & Mary, Gene Tracy, Chancellor Professor of Physics and Applied Science; Bill Cooke, professor of physics; and Robert Hinkle, professor of chemistry, are lead members of the team, which includes other faculty members.

Manos explained that the project involves the entire process of producing biofuels, from algal growth to harvesting, extracting the oil and other projects from the algae, processing the oil and producing the final biofuel product.

The project was initiated by exploring, among others, technology originally developed by Walter Adey of the Smithsonian Institution as an efficient, large-scale aquarium filter.  Adey has been meeting with a group of researchers at William & Mary and VIMS for the past year, working out details of how to adapt the concept to industrial-scale algae cultivation. A test site has been operating at VIMS, using brackish York River water, and a second test station is planned for Lake Matoaka on the William & Mary campus.

Algae are good candidates for use as biofuel because of their rapid growth rates, ability to take-up nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and some of these aquatic plants have as much as 50 percent oil content, depending on environmental factors. ChAP differs from other algal biofuel initiatives in two ways.

“In the first place, we’re going to work with many species of algae, as opposed to concentrating on farming a monoculture, or attempting to contain genetically modified algae in open-water environments,” Manos said. Most current algae studies focus on one high-yield species or strain of algae, but Manos explained that using a polyculture approach makes the algae less susceptible to disease and generally more robust. One of the goals of ChAP will be to develop processes to maximize the effective energy yield from a harvest that varies in oil content.

The other difference is that the process is designed to work without competing with either fresh-water supplies or agricultural resources. “The process will work in brackish water, salt water, even waste water,” Manos said. “That’s one of the best parts of the whole idea, and ultimately, while producing affordable transportation fuel, using wild algae can even help to remediate conditions that otherwise would lead to harmful algal blooms.”

[Stand by for details . . .]

As an academic ecologist researching or teaching about ecosystems, a common dilemma is the issue of how to define the boundaries of a system. Where, for example, does the Chesapeake Bay end and the Atlantic begin? What is the edge of the Hubbard Brook ecosystem? Et cetera. But there is one major exception to this rule: planet earth. We can define the edges of that superecosystem reasonably well. For all practical purposes we are limited, as a global society, to the resources we have here, with the single major exception of incoming solar radiation.

Humans have now grown in abundance and influence to the point where we are the force of nature. Which begs the ultimate practical question about ecosystems: How is humanity interacting with the planetary ecosystem, and is this suite of interactions sustainable?

Obviously, this generation is not the first to ask these questions. In 1972, a team lead by Donella Meadows from MIT published a book called “The Limits to Growth” (LTG), which presented results of a computer modeling study commissioned by a think-tank, The Club of Rome, concerned about the mounting impacts of unsustainable human activities on the earth system. They examined the interactions of five subsystems of the global economic system: population, food production, industrial production, pollution, and consumption of non-renewable natural resources. The model began in 1900 and continued to 2100. The model was able to reproduce broadly the historical data to the year 1970.

The central message from the LTG model  was that growth of the global economy would lead to exceeding planetary limits sometime in the 21st century, likely resulting in collapse of the human population and economic system.

BUT, the model also suggested, collapse could by an aggressive program of changes in behavior, progressive policy, and strategic application of technology.

LtG modeled three scenarios:

1) The “standard run” represents a business-as-usual situation where physical, economic, and social relationships were maintained more or les as they were during 1900–1970. This run (see the figure above) shows continuing economic growth into the early decades of the 21st century but signs of increasing environmental pressure at the start of the 21st century (e.g., resources diminishing, pollution increasing exponentially, growth slowing in food, services, and material wealth per capita). Sounds uncomfortably familiar? Finally, this scenario resulted in “overshoot and collapse” of the global system in mid-21st century due to diminishing resources and increasing pollution.

2) The “comprehensive technology” approach—approximating suggestions of “optimists” like Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg—attempts to solve sustainability issues with purely technological solutions. This scenario assumes (as do some economists, astonishingly enough) that levels of resources are effectively unlimited, as well as efficient recycling of materials, big reductions in pollution, doubling of agricultural land yields, and availability of birth control world-wide. Hmm. This scenario delayed the collapse of the global system to the latter part of the 21st century, after which economic growth outstripped the gains in efficiency and pollution control.

3) The “stabilized world” scenario assumed implementation of both technological solutions and deliberate social policies to reach equilibrium in population, material wealth, food, and services per capita. Policies implemented include perfect birth control for a family size of two kids per couple; preference for consumption of services over material goods; effective control of pollution; maintenance of agricultural land; and increased lifetime of industrial capital, among others.

The publication of the Limits to Growth study (LtG) in 1972 had immediate and ongoing impacts. Millions of copies were sold, and it was translated into 30 languages. It linked the world economy with the environment in the first integrated global model.

Needless to say, the book was also highly controversial. There was and remains a sustained campaign to discredit the LtG, including repeated misrepresentations that the LtG predicted resources would be depleted and the world system would collapse by the end of the 20th century. So people have been arguing about this for more than 30 years.

Surprisingly, no one thought to test whether the predictions were true until very recently, when Graham Turner published a paper comparing historical data for 1970–2000 with the LtG scenarios. Here’s what he found (see the other figures here):

Generally, the “stabilized world” and “comprehensive technology” scenarios overestimated food, services, and material goods for the population. And population was under-estimated by the “stabilized world” scenario. All scenarios matched the remaining non-renewable resources to varying extents. Global persistent pollution was underestimated by both the “stabilized world” and “comprehensive technology” scenarios.

Overall, Turner’s analysis shows that — can you guess it yet? — 30 years of historical data match pretty closely the key features of the business-as-usual “standard run” scenario, which predicted collapse of the global system midway through the 21st century. Conversely, the data did not compare well with other scenarios involving salvation through technology (perhaps too much of it is being diverted to twitter) or stabilizing behavior and policies.

Yikes.

Turner’s analyses also provide some indication of the change in consumption patterns that would likely be required to achieve a sustainable global system. The “stabilized world” scenario assumed a sustainable global average per capita level of material wealth approximately equal to contemporary levels. Currently, of course, the great majority of that wealth is being enjoyed by us in the developed world, which makes up one-quarter or less of the world’s population. If, for the sake of argument, this wealth were distributed evenly across the future global population (assume ~9 billion people), average per capita material wealth would fall to about 1/6th of current levels in developed countries.

Yikes again. Let’s get that cap-and-trade bill passed . . .

[original source:  Turner GM (2008). A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality. Global Environmental Change-Human and Policy Dimensions, 18, 397-411.]

I mean the natural world here. Yes, the suggestion might at first seem counterintuitive (perhaps even obscene) given the fierce opposition to any restraint on rapacious commerce and “development” that became, rightly or wrongly, intertwined with fundamentalist religion in the conservative coalition in America we have known for most of the last decade.  But of course the situation is more nuanced than that. Even among American Christians, a greener outlook has been taking hold in recent years, and it appears that this sentiment transcends particular religious sects (see, for example, the arcworld website linked below). For most religious people, obviously, there are more important concerns than the environment. But that is equally true of non-religious people.

I was led down this thread of rumination by an interesting letter to Nature this past week, which is reproduced verbatim below. The potential value of appealing to people’s religious views in environmental conservation also resonates strongly with the message from Randy Olson’s new book “Don’t be such a scientist“, which is basically that you can get a lot more mileage for your message by aiming for the heart, gut, and libido than by making clever academic arguments and citing tables of facts. The argument below seems pretty persuasive to me.

Conservation: the world’s religions can help

Shonil Bhagwat & Martin Palmer

The world’s religions are emerging as a surprising driver of support for conservation of biological diversity.

The International Interfaith Investment Group, for example, which is collectively worth more than US$7 trillion, is encouraging religious organizations to change their current investment policies in favour of those that support conservation.

In addition, lands owned by these organizations can contribute to the conservation of biodiversity because of their protected status. More than 7% of Earth’s land surface is owned by religious institutions, and a further 8% has sacred links (http://www.arcworld.org). Given that most countries will never be able to designate more than 15% of their land as protected areas (S. Chape et al. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 360, 443–455; 2005), territory with religious and sacred affiliations contributes substantially to maintaining biodiversity.

It should also be possible to raise funding for conservation by appealing to donors who have religious faith. For example, the wealthy countries of the G20 group that have large religious populations might step in and help.

The focus of initiatives in the past has been on paying for ecosystem services, which are considered ‘natural capital’ (R. Costanza et al. Nature 387, 253–260; 1997), but an appeal to support native communities on religious grounds might prove more persuasive in a difficult economic climate.

Of the 125 countries that are represented in the Conservation International list of biodiversity hotspots, most have a low per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and a strong religious base (http://tinyurl.com/2b2kg9). Collectively, these countries are home to more than 4 billion people affiliated with one of 11 mainstream faiths; more than half of them have a total population of 3 billion and a per-capita GDP of less than US$5,000.

Religious sympathy has the potential to make a major contribution towards biodiversity conservation. This contribution could be extremely valuable in the approach to the 2010 target of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

No, I’m not talking about hay fever. This just in:

National Pollinator Week is coming up (21-27 June), and I just ran across this great website that offers free downloadable guides to improving habitat for these essential animals in your yard or area.  If you live in the USA, you can scroll down to the link on lower right (”Free pollinator friendly planting guides!”), enter your zipcode, and download a concise, illustrated guide that summarizes the importance of pollinators to the ecology (and economy) of your region, describes some of the important types of pollinators in your area, and — most useful of all — lists native plants of the region with their flowering times and characteristics, which allow one to engineer the habitat to support a diverse array of pollinators throughout the year.

There is also a really nice pollinator curriculum for grades 3-6 here. The curriculum includes a bunch of specific activities and lessons, even a community service module, that can be done with kids.

[Editor’s note: Following is Paul Hawken’s recent commencement speech to the graduating class of the University of Portland. It is so inspiring, so filled with poetry and wisdom, and so dead on the mark that I feel compelled to reproduce the whole thing verbatim. I have admired Paul Hawken since I read the equally inspiring book he co-authored with Amory and Hunter Lovins, “Natural Capitalism” (which I still have not added to the NP Essential Reading list where it belongs). Talk about thinking outside the box. He is a true Natural Patriot. Read this essay, ponder it, print it out to read again every couple of months, and follow his advice.]

When I was invited to give this speech, I was asked if I could give a simple short talk that was “direct, naked, taut, honest, passionate, lean, shivering, startling, and graceful.” No pressure there. Let’s begin with the startling part. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation… but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement. Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

This planet came with a set of instructions, but we seem to have misplaced them. Important rules like don’t poison the water, soil, or air, don’t let the earth get overcrowded, and don’t touch the thermostat have been broken. Buckminster Fuller said that spaceship earth was so ingeniously designed that no one has a clue that we are on one, flying through the universe at a million miles per hour, with no need for seatbelts, lots of room in coach, and really good food — but all that is changing.

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement. It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world. Its clout resides in idea, not in force. It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the President of the United States of America, and as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way.

There is a rabbinical teaching that says if the world is ending and the Messiah arrives, first plant a tree, and then see if the story is true. Inspiration is not garnered from the litanies of what may befall us; it resides in humanity’s willingness to restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. “One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,” is Mary Oliver’s description of moving away from the profane toward a deep sense of connectedness to the living world.

Millions of people are working on behalf of strangers, even if the evening news is usually about the death of strangers. This kindness of strangers has religious, even mythic origins, and very specific eighteenth-century roots. Abolitionists were the first people to create a national and global movement to defend the rights of those they did not know. Until that time, no group had filed a grievance except on behalf of itself. The founders of this movement were largely unknown — Granville Clark, Thomas Clarkson, Josiah Wedgwood — and their goal was ridiculous on the face of it: at that time three out of four people in the world were enslaved. Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists. They were told they would ruin the economy and drive England into poverty. But for the first time in history a group of people organized themselves to help people they would never know, from whom they would never receive direct or indirect benefit. And today tens of millions of people do this every day. It is called the world of non-profits, civil society, schools, social entrepreneurship, non-governmental organizations, and companies who place social and environmental justice at the top of their strategic goals. The scope and scale of this effort is unparalleled in history.

The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.

The first living cell came into being nearly 40 million centuries ago, and its direct descendants are in all of our bloodstreams. Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected. Our fates are inseparable. We are here because the dream of every cell is to become two cells. And dreams come true. In each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90 percent of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms you would perish in hours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms. The total cellular activity in one human body is staggering: one septillion actions at any one moment, a one with twenty-four zeros after it. In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe, which is exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a “little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven.”

So I have two questions for you all: First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously, and your body does this so well you are free to ignore it, and wonder instead when this speech will end. You can feel it. It is called life. This is who you are. Second question: who is in charge of your body? Who is managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you, just as in all of nature. Our innate nature is to create the conditions that are conducive to life. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run as if your life depends on it.

Dear me.  First lightning bugs of the season out in the last few days and I haven’t even reported on this spring’s new incarnation of the Timberneck Biodiversity Restoration Project (translation for uninitiated: yardwork. Only more fun.). Well, it hasn’t been for lack of interest. Since I am off tomorrow for a overnight trip with the boy’s class, a brief tour of the highlights will have to suffice for the time being.  More to come soon, well, eventually anyway. There’s a lot happening out there.

The alert reader will recall that I made a resolution of sorts a year or three ago, inspired in part by Doug Tallamy’s wonderful book, to get serious about re-engineering the yard toward a landscape more in harmony with the evolutionary history of the local area, more hospitable to desirable wildlife of all sizes, less thirsty for imported water and industrial fertilizer, more pleasing to the eye and spirit, less work (?), etc. This has involved both a surprisingly satisfying campaign of piched battle against various aggressive and invasive alien plants, as well as a systematic plan to plant a wide range of native shrubs and perennials over the course of the next few years.  Oh, and a vegetable garden too. A major re-imagining of the property.

After starting tentatively last spring with a little butterfly patch and a few pots scavenged from a native plant sale, we decided to launch into this righteously and contacted our local native plant nurserywoman and guru, Denise Green, who produced a coherent plan to convert a large swath of monotonous green “grass” (mostly alien weeds, albeit many with little flowers that are charming in their way) into a structurally diverse sward of native flowers, grasses, and shrubs favored by butterflies and birds. The idea was to have this native landscape meld into an edible landscape that included an existing pecan tree at one end, and our little vegetable plot on the other. The plan is shown below.

So, long story short, I started with the area between the house and the shed, along the sinuous brick path. First the destruction: I cut down a gnarly old black cherry that was hugging the shed and constantly dropping dry sticks around, as well as a “grandmother tree” (Chinaberry) that had been split and broken up and resprouted many times and was basically an eyesore. Then covered the intervening grass area with old newspapers and pizza boxes and then heaped mulch over that. Into this I planted the shrubs — four highbush blueberry plants (of two varieties to ensure vigorous cross-fertilization), a small fig sapling (the only non-native), and an oak-leaf Hydrangea. Put them in in March and they are doing great!  Lots of big fat blueberries on the bushes (now covered with bird netting), the fig leafed out and growing well, the Hydrangea with two nice flower clusters.

Around the same time I installed a second rain barrel along the front of the house so we now have a capacity of 100 gallons (I hope to add a third eventually on the other side but that will require installing a gutter too, which is a bit more advanced than I want to tackle at this point). I haven’t tapped into the well yet this year.

Now the vegetable patch, at the other end of the edible crescent. Last year was my first hack at this and the results were what one would expect. I planted tomatoes, basil, rosemary, lettuce and probably something else I don’t remember. Basil is pretty tough to kill and it did accordingly well –  we had homemade pesto many times during the summer, always a hit. I got a few tomatoes but most fell victim to a fiendishly clever animal, which I have deduced must have been a raccoon because the villain actually pried apart the wire fence stapled to the timbers surrounding the plot (and, to add insult to injury, mostly took one or two bites out of each, then dumped it on the ground). The lettuce was an abject failure, started too late for one thing.

Anyway, I learned my lesson. Installed a heavier-duty fence with lots of staples and no door (I just hop over the short fence) — so far so good. Worked the whole winter’s accumulation of compost into the vegetable patch. Planted three varieties of tomatoes, giving them a bit more space than last year’s jungle, a bunch of sweet basil, two summer squash plants, two rows of green bean seeds, some spinach from seed, and a single pepper plant. Mulched them after they got established. And have watered them regularly with my collected rain. It helps that this has been a great spring for long soaking, gentle rains. Bottom line: all the vegetables are going crazy. Fingers crossed. Meanwhile, the stunted pecan tree is coming into its own now that it has been released from the shadow of the old black cherry. In a few years, we should have good crops of pecans, figs, blueberries, and vegetables too.  Oh, and I am also weeding away and nurturing some volunteer blackberry brambles that came up in the general chaos of the yard edge.

Right. About the natives. Along the wasteland between the driveway and the vegetable patch, I have been waging war against the impenetrable privet thickets for a few years now.  The stuff is almost gone. And, to my delight, it is being replaced, right out of the woodwork, by a volunteer stand of Aralia spinosa, the “devil’s walking stick” — so named for its long naked single trunk covered with frightful thorns.  The spray of flowers turning to berries expected late in summer is supposed to be a favorite of birds. In the same area, vacated by the chopped down chinaberry, two native spicebush are taking off. And, also to my delight, the little patch of sensitive ferns I put in last March has come back and is spreading vigorously. As is the Joe-Pye weed planted in the butterfly patch, which is frighteningly buff — looks like it’s been watered with pharmaceutical effluent from a Major League Baseball clubhouse. The bleeding hearts also returned (see photo at top).

Stand by for photos of the insects attracted to this wonderland as it starts to bloom. Don’t look now but I’m thinking about a chicken coop next year . . .