There is an Arch Villain Behind the Climate Crisis — And There is Just One Solution

THERE IS AN ARCH VILLAIN BEHIND OUR CLIMATE CRISIS — AND THERE IS JUST ONE SOLUTION

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch Villain, the main cause of the global warming climate crisis which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form.

He also reveals our singular solution.

Five Compassions are our path to that solution.

There is an Arch Villain Behind Our Climate Crisis — And There is Just One Solution

I

Earth is Suffering a Massive Heart Attack. Right Now.

And Her Flatline is Vertical.

If every human alive today regardless of age — your friend’s newborn, children, Gen Z, millennials, mom and dad, grandpa, great grammy — can be considered a member of a single generation, our generation is a Special Generation. Each of us has been born at a time of historical reckoning.

         Our task, our challenge, is that we have to make the changes necessary to stop and reverse the global warming climate crisis. Our survival as well as that of virtually every multicellular species and living organism — plant and animal — on Earth depends on it.

         The hurdles we face? It’s hard to imagine they could be more formidable:

• There’s an Arch Villain behind the climate crisis yet most of us don’t realize who or what it is.

• Our singular solution is one few of us are aware of and fewer still understand.

• We must implement change on a massive scale, which means taking on our Arch Villain – a vastly powerful, resolute, ruthless, steadfastly unapologetic and intractable set of industries which includes of some of the wealthiest most powerful corporations ever created.

• We are in a time crunch. If you look at this NASA chart as if it were an electrocardiogram monitoring the planet’s heartbeat, Earth is suffering a massive heart attack. Right now.

© Vostok ice core data/J.R. Petit et al.; NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 record climate.nasa.gov

         The planet is flatlining – only this cardiac arrest is vertical. The carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere is the highest it’s been in 15 million years. Facing catastrophic global warming we are heading in the worst possible direction.

         Our government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment compiled by 13 federal agencies states, “With significant reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases, the global annually averaged temperature rise could be limited to 3.6°F (2°C) or less. Without major reductions in these emissions, the increase in annual average global temperatures relative to preindustrial times could reach 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century.”[1]

         With a temperature rise of 9º Fahrenheit our civilization will break down as our environment does, human extinction and the end of our Anthropocene Epoch will soon follow.

• And there is one more hurdle: Our time crunch is far more severe than scientists predicted.

         Volume 2 of this report, 1515 pages long, states: “Self-reinforcing cycles within the climate system have the potential to accelerate human-induced change and even shift Earth’s climate system into new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past. Future changes outside the range projected by climate models cannot be ruled out, and due to their systematic tendency to underestimate temperature change during past warm periods, models may be more likely to underestimate than to overestimate long-term future change.”[2] (italics mine)

         Unanticipated biofeedback loops are accelerating global warming, blowing the lid off existing climate model projections.

         Just a year and a half ago, climate research consensus was that even with best efforts at immediately combating climate change, an additional global temperature rise of a minimum of 2.7°F (1.5℃) by 2100 may already be “baked in.”[3] Recently the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced, “If emissions continue at their present rate, human-induced warming will exceed 1.5°C by around 2040.”[4] Their report takes into consideration current scientific research and 25,000 comments from experts. This is a definitive undebatable conclusion. It shaves 60 to 70 years off estimates made just a year earlier.

         We only have until 2030 until natural disasters become environmental catastrophes.

         Over 20,000 scientists have now signed onto the report published on November 13, 2017, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, urging world leaders to take action to avoid planetary catastrophe.[5] [6]

         If you consider planet Earth as our house, a very unwelcome guest, Mr. Heat, has warmed up our front yard and is now at our doorstep. He has two unsavory companions with him: Ms. Misery, Mother Earth’s pestilent cousin, who creates a rapidly deteriorating environment wherever she sets foot, unconcerned by the attendant suffering of its living creatures; and Mr. Grim, who is already reaching out and extinguishing — reaping if you will — an increasing number of species.

         Ms. Misery is wreaking havoc in every corner of our world. Megafires blazing with such intensity that they create their own weather patterns and are virtually unstoppable[7] [8] are ravaging the earth’s warming forests, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres each. They’ve burned not just throughout the Western United States and Australia, but across the colder northern regions, Canada, Alaska, Siberia, as well as the Arctic forests even further north. “500-year storms,” “100-year floods,” “cyclone bombs,” “polar vortexes,” tornados, typhoons and hurricanes of record size and force are increasingly common.

         Snow and ice surfaces reflect the sun’s heat away from the earth. As these melt away, those surface areas become heat-absorbing water and land, warming the oceans and the planet. The unanticipated biofeedback loop here is when ice and permafrost melts away across Alaska, Greenland and Arctic regions, the newly exposed tundra contains large amounts of stored up carbon dioxide and methane that it then releases into the air, further accelerating global warming.[9] [10] More than twice as much carbon is stored in this permafrost than is currently in our atmosphere.[11] Melting permafrost is releasing significantly more methane than previously realized. Methane is nearly 300 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.[12] [13]

         When you think of Mr. Grim, an image might come to mind of a hooded figure with a large scythe, a slow-moving cloaked sack of bones shifting along down the street. Mr. Grim actually moves at lightning speed and these days he’s increasingly busy. One million plant and animal species are now vanishing or threatened with extinction due to human activities.[14]

These unwanted guests will enter our house, the Anthropocene, turn up the furnace and accelerate its end. This will happen during our children’s lifetimes.

         In a November 2018, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Petteri Tallas stated, “The science is clear. Without rapid cuts in CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, climate change will have increasingly destructive and irreversible impacts on life on Earth. The window of opportunity for action is almost closed.”[15] Our greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by 40% over the next 11 years. The IPCC report concluded that to avoid racing past warming of 1.5℃ (2.7°F) over preindustrial levels would require a “rapid and far-reaching” transformation of human civilization at a magnitude that has never before happened.

We do not want Mr. Heat in our neighborhood but there he is. We certainly don’t want him in our front yard, but we’ve stood by idly watching as he entered. He’s now on our front porch reaching to open our door.

If we do not take on our Arch Villain we have no hope of stopping the climate crisis. The planet’s Sixth Mass Extinction, which has already begun, will complete its work this century.

II

Our Arch Villain, Our One Solution, and the Slide Plenty of Folks are Talking About

Before you read the next sentence, ask yourself who you think our Arch Villain is. …

The fossil fuel / dirty energy industry? Nope. While this industry’s carbon emissions need to be corralled and significantly reduced immediately, as a stand-alone contributor to global warming, it comes in a distant second place by comparison.

Industrial agriculture. And factory farming. These are the behemoth dark twins of Big Agriculture. Big Ag. This is our Arch-Villain.

In its 2016 analysis, How the Industrial Food System Contributes to the Climate Crises, GRAIN concludes that Big Ag contributes as much as 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions. By category: Agricultural production (11-15%), land use change and deforestation (15-18%), processing, transport, packing and retail (15-20%) and waste (2-4%).[16] [17] Based on what we’ve learned about the soil microbiome in the past decade, Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang’s estimate with regard to the photosynthesis foregone on the vast tracts of land worldwide used for growing animal feed crops may be low.

Factory farming is the major global source of ongoing deforestation and a leading driver of species extinction. 33% of arable land is used growing feed crops for factory-farmed animals.[18] 70% of the world’s freshwater humans utilize is used for agriculture and one third of that is used to grow the grain fed to livestock.[19] 26% of land worldwide is used for the grazing of livestock. It is the reason so much of the Amazon rain forest is being burned away. Yet meat, dairy and other land-based animal products provide just 17% of the calories and 33% of protein consumed by humans.[20]

Behemoth twin number two, industrial agriculture, “is a massive contributor to climate change. It is responsible for 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, 60% of methane gas emissions, and 80% of nitrous oxide, which are all powerful greenhouse gases.”[21]

         We are developing and implementing technologies to reduce the carbon we are emitting, however no technology exists to drawdown carbon from our atmosphere in any significant way. We have only one existing solution. Take a second and ask yourself what that solution is. Do you know? …

         Our singular solution to the global warming climate crisis is The Liquid Carbon Pathway, a term coined by renowned Australian soil scientist Dr. Christine Jones: healthy soil’s ability to sequester carbon.

         In farming, the way to best protect and improve topsoil is Regenerative Agriculture.  It is based on these principles: cover crops, compost, crop rotation, minimal disturbance of the soil, no pesticides, pastured animals, and protecting the soil’s internet.

         Regenerative farming maximizes plant’s ability to take carbon out of the atmosphere and creates vibrant rich soil that sequesters carbon for use in the subterranean realm. Good soil sequesters carbon. Lots of carbon.

         This is the slide plenty of folks are talking about:                                     

© David C. Johnson, NMSU Institute for Sustainable Agricultural Research (ISAR)

         On his ranch just outside of Bismarck, North Dakota over a 20-year span, Gabe Brown’s regenerative agriculture techniques improved his soil’s ability to sequester carbon from 1% to 6.5%. That’s huge. Each percent of carbon in the soil amounts to 8.5 tons of carbon per acre. The chart shows how Gabe discovered and applied regenerative practices one after another, first going no-till in 1993, then diversifying crops, 5 years later adding cover crops, and then 9 years after that discovering the benefits of multi-species cover crops. Once Gabe combined these 4 principals and then added a 5th — livestock integration — his soil carbon skyrocketed from just over 2% to 6.5% in just six years.

         He told me that based on what he knows now, he could raise his soil carbon from 1% to 6.5% within 5 years and that his soil has even greater potential. He expects to be over 10% soon.

         In raising his soil carbon level from 1% to 10%, Gabe Brown is sequestering an additional 76.5 tons of carbon per acre… This is why plenty of producers are talking about this slide.

         Carbon sequestration from regenerative agriculture is our singular solution to the global warming climate crisis. We need to do this at scale — and quickly.

         Rattan Lal, Ph.D., recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science at Ohio State University, believes that 3 billion tons of carbon can be sequestered annually in the world’s soils.[22] Molecular biologist and soil scientist David C. Johnson, Ph.D.,[23]  based on his results, Gabe Brown’s, and those of other regenerative farmers and ranchers, believes we can draw down 20 billion tons a year.

         Industrial agriculture’s suite of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides kills the life of the soil, its microbiome, destroying healthy soil's ability to sequester carbon — making the Arch Villain a preeminently lethal adversary.

III

Implementing the Solution Will be Nonpartisan

We must have a plan to set in motion our singular solution — regenerative agriculture — at scale and quickly. Our plan must be inspiring, widely understood and accepted, because it takes several years to repair dead and damaged soil.

         Fortunately… There is a powerful tool we have in our toolboxes enabling us to take big steps, to fully harness the power of collective action to make change happen quickly. Realize your power as a citizen in our democracy.

         Governmental leadership, in terms of decisive policy and action, is essential. Our government enabled another Special Generation, the World War II generation, to do what it was called upon to do. It took the initiative and succeeded in transforming our entire economy into a wartime economy in a matter of months. Government is a very powerful and necessary tool.

         It is upon us to best ensure it is governing intelligently, insightfully and when the situation calls for it, boldly. We can accomplish that through our involvement as citizens in our democracy.

         The essential starting point is our compassionate activism. We have to raise our voices to increase everyone’s awareness by petitioning, demonstrating, and revealing our growing numbers to inspire and force change.

         The key imperative is presenting a solution and flying its flag. When our government lacks a plan, it is up to us to provide them one.

         We then have to focus our government’s attention on this solution. As we approach elections, this puts every candidate running for public office, from local school board up to President of the United States in the position of having to declare clearly and unambiguously their support or opposition. We will then vote for or against them accordingly.

         The Green New Deal is one part of the solution. Another essential companion, no less important, will be a New Farm Bill to be enacted in 2021.

         We have to embrace regenerative agriculture at scale — our singular solution — and shift away from Big Ag’s behemoth dark twins, industrial agriculture and factory farming. This means we have to get our government to replace and fundamentally repurpose the most important piece of legislation this country has ever produced: The 2018 Farm Bill.

         The Farm Bill determines how American agriculture is done. Lobbied for, subsidized and even drafted in large part by Big Ag, this Farm Bill is a gift to our Arch Villain, a blanket endorsement of industrial agriculture and factory farming. The Farm Bill increases global warming more than any other bill. The 2018 Farm Bill extends to 2023 and enables the continued killing of the soil microbiome on 231 million American crop acres, eliminating that soil’s life and its ability to sequester atmospheric carbon.

         If this is allowed to continue as business as usual for the next three years, the United States will be unable to dial back its collective greenhouse gas emissions to meet the reduction thresholds of the Paris agreement and unable to limit global warming to a 2℃ increase by 2035.

         The 2018 Farm Bill unlocked our front door just as Mr. Heat’s hand was reaching for the doorknob and the way in. This is a path to disaster.

         We cannot let the 2018 Farm Bill stand for five years or anywhere close. This Farm Bill must be jettisoned and replaced with a New Food and Farm Bill that will in turn become the most important piece of legislation our federal government will sign into law.

         And… The solution is nonpartisan.

         Wait. Time out… Given the level of divisiveness in American politics, how can any issue, let alone one that involves the entirety of agriculture and massive corporate interests, one that is going to be decided by our elected officials possibly be nonpartisan? The debate leading up to the 2018 Farm Bill was fervid, rancorous, and insanely partisan. How could a replacement Farm Bill not be?

• Because there is such a pervasive, fundamental lack of understanding about the immediacy and the severity — the catastrophic environmental consequences of global warming in store for us — among members of both dominant political parties, it is nonpartisan.

• Because there is such an incomplete understanding of the human cause of global warming, and the magnitude of Big Ag’s role as our Arch Villain — the industries responsible for creating the lion’s share of greenhouse gas emissions — it is nonpartisan.

• Because it will lead to the New Economy which will create 65 million new low-carbon jobs and add $26 trillion to the global economy between now and 2030[24] — and economic growth and prosperity is a goal of both parties, it is nonpartisan.

• Because American farmers and rural communities, the blighted economies of our shires, have as much or even more to gain economically as any other region of the country, it is nonpartisan.

• Because reclaiming our country’s standing as a global leader, innovator, as well as a paragon of a moral and ethical Democracy is a goal of patriots from both parties, it is nonpartisan.

• Because the values residing at the core of our democracy and abiding in the hearts of Americans — our compassion, our decency, our love for our environment and this planet, our very humanity — are aligned with the imperative that this dire problem must be remedied, it is nonpartisan.

• Because global warming is destroying our environment — our biome — and will soon be jeopardizing our very survival, this is nonpartisan. There will no longer be elections when society breaks down let alone when there is no-one left to run for office or to vote.

         Our essential singular solution is regenerative agriculture implemented rapidly onto the vast majority of American cropland, combined with the end of factory farming and the return of pastured livestock. Once this plan of action is advocated and fought for, manifest and put in practice across the land, and its benefits realized, agriculture will become one of the key sectors transitioning — and growing — our economy into a robust, sustainable, thriving New Economy. That, as well as healing our planet, and saving us on it.

In World as Lover, World as Self, philosopher Joanna Macy writes about our Special Generation, “We are now at a point unlike any other in our story. Perhaps we have, in some way, chosen to be here at this culminating chapter or turning point. We have opted to be alive when the stakes are high to test everything we have ever learned about interconnectedness and courage — to test it now when it could be the end of conscious life on this beautiful water planet hanging like a jewel in space.

         “We are confronting and integrating into our awareness our mortality as a species. We must do that so that we can wake up and assume the rights and responsibilities of planetary adulthood.”[25]

         In How to Thrive in the Next Economy, John Thackara writes, “A variety of changes, interventions, and disruptions accumulate across time until the system reaches a tipping point: then, at a moment that cannot be predicted, a small release of energy triggers a much larger release or phase shift, and the system as a whole transforms.”[26] This is the same tipping point that Malcolm Gladwell writes about.

         French philosopher Edgar Morin, in Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium – Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences, echoes Nelson Mandela: “All great transformations have been unthinkable until they actually came to pass.”[27]

         This is the coming evolution, the necessary change at a critical time. To avoid the earth’s sixth global extinction, this is the path forward — what the future MUST look like.

         Mr. Heat is standing in our living room and the sofa is starting to smolder. Ms. Misery is pleased with herself. And Mr. Grim is looking at you.

         The fight is on. Everything you purchase, everything you consume, every action you take is a choice. Live well, make the healthy choices, the right choices, compassionate choices. Inform others, enable them. Rise up and be heard. From this day forward.

         We are a Special Generation. Humanity will perish or prevail based on what we can achieve over just the next few years. Find your voice, use it. Important challenges are upon us.

         If we turn Mr. Heat and his accomplices out of our house, America can be a beacon to the world once again.

Today if you walk across the grass of a D-Day cemetery in France, or a veteran’s cemetery stateside, you feel it — how not too long ago, another Special Generation protected and provided for us the society we enjoy today, by winning World War II and the fight against fascism. Forty years from today, if your children are alive to walk across a lawn, any lawn, they will feel the very same emotion — for us, for our Special Generation, the one that rallied just in the nick of time and took decisive action to corral and beat back global warming, the Special Generation that saved their lives as well as the life of almost every multicellular organism on Earth, even the grass under their footsteps.

______________________________________

Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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[1] U.S. Global Change Research Program, USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp., doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.   https://science2017.globalchange.gov/downloads/CSSR2017_FullReport.pdf

[2] U.S. Global Change Research Program, USGCRP, 2018: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume II [Reidmiller, D.R., C.W. Avery, D.R. Easterling, K.E. Kunkel, K.L.M. Lewis, T.K. Maycock, and B.C. Stewart (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 1515 pp. doi: 10.7930/NCA4.2018  pg. 100  https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/downloads/NCA4_2018_FullReport.pdf

[3] Ashley Strickland, Earth to Warm 2 Degrees Celsius by the End of this Century, Studies Say, CNN  Jul. 31, 2017 http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/health/climate-change-two-degrees-studies/index.html

[4] Alister Doyle, Exclusive: Global Warming Set to Exceed 1.5℃, Slow Growth – U.N. Draft, Reuters, Jun. 14, 2018,  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-report-exclusive/exclusive-global-warming-set-to-exceed-15c-slow-growth-un-draft-idUSKBN1JA1HD

[5] William J. Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M. Newsome, et al. World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, BioScience, Vol. 67, Issue 12, 1 Dec. 2017, Pgs. 1026–1028, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125

Pub: Nov. 13, 2017 https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229

[6] Alliance of World Scientists, World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, 2019, view the 20,000 scientists signing the article at publication or subsequently endorsing it. http://scientistswarning.forestry.oregonstate.edu/?cid=em_mdr-

[7] Laura Parker, How Megafires Are Remaking American Forests, National Geographic Aug. 9, 2015  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/150809-wildfires-forest-fires-climate-change-science/

[8] Heyck-Williams, S., L. Anderson, B.A. Stein. Megafires: The Growing Risk to America’s Forests, Communities, and Wildlife. Washington, DC: National Wildlife Federation. 2017  https://www.nwf.org/-/media/Documents/PDFs/NWF-Reports/NWF-Report_Megafires_FINAL_LOW-RES_101717.ashx

[9] Bob Berwyn, Thawing Alaska Permafrost Sends Autumn CO2 Emissions Surging, Inside Climate News, May 8, 2017   https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052017/arctic-permafrost-thawing-alaska-temperatures-co2-emissions

[10] Katrin Kohnert, Andrei Serafimovich, Stefan Metzger, et al. Strong Geologic Methane Emissions From Discontinuous Terrestrial Permafrost in the Mackenzie Delta, Canada, Scientific Reports 7, Article 5828, Jul. 19, 2017. doi:10.1038/s41598-017-05783-2  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-05783-2

[11] David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, New York Magazine, Jul. 9, 2017  http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html

[12] Jessica Corbett, Thawing Permafrost Emitting Higher Levels of Potent Greenhouse Gas than Previously Thought, Common Dreams, Apr. 16, 2019  https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/16/thawing-permafrost-emitting-higher-levels-potent-greenhouse-gas-previously-thought

[13] Jordan Wilkerson, Ronald Dobosy, David S. Sayres, et al. Permafrost Nitrous Oxide Emissions Observed on a Landscape Scale Using the Airborne Eddy-covariance Method, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 19, 4257-4268, 2019https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-19-4257-2019  Apr. 3, 2019, https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/19/4257/2019/

[14] Matt McGrath, Nature Crisis: Humans ‘Threaten 1m Species with Extinction,’ BBC News, May 6, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48169783?fbclid=IwAR0phQ37H8CcCstLIEPuGuxA0i2xmC3AV112S5eg5LImq_kerQ-FWlvhzHo

[15] Damian Carrington, Climate-heating Greenhouse Gases at Record Levels, Says UN, The Guardian, Nov. 22, 2018,  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/22/climate-heating-greenhouse-gases-at-record-levels-says-un

[16] GRAIN, Henk Hobbelink, The Great Climate Robbery. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist Publications, 2016. Pgs. 1-7

[17] GRAIN, Commentary IV: Food, Climate Change and Healthy Soils: The Forgotten Link, Trade and Environment Review, 2013, https://www.grain.org/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTUvMTEvMDUvMDhfNDZfMDZfNTIyX0dSQUlOX1VOQ1RBRF8yMDEzLnBkZiJdXQ

[18] Wake Up Now Before It Is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now For Food Security In A Changing Climate, Trade and Environment Review 2013, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, http://unctad.org/en/pages/PublicationWebflyer.aspx?publicationid=666

[19] Worldwatch Institute, Peak Meat Production Strains Land and Water Resources, Aug. 26, 2014, http://www.worldwatch.org/peak-meat-production-strains-land-and-water-resources-1

[20] World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2016, Pg. 95, http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/lpr_living_planet_report_2016.pdf

[21] Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books, 2016. pg. 8

[22] Rattan Lal, Pete Smith, Hermann F. Jungkunst, et al. The Carbon Sequestration Potential of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Soil and Water Conservation Society – Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Nov/Dec 2018 – Vol. 73, No. 6, 73(6): 145A-152A  www.swcs.org       https://www.nrdc.org/experts/lara-bryant/organic-matter-can-improve-your-soils-water-holding-capacity

[23] David C. Johnson, Ph.D., is a Molecular Biologist and Soil Scientist at New Mexico State University unraveling the secrets of soil microbes.

[24] The New Climate Economy 2018 Report, Unlocking the Inclusive Growth Story of the 21st Century, Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, 2018, https://newclimateeconomy.report/2018/key-findings/

[25] Reprinted from World As Lover, World As Self (1991, 2007) by Joanna Macy with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org   pg. 184

[26] John Thackara, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015 pg. 9

[27] Edgar Morin, Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium – Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences, New York, New York: Hampton Press, 1999

Something is very seriously wrong.

THE GREAT HEALING

Five Compassions That Can Save Our World

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Five Compassions are our path to that solution.

Something Is Very Seriously Wrong

For every species — even us humans — awareness of new threats entering our environment is essential. Understanding those threats and then adapting by finding and implementing solutions, enables us to survive.

            It’s easy for us to become complacent as it appears we’ve done a thorough job taking control of our planet. There are over 7 billion humans alive today. We’ve done a pretty good job adapting.

            Or so it would seem.

Say someone showed you a photo of this fish and you wanted to find out where she lives, what she does for fun, and what that weird thing is sticking out of her head:

1

You can easily find out.

She’s a triplewart sea devil who swims around in the deep ocean. By deep, I mean at depths down to 15,000 feet. In a swimming pool, the water pressure at a depth of 10 feet is .3 atmospheres (atm), which is about 4 pounds of force per square inch on your body. When you swim underwater along the bottom in the deep end you may feel a little pressure, especially in your ears. Oceanic water pressure at 15,000 feet is around 459 atm or 6,749 pounds of force per square inch.2 How is a creature built to withstand that kind of pressure? We have to submerge in a mini-submarine protected by a specially designed shell to visit her in order to avoid being instantly pancaked by the water pressure — and here she is looking at us.

With eyes. How do those eyes withstand this tremendous pressure? How are they made? Blue eyes straight from Game of Thrones…

Sunlight fades as you descend in the ocean. Aqua-blue water darkens as more and more water separates you from sunlight until, at around 650 feet down you leave the photic zone and descend into a depth where sunlight no longer penetrates.3 You find yourself immersed in ocean darkness. Complete wet blackness.

This triplewart sea devil — let’s call her Hazel — lives here. She will never see sunlight. She navigates in perennial darkness. So, she has a light sticking out of her head.

4

Is that to avoid bumping into rocks? Hazel’s face looks like she’s run into more than a few. Is it to illuminate her features to attract a potential mate? She’s swimming solo. Should she consider suspending it a bit further back to cast a more diffuse light on her facial features, perhaps creating a more sex-appealing allure for that chance encounter?

How did that light get there? Did it start as a growth that somehow lit up and elongated over several thousand generations until at last, arriving at the optimal hanging lantern position? Is it a tactile appendage, like ET’s finger?

It turns out that this light’s appendage is an evolution of the triplewart sea devil anglerfish’s dorsal fin. And Hazel keeps it suspended right where it is with good reason. Right in front of her mouth.

We’ve got the technology and we’ve got the skills. Whatever I want to know about triplewart sea devils like Hazel, if someone knows it, it’s not difficult to find out.

Hazel is indeed a female. Her ‘light’ is actually an aggregation of glowing bioluminescent bacteria that attracts other fish who mistake it for prey.5 They swim in to eat it, only to become Hazel’s meal in short order.

Now that I know a little bit about Hazel, I’m concerned about her and this is why.

It turns out that we humans can and do extend our reach, sinking into Hazel’s depths without a submersible. Plastic bags, as well as some of the other countless varieties of discarded plastic that we’re filling the oceans with, drift current-carried into her depths.6 7 Non-biodegradable translucent phantoms appear like jellyfish, a food staple of many fish. Other small, often brightly colored, plastic objects descend like food remnants, appearing like torn bits of fish that have fallen prey to and been partially devoured by surface dwellers above. These objects are consumed by fish like tuna and whales in the surface depths, and by the denizens of the lower depths, like Hazel.8 9

If during her wandering, a bit of baggie appears before Hazel’s glow and she eats it, it’ll coat her stomach like some horrible wallpaper or laminate that she can’t redecorate away. It’ll adhere, indigestible, covering her stomach lining or clogging her intestine like those of so many of the whales beaching themselves10 11 or the fish fishermen are catching, or sea birds like these on Midway atoll:  youtube.com/watch?v=ozBE-ZPw18c 12

Hazel’s at risk because she’s not aware of this new threat. It took her countless generations to get her lantern light glowing bright and well. She’s eaten very little that was not food to sustain her. Will she and her fellow triplewart sea devils learn to distinguish prey from plastic? Or will they perish in silent agony having failed to figure it out?

For every species — even us humans — awareness of new threats entering our environment is essential. Understanding those threats and then adapting by finding and implementing solutions, enables us to survive.

            It’s easy for us to become complacent as it appears we’ve done a thorough job taking control of our planet. There are over 7 billion humans alive today. We’ve done a pretty good job adapting.

            Or so it would seem.

. . .

Animals. Why is it, then, that right now, thousands of species are in critical decline, either going extinct or facing extinction? The Living Planet Report 2018 from the World Wildlife Fund reveals “an astonishing 60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in just over 40 years.”13 60%... We have the technology, a tremendous toolset the likes of which this world has never before seen. We can learn about — even visit and experience first-hand — fascinating creatures. So how is it we can’t seem to do something to stop their demise? Why is this happening?

            Moreover, how is it that billions of other creatures — animals in human care — are enduring lives of incessant cruelty and suffering on factory farms? How have we come to this?

Self. Why is it that so many of our teenagers have grown so overweight that they are unable to run at a moderate pace for six minutes on a treadmill, or do a single push up, their bodies so bloated they hesitate to take their t-shirts off when swimming at a beach or public pool? Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and dementia, even adjusted per capita, are at record highs. Seventeen million people die each year from heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular diseases. Over 35% of adults in West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana are obese, and the rate is now 30% or higher in 25 states according to a 2017 State of Obesity report.14

            In an era of unprecedented health awareness and nutritional understanding, why are so many of us in poor health? If you are a patient diagnosed with one or more of these conditions, why is it your doctor will treat your symptoms but probably not adequately inform you about the causes? And what are the causes? What’s really going on?

Land. When you fly over or drive across our country, you may notice the big farms that cover the prairie, and how vast their crop acreage is. Corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see. When the crops have been harvested, all you witness is brown, exposed soil baking in the sun. Topsoil, the soil that every plant grows from, takes millions of years to accumulate — millions of years. The most productive soil in the world is prairie soil. While 7% of the world’s land is prairie soil, when the United States looked at the cards it was dealt in the game of Soil Poker, we drew a winning hand — 22.5% of our landscape is prairie soil.15 Yet in just the last 100 years, we’ve managed to lose most of it. Soil degradation has intensified to the point where, over just the last 40 years, 30% of the world’s cropland — over one billion acres — has been abandoned as unusable.16

            The Deputy Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations stated in December, 2017, that farming will end in 60 years given the current rate of soil degradation because the world’s topsoil will be gone.17 How is this happening?

Community. And what has happened to our communities? Passing through a rural small town, chances are it is not a tourist destination. Even if a highway runs through it or nearby, passersby tend to pass on by. But that town grew to town size because it once had a vibrant local economy which most probably included small farms and farming families. People’s needs supported an array of businesses, shops and stores, Main Street and all the streets branching out from it. It was a quiet, pleasant, attractive place to live. Until the decline.

            There were 6.8 million farms in America in 1935. There are less than 2.1 million today.18 Many millions fewer American families now make their livelihood farming. Their loss forced most of the town’s businesses to shut their doors. The modern crop farms, which have expanded vastly in size and now dominate the landscape, need very few workers to operate. So, what has happened to American livelihoods? And not just in rural communities. Why are so many of our urban communities impoverished and blighted?

            How is it that 55% of the zip codes across America are now defined as food deserts — areas where residents do not have local access to supermarkets, let alone healthy food?19 What are the real consequences of loss of livelihood and loss of community? What is preventing these rural towns and urban neighborhoods from reinvigorating themselves and making a comeback?

Democracy in America is in need of a comeback because it’s also under threat. In a sense, democracy — like animals, humans, soil and crops — is a living, fluid, evolving organism. It doesn’t exist everywhere, and where it does, it can be impermanent. It’s different in every country based on the interplay of the peoples and cultures and belief systems from which it spawned. Some countries have robust competitive democracies, while in others democracy has disappeared or exists in name only with the ruling party propagandizing its veneer, masking an underlying totalitarian or fascist state of affairs. Why, in the Internet era with so much information available to us and flowing so freely, has democracy fallen so short and failed so many?

            Why are so many citizen majorities in democracies underrepresented, their voices muted — the promise of the issues they support suppressed and unrealized? What has happened to majority rule in America?

Each of these questions, on its own, calls out a significant problem. The questions, and their underlying problems, may seem unrelated — but they’re not. They are all interrelated. The problems they call into question are each in turn just a symptom, an aspect, of something larger still.

            Something is very seriously wrong.

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright ©2019 by Stephen Erickson.

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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1 © Solvin Zankl

2 Ocean Pressure Calculator  http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/gallery/view.jsp?id=f5c3dd7514bf620a1b85450d2ae374b1

3 Allowing photosynthesis.

4 © Solvin Zankl

5 Solvin Zankl and Biographic, See the Weird and Fascinating Deep-Sea Creatures That Live in Constant Darkness, Biographic, Nov. 7, 2016

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/see-the-weird-and-fascinating-deepsea-creatures-that-live-in-constant-darkness

6 Harold Johnson, Plastics in the Ocean: How Dense Are We?  Scientific American, Aug. 16, 2012   https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/plastics-in-the-ocean-how-dense-are-we/

7 Sarah Zielinski, Your Garbage is Polluting Even the Deep, Remote Reaches of the Ocean  Smithsonian.com  Apr. 30, 2014   https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/garbage-polluting-deep-remote-ocean-180951271/

8 Fiona Harvey, Fish Mistaking Plastic Debris in Ocean for Food, Study Finds, The Guardian, Marine Life, Aug. 16, 2017  https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/16/fish-confusing-plastic-debris-in-ocean-for-food-study-finds#comments

“Matthew Savoca, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author of the study, told the Guardian: ‘When plastic floats at sea its surface gets colonised by algae within days or weeks, a process known as biofouling. Previous research has shown that this algae produces and emits DMS, an algal based compound that certain marine animals use to find food. [The research shows] plastic may be more deceptive to fish than previously thought. If plastic both looks and smells like food, it is more difficult for animals like fish to distinguish it as not food.’”

9 Alina M. Wieczorek, Liam Morrison, Peter L. Croot, et al. Frequency of Microplastics in Mesopelagic Fishes from the Northwest Atlantic, Frontiers in Marine Science, Feb. 19, 2018 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00039/full

10 Matthew Robinson, Dead Whale Found with 40 Kilograms of Plastic Bags in Its Stomach, CNN, Mar. 18, 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/18/asia/dead-whale-philippines-40kg-plastic-stomach-intl-scli/

11 Lee Moran. This Sperm Whale was Found Dead with 64 Pounds of Trash in its Digestive System, Huffington Post, Apr. 7, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/dead-sperm-whale-plastic-spain_us_5ac8b736e4b09d0a11942cd4

12 Please watch Midway, a 4-minute documentary film by Chris Jordan.

Chris asks each of us, "Do we have the courage to face the realities of our time? And allow ourselves to feel deeply enough that it transforms us and our future?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozBE-ZPw18c

13 World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2018, https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018

14 The State of Obesity 2017, Trust For America’s Health, Reports, August 2017  http://healthyamericans.org/reports/stateofobesity2017/

15 Dr. John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science, Washington State University. Quoted from his appearance in the documentary film Symphony of the Soil, Directed, Written and Produced by Deborah Koons Garcia, Lily Films, 2012

16 David Pimental, Michael Burgess, Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production, Agriculture 2013, 3, 443-463; doi:10.3390  Aug. 8, 2013 https://www.bmbf.de/files/agriculture-03-00443.pdf

17 Chris Arsenault, Only 60 Years of Farming Left if Soil Degradation Continues, Reuters, as reported in Scientific American, Dec. 9, 2017  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/#

18 Farming and Farm Income, USDA, Economic Research Service using data from USDA, National Agriculture Statistics Service, Censuses of Agriculture (through 2012) and Farms and Land in farms: 2016 Summary. 2016  https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/

19 Richard Florida, It’s Not the Food Deserts: It’s the Inequality, CityLab, Jan. 18, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/its-not-the-food-deserts-its-the-inequality/550793/

Lucinda Monarch, this tiny creature, who weighs less than a dime and flies funny pumping paper-thin wings…

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.

Meet Lucinda Monarch.

Lucinda Monarch

Lucinda Monarch flies along a winding river bed, then veers into the surrounding meadow amidst its flowers, goldenrod, asters, coneflowers and common milkweed, gliding not deftly with the efficient, seemingly effortless changes of direction as a bird does, instead meandering, slowly, her thin tiny wings fluttering, lifting her along on a curving, wobbling path through the air. If you’re familiar with Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons and Woodstock’s flightpath, Lucinda’s isn’t as convoluted as that — not quite anyway.

             Lucinda’s name in Spanish means “light.” Attracted to many of the flowers in this meadow, she’ll feed on their nectar which nourishes and sustains her. She doesn’t realize that while seeking out nectar, she’s pollinating plants, an essential role she shares with bees, wasps, lacewings and other insects. Pollinators transport pollen from one plant to another, fertilizing and enabling them to reproduce. These insects are responsible for cross-fertilizing a third of the world’s food supply.

            And at this moment, Lucinda lands on a milkweed plant.

1

Her antennae and legs — sensitive to a plant’s chemical balance — identify whether or not it is milkweed. Milkweed is the host plant of monarchs; it is an essential stop for them.

            Milkweed contains a milky latex sap, which is poisonous to most animals. But not to monarchs. Eating milkweed provides monarchs not only nutrition but protection. They store its toxic compounds — its cardenolides — in their bodies and that gives them their orange coloring, a signal to predators that they are noxious and, therefore, prey to be avoided. Monarchs only place their eggs on milkweed as that is all their larvae will eat, storing its nutrients and its poison. As caterpillars and from the moment they emerge from their chrysalides as butterflies, they will have their protective coloring on full display.

            Today, Lucinda is interested in eating and perching — but not in depositing eggs. She can’t and there is a special reason why.

            On this beautiful autumn day, she’s healthy, content, and nourished. She’s strong. She needs to be because the time of year is shifting. Temperatures are cooling. The days are getting shorter. The milkweed she eats is aging, and her plant nectar sources are diminishing.

Lucinda and the other monarchs who have been born in August or September are unique, born differently from their parents, their grandparents and their great-grandparents. Her generation realizes this. They were aware they are different even back when they were little caterpillars.

2

She is part of a special generation — the migratory generation. Each year, the 4th age group of monarchs is the migratory generation. The three previous generations emerged from their chrysalides sexually mature. They’d mate, the females would find milkweed to eat and to secure their eggs on. The lifespan of Lucinda’s parents and the two generations before them was about six weeks. Lucinda and her peers will have a lifespan of up to nine months. They emerged from their chrysalides in a state of reproductive diapause — suspended sexual development —  and are unable to mate and reproduce until spring. Until that time, all their life energy is focused toward storing body fats and developing flight muscles for something truly incredible — the upcoming journey.3

            When the angle of the sun reaches 57° off the horizon, and when the days consecutively shorten, the monarchs of Lucinda’s generation realize it’s time to go…4 They get it. They know. A week ago, Lucinda and all of the monarchs in her area left southern Canada. They’re now in Minnesota.

This tiny creature, who weighs less than a dime and flies funny pumping paper-thin wings, is beginning a migration along with all the other monarchs across the portion of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. They are traveling from their summer breeding grounds heading south and southwest in search of the overwintering grounds where they can survive the cold.

They are traveling into Central Mexico.

Lucinda’s journey will take her 3,000 miles. Three thousand miles… to a destination neither she nor any of them has ever been before.

They will fly as many as 50 to 100 miles in a day. With wings thin and fragile, monarchs will brave gusting winds, rain, whatever weather manifests on their way, over thousands of miles…

5

How do they know the route? They’re starting out from different places spread throughout a vast region thousands of miles wide. How do they find a destination not one of them has ever seen and recognize it as the destination? Scientists at the University of Kansas discovered in 2009 that monarchs orient themselves using a special internal circadian clock located not in their brain but in their antennae. As they head south following the sun, they orient themselves in a time-compensated manner adjusting their course based on the shifting position of the sun in the sky.6

  Each day they find refuge in stopover places with nectar sources and shelter from the elements. Heading south toward Texas they will meet other butterflies and merge forming larger groups called kaleidoscopes or swarms. These are big and small groups, but they don’t really buddy-up, they just travel and rest together for the evenings in trees and shrubs. If one of them were to be separated from the group, it would know how to complete the journey on its own.

  This morning Lucinda got a late start. The evening was cold. Butterflies aren’t able to fly if their core body temperature is below 55°, so she had to warm up for awhile in the sunlight. Yesterday she only flew for a half day because it rained. Monarchs can’t fly in the rain, and she had to wait in a bush until her wings dried. Monarchs are not only careful travelers but they are also great planners. They exert a great deal of energy on their journey but as long as there are sufficient plants along the way with nectar to sustain them, they will arrive in Mexico weighing a bit more than when they started their migration.7

The monarchs that survive the trek will reach their destination in Central Mexico around November 1st, aggregating in the forests of tall oyamel fir trees on twelve south-southwest facing mountain slopes at altitudes between 6,900 and 13,500 feet — the only altitudes where these trees grow. Here they will find water, shelter to protect them from predators, and cool temperatures which will slow down their metabolism enabling them to conserve enough energy to survive the winter.

The monarchs have been migrating annually along this route for the past two million years. As a pollinator, this journey and their place, their role in the ecosystem is a critically important one.

            But monarchs are not faring well. Their population is in precipitous decline.8

            The main factor causing the monarch’s demise is the loss of its milkweed, particularly in the Midwest.

            Farmers have traditionally tried to eradicate milkweed, which was widely considered a pest-plant, but milkweed survived in agricultural areas as it recovers well to plowing. In recent years, several factors have combined to assure milkweed’s decline. The number of small farms has sharply fallen over the past 75 years resulting in cropland consolidation into fewer, vastly larger farms. These larger operations cultivate in the Industrial Agriculture model, which has assumed predominance since World War II and emphasizes monocrop production and maximizing tillable crop acreage. This has resulted in the elimination of hedgerows and other border areas between farms, and the scaling back of divider crops, bordering woodlands and wild areas — all of which contained grasses, nectar plants and milkweed. Urbanization has also consumed millions of acres of former wildlife habitat. On top of that, global warming is increasingly causing droughts and severe weather throughout this region, harming what milkweed remains.

Becca Cudmore writes in Working Together for Monarchs, “In 2014, Iowa State University estimated that 98% of the milkweed that once grew where Iowa farmland now exists is gone. 80% of all Midwestern milkweeds have been eradicated as well. According to The Monarch Lab at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, that percentage closely mirrors the drop in monarch egg production in the Midwest. And in 2014 when University of Guelph researchers in Canada compared the various life threats to the monarch, they found that milkweed loss had the greatest effect on recent declines.”9 The corn belt is a key area for monarch breeding in the summer months as well as an important stopping point for migrating monarchs who rest in the oak and pine trees and feed from flowering plants like the goldenrod and wild bergamot in the meadows below.

Making matters even more dire for monarchs, genetically engineered crops (GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms) arrived on the scene in 1996. These crop seeds are genetically engineered to be impervious to Roundup, which is an herbicide sprayed on the fields. The active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, kills what are deemed unwanted weeds and pests. Farmers embraced this new technology because it promised to make farming easier and increase crop yields. Included in the wide spectrum of plants and soil life that Roundup poisons and kills is milkweed. This has all but wiped out the plant on soybean and corn farms throughout the Midwest thereby reducing monarch butterfly habitat by more than 163 million acres.10 Other herbicides including dicamba, Enlist Duo, and neonicotinoid pesticides are lethal to monarch caterpillars as well.11 Jonathan Lundgren, a senior research entomologist working for the USDA, and his research team found neonicotinoid pesticide “in places where it doesn’t belong.” They discovered that the tissue of “60% of the milkweed in their South Dakota study area was contaminated by the pesticide, which even at low levels causes monarch larvae to grow much more slowly and reach much smaller size.”12

Lucinda is going for it. She has traveled over 3,000 miles and now flies through the mountains of Central Mexico, upwards, her tiny wings pumping way.

            She ascends, reaching an altitude of 7,000 feet.

            On November 1st, Lucinda arrives at a forest of oyamel fir trees. There are tens of thousands of monarchs arriving with her — a huge swarm. The humidity in the forest is perfect. Kylee Baumle notes in The Monarch – Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly that this area is not too warm for her to be at risk of drying out and not too wet to foster disease.13 Lucinda has never seen this place before, but she is certain that this is her intended destination.

            Fewer than 5% of monarch eggs survive to become butterflies. Tens of thousands of adult monarchs don’t survive their migration. But Lucinda has. This little creature has travelled 3,000 miles.

            No matter where they start their migration, monarchs begin to arrive in the oyamel forest around the same day every year. November 1st.

            The Mexican national holiday, Día de los Muertos — or Day of the Dead — begins on October 31st. This is when families gather together to honor and remember loved ones who have passed. It has been celebrated by the indigenous peoples of the land that includes today’s Mexico since around 1800 B.C.

            In her beautiful book, The Monarch – Saving Our Most-Loved Butterfly,14 Kylee Baumle writes, “Because of the arrival of the monarchs during this special time, many people believe that these butterflies are the souls of their loved ones coming back to pay them a visit…

            “On Day of the Dead, it is said, the gates of heaven open at midnight on October 31st and the spirits of the children who have died come down to reunite with their families for 24 hours. Then, on November 2nd, the souls of the departed adults join them.”

15

When spring arrives, Lucinda and the other monarchs will return from Mexico and fly north through southern Texas. They will have emerged from reproductive diapause and mated, and they are now in search of healthy milkweed to lay their eggs on — an essential final fervent search before their lives come to a close.

            “Populations of the iconic and beloved monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus plexippus) have dropped an astonishing 96.5% over the past few decades, from an estimated 1 billion in 1997 to just 35 million in early 2014” writes John R. Platt in Scientific American.16 The yearly count of monarchs overwintering in Mexico in March 2018 confirms their continuing rapid decline, occupying just 6.2 forest acres, down from 7.275 acres the year before.17

Sarah Foltz Jordan, a Pollinator Conservation Specialist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation18 provides habitat restoration support to hundreds of farmers and farm agency professionals across the Upper Midwest. The Monarch Joint Venture program19 is also doing everything it can to help save the monarchs, but a 2016 study determined that there is a “substantial probability” of the quasi-extinction of the monarch population east of the Rockies within the next 20 years.20 The term “quasi-extinction” means a population decline to a number low enough where the recovery of the species is unlikely.

Her thin tiny wings fluttering, lifting her along on a curving, wobbly path in the warming spring air, Lucinda descended from the forest of oyamel fir trees in the mountains of Central Mexico returning north. She found milkweed in southern Texas, and she laid her eggs there before dying.

            While the number of farm families planting pesticide free milkweed corridors is growing, industrial agriculture farmers are using more Roundup than ever before as well as newer and even more lethal pesticides and herbicides. In 2018, the population of eastern monarchs, which range from the Rocky Mountains all the way across to the east coast and from the central U.S. up into Canada, has diminished further. Today, massed together, monarchs would only cover an area the size of 16 football fields. In the forest of oyamel fir trees they occupied 14.7% less acreage than they did just a year before.21

            Lucinda’s offspring have an ability to perceive things we can’t begin to understand. They’re returning to Canadian meadows they’ve never seen — and they’ll realize when they arrive that’s their home. Their next migratory generation will know that their destination is thousands of miles to the south, at well over a mile altitude in mountains forested by trees that don’t exist anywhere else, on a November 1st. If monarchs are capable of perceiving all of that, then perhaps, somehow, in some way, they can sense this:

            Tens of thousands of us are aware of your plight, we are taking action to try and save you. Farmers are creating butterfly corridors, homeowners are creating butterfly friendly gardens, planting forage plants and milkweed in their yards. Scientists and townspeople in the mountains of Central Mexico are planting a new forest of oyamel fir trees at higher altitude so when the planet warms you can overwinter at the temperature you need to survive.22

            We’re taking on Big Ag as well — and they’re going to pay, and pay handsomely, for what they’ve done to you and yours, and for a few other reasons as well. They are going to stop killing virtually every plant, animal, and microbe that lives in or above ground in fields far and wide, poisoning your milkweed, wiping out millions upon millions of you, and turning your migratory pathways into evermore perilous passages.

            To survive, Lucinda and each one of the monarchs need help from even more compassionate farmers and compassionate people.

            Help from people like you.

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright ©2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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 1 Butterfly on orange milkweed photo: © Dave/Adobe Stock

2 Butterfly caterpillar photo: © withthesehands/Shutterstock

3 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017  pg. 36

4 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017  pg. 37

5 Butterflies in meadow photo: © Glass and Nature/Shutterstock

6 The Annenberg Learner, Which Way to Mexico? Exploring the Mysteries of Monarch Navigation

  http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/sl/38/0.html

7 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017  pg. 38

8 The Environmental Defense Fund   A Future for Monarchs - Bringing the Iconic Butterfly Back From the Brink   https://www.edf.org/card/future-monarchs

9 Becca Cudmore, Working Together for Monarchs, World Wildlife Magazine, Sum. 2017 https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/summer-2017/articles/working-together-for-monarchs

10 John R. Platt, Monarch Butterflies Could Gain Endangered Species Protection,  Scientific American, Extinction Countdown, Jan. 5, 2015 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/monarch-butterflies-could-gain-endangered-species-protection/

11 Center For Food Safety, Annual Monarch Count Shows Butterfly Still Threatened, Mar. 5, 2018  https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/5283/annual-monarch-count-shows-butterfly-still-threatened

12 Maria L La Ganga, Government Rejects Scientist’s Claim it Tried to Cover Up his Pesticide Research, The Guardian, Feb. 29, 2016   https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/29/scientist-usda-negative-pesticide-research-neonicotinoids-environment

13 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017  pg. 42

14 Kylee Baumle, The Monarch,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: St. Lynn’s Press, 2017  pg. 44

15 Butterfly close up photo:  © Kylee Baumle

16 John R. Platt, Monarch Butterflies Could Gain Endangered Species Protection, Scientific American, Extinction Countdown, Jan. 5, 2015 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/monarch-butterflies-could-gain-endangered-species-protection/

17 Center For Food Safety, Monarch Butterfly Migration Could Collapse, Scientists Warn, Mar. 6, 2018  https://www.ecowatch.com/monarch-butterfly-population-migration-2543505935.html

18 The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation 

In 2016, their monarch project, a joint venture between Xerces, Monarch Joint Venture,  the University of Minnesota Monarch Lab and (Paligraph ) Prairie Institute.

19 Monarch Joint Venture  https://monarchjointventure.org/

20 Brice X. Semmens et all, Quasi-extinction Risk and Population Targets for the Eastern, Migratory Population of Monarch Butterflies (Danaus Plexippus), Scientific Reports 6, Article 23265 (March 21, 2016)  https://www.nature.com/articles/srep23265

21 Environmental Action, Working to Save Monarch Butterflies, Environmental Action Blog, Jun 12, 2018, https://environmental-action.org/blog/working-to-save-monarch-butterflies/

22 Kate Linthicum, To Save the Monarch Butterfly, Mexican Scientists are Moving a Forest 1,000 Feet up a Mountain, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 9, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-col1-mexico-monarch-butterfly-20190409-htmlstory.html

The Moral Imperative to End Factory Farming: Thomas Quicksilver

The Moral Imperative to End Factory Farming: Thomas Quicksilver

By Stephen Erickson

Elementary school students peer out of school bus windows at the Duplin, North Carolina countryside. The woods are cut back from the road making room for crop fields, each spanning several acres. People’s homes glide past — modest brick houses, small clapboard ones little more than shacks, rectangular immobile mobile homes with built-on front porches. Puffy, low-hanging clouds drift across a heavy sky, wearing traces of pinks and oranges, gifts from the rising sun. No one pays any attention as they pass an unpaved road which cuts back through forest trees leading to a pig factory farm and its adjacent spray field…

            Thomas Q. Piglet lives down this road. He’s a little guy with short white hair that doesn’t quite cover all of his soft pink skin. He’s got a really big head. And a long nose and pointy extendo ears. When he looks at you what may first strike you is his sharp, perceptive awareness, but right now his eyes are on the one who is most important in his young life — his mother.

© Jo-Anne McArthur/Essere Animali

She’s not sleeping, she’s not hurt, just confined inside the metal bars of a farrowing crate. She can stand up, but the dimensions of the crate are so narrow, the metal bars barely wider than the width of her body, that she can only step a foot or so forwards or back. She is unable to turn around. Thomas looks at her, nudges her snout and she looks back recognizing her piglet. She is having some difficulty breathing and looks tired — she isn’t well. She was brought here nearly three weeks ago when she was about to give birth. Thomas Q. is one of her ten babies in this cement and steel farrowing pen. She lies on her side to nurse them. Thomas and his brothers and sisters are confined in the narrow space beside her where you see him now.

Pigs like to bask and play in the sunlight as it warms their soft sensitive skin. When cool, scent-filled breezes envelope their faces and bodies, there’s nothing better. They quickly learn an array of sounds and gestures to communicate with each other. They form social groups. Pigs wag their tails when they are happy, and they learn to respond to their own names.1 They develop a strong memory for faces and will immediately recognize ones they like and others they’d prefer not to be around. Most of all, they love to root in muddy ground, to forage with their snouts amidst grass and bugs and all kinds of scents and mysteries in the wet soil. Mud keeps them cool as they don’t have many sweat glands. Pigs need to ingest the microbes and ‘dirt stuff’ to maintain their health.2 However, despite their penchant for rooting in the soil and running around in the fields, pigs are clean animals. They prefer to go to the bathroom well away from the areas where they eat, rest or anywhere near their farrowing pens.

            Thomas hasn’t experienced any of that yet. He’s naturally curious but there’s nothing stimulating or interesting for him in this claustrophobic, fetid space. He and his mother, brothers and sisters live on this cold metal floor in this darkened room. The floor is grated, with lines of rectangular openings narrow enough so their feet don’t fall in, while wide enough for their urine and their poop to drop down into a collection space underneath before draining through pipes that lead outside into a vast adjacent cesspool called a lagoon.

            As Thomas glances at his mom, she is not covered with dirt and bits of field grass and straw from a welcome journey outside — she hasn’t left this crate. Instead, she is covered in her own waste. His mother hasn’t stood up since yesterday. This concerns him but she’s alive and nurses him – so it must be okay. This is all he’s ever experienced, all he knows. This is how it’s supposed to be, right?

            A human is approaching. Thomas is wary. When the humans appear, nothing good ever happens. Already in their young lives, Thomas and each of his brothers and sisters have been hurt by humans, receiving pain for reasons beyond their understanding. It’s best when the humans pass by leaving them alone. Pigs not only have very good memories, they are smart — most likely smarter than your dog, and maybe even as smart as cats although a cat would never admit that.

            Thomas Q. would respond to human affection. Only he has never had that kind of experience. Fearful, he backs away from the workers as they approach. A week ago, a worker came into his pen, grabbed him by his hind legs and lifted him into the air. He squealed loudly, terrified and twisted his body but could not escape. The worker held a sharp scalpel in one hand and cut off his tail, which really hurt as he was given no anesthetic to kill the pain, then made two cuts in his backside, squeezed, drawing his young testicles out from inside his body and tore them off. As Thomas squealed loudly, writhing in searing pain, his mother went berserk. Roaring at the intruder, she pressed hard against the metal bars. Thomas was cast aside on the filthy floor. He watched helplessly as, one by one, each of his scurrying bothers were caught, raised and their squeals of terror turned into high pitched shrieks from the pain of tail docking and castration.

            Today the human pays no attention to Thomas or his brothers and sisters, focusing instead on his mom. It matters to this worker that she’s not standing. It’s a nuisance. He carries a long metal rod, called a ‘poop stick,’ with which he prods her to get her to stand. The sows must stand at least once every day. Thomas watches as his mom is poked harder, harder still, again — until she rises. The worker then uses the stick to slide the masses of feces that have accumulated around her body into and through the openings in the floor. A mature sow, she weighs well over 400 pounds and produces around 16 pounds of excrement a day. The omnipresent, concentrated and highly toxic ammonia and hydrogen sulfide fumes from pig waste creates breathing problems for the pigs as well as a hazardous environment for the workers. Once the worker has finished, he moves along the row to the sow in the next gestation crate. Thomas hears the cries of other sows and piglets, their neighbors off in the darkened space of this vast room.

            Later, in another building, Thomas will be assigned a number, which will be inked into his skin by half-inch long spikes mounted on a big hammer-like tool. He will be stuck with it and tattooed four times around his forward haunches. Sows are given a bright earring, more specifically an ear tag — like the yellow one you see his mother wearing — applied with a riveter. These pigs are not afforded even an instant of compassion; they’re barely considered animals. They are just production units on an assembly line. Thomas won’t be cared for, or even cared about. He is just kept alive and fed to maintain his value.

            Thomas Q. isn’t even his name. He doesn’t have one. I named him. No one on this farm cares enough about him to give him one — nor ever will.

            100 million pigs are raised for food each year in the United States. Today, 99% of these pigs spend their entire lives on factory farms in conditions similar to Thomas and his mother.3 The pork industry and its trade organizations like the American Association of Meat Processors and the North American Meat Institute promote the appearance of happy pigs living natural lives in idyllic pastures on small family farms to consumers, often using idealized images of these homesteads in their advertising and food packaging. They evoke a nostalgia for rural life, for this is what American family farms were like in the 1940s, 1950s and to a diminishing extent, the 1960s and 1970s. But for 99% of pigs today, this image couldn’t be further from their reality.

            The industry refers to this as a farm, but it isn’t one in the traditional sense — it’s a factory. This is a factory farm, also referred to as a CAFO, which is an acronym for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. The tiny space Thomas, his mother, brothers and sisters occupy is just one in a long row of identical spaces extending over 200 feet, the entire length of this cavernous barn. Numerous identical rows of these gestation crates span the width of this farrowing outbuilding. 2,000 sows and piglets fill this darkened space.

            On a traditional farm each animal is cared for, its needs are met, and it is afforded enough space to live according to its animal nature. The farmer’s living depends on raising thriving, healthy animals to full market weight and price. The pigs enjoy a good, fit, natural life. By contrast, raising livestock on a factory farm is just a numbers game. Animals here are considered a commodity, and the fact that they are living creatures rather than production units on an assembly line, is an inconvenience. If during the manufacturing process as Thomas Q. is grown to market size and weight, he is badly hurt or becomes diseased, then Thomas-Q. — the “production unit” — will be deemed broken, of no value, and will be cast aside. Dumpsters called ‘Dead Bins’ line the outside of this barn. One is waiting for him if that’s how it goes. Any care or attention paid to any of these production units beyond the barest minimum necessary to get them through the assembly process is an unnecessary expense to be avoided.

© Jo-Anne McArthur/Essere Animali

Today, noise and commotion command the pig’s attention. Something’s going on. Humans appear. Eight of them. The entirety of this huge factory farm and all of its barns is staffed by just ten workers. Thomas rarely sees more than one or two at any time, yet on this Friday, eight of them are entering.  Suddenly, the back of Thomas’s pen opens, and a worker enters. He’s got the red paddle — the scariest color. It’s a wide, flat barrier Thomas Q. and his siblings can’t get around. The worker yells at them, shakes a plastic jug with frightening noisy things rattling in it. Thomas cowers beside his mother, tries to nudge himself under her for protection but to no avail. His mother has no energy to rise. She can’t shelter him.

            The other door opens — the one on the other end of the pen. Mysteriously. No human blocks this path, this way out.

            The Q in Thomas’s name stands for Quicksilver. He’s a fast little guy and he quickly realizes: this is his chance. Escape! This is the way!

            Thomas Quicksilver is the first to dash out, leading his brothers and sisters into the middle aisle. Surprise! They are joined by piglets rushing out of the other pens on both sides, fleeing rattles and red paddles. Jailbreak! Piglets flood in. Thomas notices that the big doors at the far end are open. It’s darkness beyond — maybe a path out of this barn. The piglets herd together, head in that direction. Is it time now to see the sun? Is this the way to the grass and the rooting soil? The piglets are finally leaving this dark, scary, hurtful place, all they have ever known.

            Thomas and hundreds of piglets move through the open doors and find themselves in another dark hallway. It leads to another. Thomas is cautious, wary, but has no choice but to keep advancing, pressed forward by those behind him. Another dark corridor, but this time, at its end… an open door with slices of brightness along its edges — the promise of sunlight beyond. Thomas and the other piglets head instinctively to the sunlight, which none of them have ever before experienced.

            As they herd through this narrower door they emerge onto a metal ramp that leads them up into a transport truck. The sliver of sky above, vivid and warm, is eclipsed as the piglets behind Thomas force him forward into the truck.

            Thomas is leaving the farrowing barn and will be driven to a grow-out barn where he will be housed in a small pen along with several other pigs. He will spend his remaining days there, until he approaches full size and market weight, at which time he will be transported to the rendering plant and to slaughter. Thomas will never set foot in a meadow or grassy farmland, never bask in the sun. He will never be able to root in wet mud or straw, never have space to run around and play with his friends. Or develop any of the complex social relationships pigs have the natural capacity for.

            Back at the farrowing barn, it’s his mom’s turn. She, and all the sows have watched as their babies have been driven away. Now, it’s their turn to vacate this barn. The workers prepare a path to a different destination and this time they spread out, each manning turning points to direct traffic along the route. Just one sow is released at a time. The workers are prepared. They know from experience that sows will react in different ways.

            The first sow released is one who has just delivered her first litter. First timers are excited to get out of their cramped crates. They haven’t been able to walk or even turn around for over three weeks. Now, the metal bars they have been pressing futilely against shift aside! These sows erupt into the middle aisle, discovering some space to move around. They follow the scent of the piglets, hoping to reunite with their own.

            Once one sow hastens through the big doorway, and turns along the second section of the path, a worker lets out the next sow.

            This sow is one who has been through this before. She leaves her crate stepping into the middle aisle but is more reluctant, lethargic. This is the second common reaction. Pigs, like dogs, can remember faces, bodies, and smells. They can quickly identify animals or people that they have encountered, even years before, remembering whether these experiences were good or bad. This sow has delivered several litters in this barn, she remembers this experience. She knows where she’s going, how it has ended before.

            These sows are being transferred to the gestation barn, which is nearly as large as the farrowing barn, and where they will be forced into gestation crates barely wider than their bodies. These new crates are even smaller than the ones they are now leaving, as there is no additional space necessary for the nursing of piglets. They will each spend the next three months, three weeks and three days in those narrow confines, unable to walk, back up or turn around.  3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days… Two thousand seven hundred and sixty-six hours. After about two weeks there, they are forcibly artificially inseminated and the whole cycle begins again.

            For the first timers being moved, the end of this journey is an emotionally wrenching and often violent one. The workers know from experience that the very instant a first timer sow, so excited to be out of the torturous confines of a farrowing crate, turns the corner and faces the end of the path — not an open field, not an expansive enclosure, not even a modest size pen, or anything natural, of nature or even close — but a dark, tiny metal cage, smaller even than the one she just came from, that surprise, the total shock of this realization, quickly becomes angry rebellion. These large animals often turn and struggle to avoid going into this kind of space again — and must be forced. Two workers stand poised to use tools of personal preference — electric shockers, metal pipes, a length of rebar, whatever works best for them to gain compliance — to get each sow into the open gestation crate awaiting her.

            Many experienced sows, those that have borne numerous litters, take this walk but must be prodded by the worker manning each new section of the route, in addition to being motivated at trail’s end to enter one of these narrow confinement cells.

            For the workers, there are so few of them and so many animals. They are overworked, underpaid, and vastly overtasked. The hours are long, the job is dangerous, injuries are common. The workplace air they breathe is rife with dirt, fecal and other particulate matter, and disease. A quarter of them will develop respiratory problems such as asthma, bronchitis and organic toxic dust syndrome.4 Working at this factory farm, each one of them is now six times more likely to catch and carry the antibiotic-resistant MSRA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria which can cause deadly skin, blood and lung infections and is highly contagious.5 Their labor is considered unskilled so most are paid minimum wage, if that. Having to put up with, be complicit with and manage so much animal suffering, the job is soul deadening — a job very few people would want, one you take to survive, as an immigrant in a new land, as an unskilled, under-educated or underachieving person who’s strong of body, who has applied for work at manufacturing plants or businesses in town, and can find no other employment. The attitude requires a detached resignation to get the assigned tasks done each day while protecting what remains of your energy so that by shift’s end, you can clean up and head out into your private life, to the family you are providing for, to whatever pleasures or routine satisfaction you have some control over for the remainder of your living day.

            Workers tend to get frustrated with the animals. Each day, there is only enough time to complete their assigned tasks if everything goes smoothly. To stay on schedule, they must get the animals to comply, even those incapable of it. When there’s a moment of brightness, when an animal’s sensitivity, feeling or intelligence shines through, it must be paid no attention to. Compassion does not exist here. Nothing can interfere with the factory farming process.

            There was one morning when two workers entered the barn to discover two sows, along with their piglets, wandering loose along the middle aisle. The workers stopped and watched to try and figure out what exactly was happening. And what they saw amazed even them. One of the sows had figured out how to loosen her crate door hinges with her tongue, work a pin up, back and forth — again and again — until it fell open. She escaped with her babies. A second crate door, the one adjacent, lay on the ground as well. Rather than flee with her piglets through the far door and a chance at freedom, the sow had chosen to stay and free her neighbor. The workers watched in disbelief as she was now at a third gestation crate and, angling her snout from the outside in, was managing to lift and rock that door open as well. She succeeded, and the workers witnessed this third sow and her piglets emerge. The workers regarded one another, impressed with this animal’s intelligence, feeling an affinity with her selflessness in delaying her cherished escape to freedom to help others find theirs. They watched as she moved down the line and stopped at the next farrowing crate.

At this point the workers stopped her as they had no time to spare in their schedule for these escapees, let alone more. They remounted the crate doors, then returned the piglets to their pens, and the sows to their crates. All except one. The ringleader. Who now knew how to open a gestation crate door. She would not forget that, and she won’t stop doing it. So, she must be put down. And right there, right then, in front of her piglets, in front of all of them, she was.

            The third most common type of animal reaction on this Friday is displayed by the sows that are absolutely unwilling, or due to injury, unable to be moved. Today, Thomas’s mother is one of them.

            Thomas’s mother is four years old. Worn down and depleted from delivering and suckling three litters of piglets every year, living completely without exercise in this intensive confinement on cement and metal flooring, her leg muscles are weak and wasted away from lack of use, her swollen leg joints — increasingly painful even to put weight on — are now crippled. She finds herself unable to stand in her opened crate. She has an increasingly hard time breathing, having developed respiratory problems over years of inhaling the dust, dander and the poisonous gases released from the buildup of her urine and feces as well as what rises up from the accumulation space below from the waste of her 2,000 neighbors. Watching her babies taken from her, knowing from past experience that she will never see them again, companionless, comfortless, never once having succeeded in chewing through the bars of her crate despite having broken several of her teeth trying, prone now to dementia from the omnipresent stress and depression, she has withdrawn from this life as well.

            A worker looks at her chart. She hasn’t eaten for three days.

            Each hog’s food trough and water dispenser are checked daily. In yet another way the factory farming system cuts down on labor costs, the pig feed — stored in silos elevated outside each barn — is dispensed automatically through feeding pipes into individual rations into each sow’s trough. Due to the high risk of infectious disease in this exceedingly pestilent environment, the food delivered to the farm arrives laced with antibiotics. When a sow stops eating, it is recorded. On the third consecutive day a worker typically will then go to the refrigerator, get a syringe of tetracycline antibiotic, and inject the pig to knock back any infection she may have.

            North Carolina hog farms are still reeling from the highly contagious PED (Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea) virus that appeared in the United States in May 2013, which spread rapidly throughout most of the country, killing or prompting the killing of over seven million pigs in the first year alone.

            Thomas’s mother was given the shot yesterday. Today she is still not eating. And now she refuses all efforts to move her. She may have an infection. Or she may not. Terminally ill sows often are left to suffer for a week, even two, on the chance they might rebound. But Thomas’s mom is older and has had a productive life. The decision is made. She won’t be allowed back with the other hogs in the super-confined quarters of the gestation barn.

            When a sow or a piglet must be terminated, workers have two options — the gas cart or “bolting.” The standard factory farm industry practice used for decades to kill injured pigs is “thumping.” You pick up a young pig by its hind legs, whip it high around and over your rotating body, and rocket it down, slamming its head with as much force as possible onto the concrete floor. You “thump” it off the floor. This practice may need to be repeated but when you get adept at it, the odds are good that you end the pig’s life on the first thump. “Thumping” is less common nowadays if the barn has a “death cart.”

            One worker is wheeling this along the middle aisle now. Piglets that did not survive the move are tossed into its plastic tub, some alive, others dead. When the tub is full it is sealed and CO₂ gas is pumped into it, which, over ten slow minutes, should succeed in suffocating all the animals.

            Grown sows like Thomas Quicksilver’s mother don’t fit into the tub.

            A worker approaches her. He stands in front of her.

            She looks up and regards him. He has a bolt gun in hand — it’s time for “bolting.” He raises it and presses it to her forehead. Her eyes watch him and, with a sudden excruciating shock, a steel bolt crushes through her skull and drives two inches into her brain. Senses, then consciousness leave her, and her suffering, miserable life finally, mercifully, ends.

. . .

So.

            Why should we care? These are not animals living in the wild and they are not pets. Factory-farmed animals — pigs, cows, chickens, ducks and geese, fish, and animals raised for their fur — are brought into the world and raised to maturity for a specific purpose, either to produce something we consume such as meat, milk and eggs, or wear.

            I, for one, care deeply. Subjecting another living creature to willful, deliberate sustained cruelty is never okay. Not one animal and certainly not hundreds of millions.

            Awareness can be troubling, even painful. It can be excruciating to witness cruelty and suffering, let alone begin to realize how widespread it is. Awareness however, is a package deal. One which includes experiencing the beauty and interrelatedness of everything in this exquisite world — a world that each one of us has the unique and extraordinary opportunity to experience — during this lifetime in human form.

            For the philosopher Joanna Macy, our ability to witness, to “suffer with,” lives at the very heart of compassion. As she writes so beautifully in World as Lover, World as Self, “In owning this pain, and daring to experience it, we learn that our capacity to ‘suffer with’ is the true meaning of compassion. We begin to know the immensity of our heart-mind, and how it helps us to move beyond fear. What had isolated us in private anguish now opens outward and delivers us into wider reaches of our world as lover, world as self.

            “The truth of our inter-existence, made real to us by our pain for the world, helps us see with new eyes. It brings fresh understanding of who we are and how we are related to each other and the universe. We begin to comprehend our own power to change and heal. We strengthen by growing living connections with past and future generations, and our brother and sister species.”6

Compassion for animals, no less important than caring for one another, is one of the essential traits that defines and anchors our humanity. Our survival as a species depends on empathy for animals as well. Mahatma Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” We are not treating our farm animals well. The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index7 ranks animal welfare performance of the world’s 50 largest livestock producing countries. The United States places second highest in animal cruelty. As a country, this is shameful.

In America today the vast majority8 of pigs, cows, chickens and turkeys endure lives of incessant stress and cruelty, crowded together in the horrific confines of factory farms. These are concentration camps for animals. And ideal breeding grounds for pandemic disease. You can help change this.

We can bring an end to factory farming. You can make a significant impact by no longer being their customer. In Eating Meat: Constants and Changes, Vaclav Smil determined that factory farming will no longer be necessary if Americans cut their meat demand by 30%.

Honor your body temple. Eat nutritious safe food to optimize your health and immune system. Especially during this Coronavirus pandemic. Eat less meat and dairy. Don’t purchase any food product containing meat and dairy from factory farms. You can source humanely raised pastured animals, free range chicken, grass-fed grass-finished beef, and organic produce on sites linked to this endnote.9

. . .

© Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals

Thomas Q. Piglet is now full-grown Thomas Quicksilver. As you can see, he still has the pointy ears and an even bigger-than-big nose. He backs away from us, retreats as far as he can — although there’s not too much space in this crowded transport truck.

            Every interaction Thomas has had with humans has been unfriendly, if not painful, so he remains fearful. To this day Thomas Quicksilver has never once been allowed to be outside and bask in the warming sunshine, to eat field grass and frolic in it, to wander into some muddy soil to root around and snoggle in. Once it was different, just for a moment — just that one time. The day when he was one of several hundred piglets on a transport truck destined for the farrowing barn. He was looking out through one of the metal openings at the sunshine and the grassy fields, breathing fresh air at last, realizing there exist spaces to run around in and play, to get out into this warm day and find some wet soil to wallow in. The transport slowed to a stop at a road crossing alongside a school bus. At each of its windows were children’s faces. Some of the girls started to coo, “oouughhh” and “aughh” and “Look how cute they are.” Boy’s heads turned as well. They smiled at Thomas — more than just how cute he is, they perceived his gentleness, his sensitivity, the intelligent curiosity in his gaze. Thomas had never before seen a human looking at him this way. He had never seen a human smile.

            Thomas Quicksilver is unaware a date had been calendared for him — and that today that date has arrived. When his pen doors opened he seized the opportunity to dash out and find freedom and was steered onto and crowded into this animal transport truck.

            He found the space to stand beside an opening in the metal side wall and he gazes out on the passing countryside, the green grass waving in the fields in a sunny breeze, tree leaves fluttering. Maybe, at long last, he’s going to be allowed to wander out there. He hasn’t lost hope.

            Pigs are among the most intelligent animals, on a level with chimpanzees and dolphins.10 He would recognize his mother if they crossed paths. Maybe she will be wherever it is he is going.

            All of us, we animals, want the same things: to be able to avoid pain and suffering, to eat and live in places where we can relax and feel safe.

            At what point will Thomas lose hope? As the transport drives within a mile of the slaughterhouse, smells began to reach him. The wafting scent of pigs. Thousands of them are delivered to this final destination each day. But there is another smell as well. Pigs have an acute sense of smell. They smell better than we do, and they smell more.11 Thomas’s nose is bigger than most, but each of them takes it in: The smell of the smoke billowing out of the processing plant’s towering chimneys. Of pig body parts. It grows stronger — they realize that this place is getting closer. Thomas senses that this is not a safe place, it is not a good place.

            That concern is what you see in Thomas’s eyes now as the transport has stopped outside its destination.

            The transport pulls into the yard; journey’s end. As Thomas is forced out of the truck and herded toward an entry, he hears high pitched shrieks of terror — of panicked pigs within.

            At what point will hope leave him? Thomas has lived so much of his life in fear. Does fear ebb as hope drains away? He is forced into the building, shoulder to shoulder with his companions. He has grown to maturity with them yet never had any opportunity to form social groups with any of them. As the sunlight leaves him and he advances into shadow, the screams are more acute, bone-chilling. Nothing is worse than the sound of the terror ahead, indoors, reverberating off machine metal and cement walls. The dominant smell now is fresh blood and entrails — and it’s the smell of his kind.

            Thomas Quicksilver, fleet of foot, glances around. He’s done it before, he’s spotted that door ajar, that escape path, that opportunity to dash to a safer better place, a kinder place, a sunlit place, to freedom. He’s seen children’s smiles, their adoring faces, he’s just seen sunlit fields. Unlike his mother, he’s still able of body. His heart beats rapidly but is heavy in this horrific place, a Hell on Earth. His soul is wounded — but he can still scurry. He hasn’t lost hope. He’ll find an open door, a sliver of a crack, a way out. He will find it. Here and now or here and hereafter.

. . .

Thomas Quicksilver, we cannot save you, we cannot comfort you in the slightest, we cannot improve your life. We cannot even communicate to you one thing that we really wish we could: That many of us, and many more of us with each new day, are aware of what factory farming is, and we are acting with our purchasing power, deciding that whatever we choose to eat, it will no longer include the products of factory farms. We will no longer sustain and enable this cruelty. We will no longer be complicit in allowing this shameful abomination to continue.

            In the early Latin translations of the Bible, the word “dominion” was used declaring that God gave humans “dominion” over animals. Given Christianity’s message of love and mercy, theologians are now interpreting that verse using the word “stewardship” instead, finding that more harmonious with passages appearing elsewhere in the Bible. Teachings like, “Blessed are the merciful,” and “Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto Me.”  Like our pets, these animals are sentient beings. Because we are aware of the horror endured on factory farms, and because we can effect change, we cannot turn a blind eye.

            The Golden Rule is part of our journey. You know the one — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” More than how we treat other human beings, it applies to how we treat animals, and our entire world. For Thomas Quicksilver, for each one of us, it’s all about the Golden Rule…

            We take responsibility. We are at a pivotal point in human history. Humanity surviving not only the COVID-19 pandemic, but our climate emergency as well, is based on widespread awareness, seizing this moment, and taking action. The choice we have is a moral choice — one which defines who we are. It’s based fundamentally, on our compassion.

            Thomas Quicksilver, we are raising our voices and taking action to end the horror of factory farms so that future generations of animals will not suffer as you and your mother have.

__________________________________________________________________

Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years.

He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. 

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World Stephen identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens human extinction this century.

He also explores our singular solution.

Along the way there are exquisite creatures like Thomas Quicksilver, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.

__________________________________________________________________

1 Rob Percival, Why Animal Sentience Matters – and Why We Need a Charter for Animal Compassion, AlterNet, Aug. 11, 2017  https://www.alternet.org/animal-rights/why-animal-sentience-matters-and-why-we-need-charter-animal-compassion

 2 Dr. Meg Cattell and Dr. Arden Nelson told me that “Pigs are made to live half underground. They need all those microbes and dirt stuff in their gut. When we take pigs into a sterile environment it messes them up. Most pigs that die prematurely die from ingestive disorders.” Drs. Meg Cattell and Arden Nelson are board certified dairy veterinarians and proponents of grass feeding and keeping animals healthy through nutrition and management. As consulting veterinarians and educators they have worked with many sizes and types of dairies throughout the United States and have lectured around the world. http://windsordairy.com/learning-center.html

 3 ASPCA American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals website https://www.aspca.org/animal-cruelty/farm-animal-welfare/animals-factory-farms

4 Farm Sanctuary, Factory Farming’s Effect on Rural Communities, Farm Sanctuary website, https://www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/factory-farmings-effect-on-rural-communities/

 5 Shylo E. Wardyn, Brett M. Forhey, Sarah A. Farina, et al.  Swine Farming is a Risk Factor for Infection With and High Prevalence of Carriage of Multidrug-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, Center For Emerging Infectious Diseases, Jul. 2015, CID 2015:61 (1 July), https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/838e/424b2ded981288fd6e7e28e1633cfa1b3cab.pdf

 6 Reprinted from World As Lover, World As Self (1991, 2007) by Joanna Macy with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org

 7 https://vaci.voiceless.org.au/

 8 https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates

 9 https://www.thegreathealing.org/blog/source-humanely-raised-pastured-animals-free-range-chicken-grass-fed-grass-finished-beef-on-these-sites

10 Reynard Loki, How Can You Talk to Kids About Factory Farming? These Books Can Help., Truthout, Oct. 28, 2018, https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-you-talk-to-kids-about-factory-farming-these-books-can-help/

11 Reynard Loki, How Can You Talk to Kids About Factory Farming? These Books Can Help., Truthout, Oct. 28, 2018, https://truthout.org/articles/how-can-you-talk-to-kids-about-factory-farming-these-books-can-help/

You are now part of what will become one of the essential social justice movements in our nation’s history.

BOOK EXCERPT

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also explores our singular solution.

Five Compassions are our path to that solution.

Another Compassionate Action Is:  Advocate

Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to widen our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

            When you make others aware of your choices and influence theirs, your impact magnifies. Let your loved ones know, and your extended family. Tell your friends and colleagues. Inform your social networks. Share insights on what to purchase and where to buy it. Share recipes.

            Today one hundred people adjust, tomorrow a hundred more, soon it is one thousand, one hundred thousand. One day it is one million, another million — and then shifts happen.

            Here is an example of what can happen when just a few people get together and share their concerns. Here is how a few parents became the catalyst for a shift that has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of children…

What kinds of lunches are served to your children in their school cafeteria? In most schools, the meals, snacks and beverages provided will be consistently sugar rich, calorie rich and nutritionally barren. Most school cafeterias primarily offer the processed foods and sweetened beverages delivered by the fast food national chain suppliers their school district has contracted with. Studies show that this food places our children — these young students with their developing brains and bodies — at risk of obesity, pre-diabetes and a range of related health problems; that eating this food makes them more aggressive, causes them to have more difficulty concentrating, and they don’t perform as well academically.

A few parents in Los Angeles shared their concerns with one another about the nutritional quality of the school lunches served each day to their children. They then enlisted the help of a humane organization, Compassion Over Killing, who began working with the city council to draft a Meatless Mondays Resolution. Councilmember Ed P. Reyes, who became an advocate and co-author of the resolution, said, “When dealing with issues as big as global warming, or even as personal as battling diabetes or obesity, it’s easy to feel helpless, like there’s little we can do to make a difference. But the small changes we make every day can have a tremendous impact. That’s why this Meatless Monday resolution is important. Together we can better our health, the animals and the environment, one plate at a time.” For co-author, Councilmember Jan Perry, “Meatless Monday is about raising awareness… a call for all of us to think about our environment, the food we eat, and how we can be a part of making ourselves healthier.”1

The city council passed their resolution.

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) then developed an implementation plan and Mondays are now meatless in all cafeterias throughout the second largest school district in the country, which serves 700,000 lunches each school day.

The story gets better. The Humane Society then became involved to make sure the meatless meals were ones the students would find tasty, enjoyable and fun, “Instead of the standard fare of chicken nuggets and pepperoni pizza found on so many school menus, schools that have been through our training are serving Baja Bean Tacos, Amazing Lo Mein, and Protein Packed Two Bean Chili.”2 When Meatless Monday became a reality in the schools, the students embraced the menu changes. Soon, throughout the week healthier menu selections emphasizing fruits, vegetables and vegetarian options were added. Student academic performance measurably improved.

This single program in Los Angeles spares 4.6 million animals each year from factory farms. And the story is only beginning…

The school district, inspired in part by an eighth grader, Lila Copeland, who founded the nonprofit Earth Peace Foundation, began a pilot program offering a vegan school lunch option. It was immediately successful, with 13% of the students, including many non-vegan students, choosing the option. The Food Services Division expanded the vegan option into 35 schools and plans to offer a vegan lunch option at all schools. “We are thrilled with the reaction to the pilot and that most of the kids trying the new lunches were not vegan or vegetarian,” says Copeland. “We think more kids will now choose a healthy lunch option.”3

On April 18, 2017, the LAUSD Board of Education, now attuned to this issue, passed a resolution ending McDonald’s McTeacher’s Nights. Hannah Freedberg of Corporate Accountability describes what a “McTeacher’s Night” is: “McDonald’s has teachers work behind the counter of a local McDonald’s, serving burgers, fries, and soda to their students and students’ families. While McDonald’s gets the kind of marketing money cannot buy, schools are left with a paltry percentage of the proceeds from the night (sometimes as little as 10 percent) — and impressionable children come away with the idea that their trusted teachers endorse McDonald’s food.”4 While the teachers volunteer working behind the counter, McDonalds can cut employee hours saving that coin as well. No longer. Not at L.A. Unified.

And better: In 2018, the California Federation of Teachers, representing over 120,000 education professionals, passed a resolution to “oppose and reject” McTeacher’s Nights.5 McTeacher’s Nights will be history in California. And other school districts around the country are taking note.

And even better: On February 7, 2019, the American Federation of Teachers passed a resolution directing more than 1.7 million educators nationwide to reject junk food fundraisers including McTeacher’s Nights.6 50 teachers unions representing 3 million teachers have now taken a stand against McTeacher’s nights.7

            The Los Angeles Unified School District now provides healthy lunch options to 700,000 children — meals that improve their health and their academic performance.

            You want that for your child.

            The story gets better still. Mercy For Animals has a food policy program, working with schools and other institutions, which is succeeding in switching 26 million meals a year to plant-based.8

            For Joel Fuhrman, M.D., “It’s crazy that almost half of all entrees served in elementary schools include processed meats (such as hot dogs, ham, sausage, luncheon meats, corned beef, and canned meats), yet World Health Organization has declared that processed meats are a class 1 carcinogen in humans, placing them in the same category as asbestos and cigarette smoking.”9 Citing numerous research studies, including one that concluded that based on data from 12,000 students in the 5th to 8th grades, students who ate processed and fast-foods performed worse in math, reading and science, Dr. Fuhrman writes, “The junk food diets that our children regularly eat directly affect their academic performance. And yet, fast food is being served to kids at breakfast, lunch, and dinner all around the country. It is high time that this information becomes public knowledge so that we can change these accepted ‘normal’ patterns.”10

            Beginning in September 2018, all schools in California’s Santa Barbara Unified School District stopped serving processed meats, including bacon, deli meat, pepperoni and hot dogs. A popular plant-based option is already available at each meal. Of the two million meals the district serves its students each year, half of all meals are now entirely plant based. For Nancy Weiss, the district’s Food Service Director, “It’s the right thing to do to ensure that our students are getting the highest-quality food. There’s no room for carcinogens on the lunch line.”11

            On March 11, 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all New York City public schools will have Meatless Mondays beginning with the 2019-2020 school year.12

            An insightful article revealing successful initiatives in school districts nationwide and how important this is for children is, 10 Revolutionary Ways School Lunch in America is Improving (Plus Healthy School Lunch Ideas).13

            When people communicate with one another and voice their concern shifts like this happen.

            When an outcry against veal in the 1980’s led by the Humane Farming Association’s National Veal Boycott raised public awareness nationwide of exactly what a veal calf is, and how it is raised, the demand for veal plummeted from 3.4 million calves a year to 500,000 in 2017.14 Italian restaurants that cater to an older or traditionally cultured clientele can find themselves trapped. Many of these customers expect, order and enjoy veal dishes on their menus. You can support these businesses while helping them become more compassionate. If you enjoy eating at one of these restaurants continue to do so — just no longer order veal anything.

            In making even gradual modest shifts in what you eat, you are now living more compassionately.

By choosing this compassionate path, please celebrate what you’ve achieved.

            You, by adding to the demand for healthy, tastier, higher quality organic produce and humanely raised animals and animal products, enable farms like Cottonwood Creek Farms to sell every egg, every animal they raise, and they are at their capacity. You enable farmers like Lou Preston at Preston Vineyards to sit down at the end of a long work day and savor a glass of his wine while reflecting on the demand for all the healthy, exquisitely tasteful products of his land, the eggs, vegetables, his breads and olive oils. This opens the door for new entrepreneurs to engage in this style of farming. Imagine tens of thousands of new vibrant small family farms appearing to meet the rising demand for humanely raised meat and dairy.

            When this modern version of traditional farming is scaled, by multiplying the number of farms, not the density of animals, it will grow to meet the substantial but decreasing consumer demand for meat and dairy products.

            You are bringing an end to factory farming.

            You are helping the return of small farms, of a modern day Grange, of the local foods movement, of food-to-table, and the creation of 500,000+ new farmers and farming jobs over the next decade, all of which will result in the rebirth and revitalization of rural towns and communities.

            The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index ranks the animal welfare performance of the 50 largest livestock producing countries in the world. The United States ranks second highest in animal cruelty.15 We, as a country, should be ashamed of that. You are helping to change that.

            As Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.”16 Compassionate activism is compassion flourishing. It is compassion realized. Get active. Engage your compassionate activism.

            You are now part of what will become one of the essential social justice movements in our nation’s history.

            You are now a seminal participant speeding our country’s evolution into a more compassionate nation.

            Consumer demand for organic produce has now grown to a 15 billion dollar a year business. Many farmers are adjusting their crops and practices to accommodate this demand. Consumer awareness and preference will shift animal production away from huge factory farming operations, which will not be able to adapt and change. Factory farm operations will become untenable.

            Realizing that your reach and influence now extends beyond your community and out into the world can be invigorating. There is new-found power with this as one purpose in your purposeful life.

            You are helping to manifest the Great Healing.

            Jane Goodall has famously said, “You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Cynthia Millburn, in her article How Showing Compassion for Animals Can Improve Your Health,17 writes that, “Compassion can help broaden our perspective and redirect our focus away from ourselves. Compassion might boost our sense of well-being by increasing a feeling of connection to others. Social connection helps us recover from illness more quickly, strengthens our immune system and even increases our lifespan.”

            I love bonus benefits and added value. Demonstrating compassion for animals has yet another nice ride-along: We can find ourselves living with even greater compassion toward, patience with, and understanding of, one another.

            Here is one more benefit, perhaps the most important of all, and one Joanna Macy describes beautifully in World as Lover, World as Self:

            “Not only seers and shamans, but scientists also, have revealed the capacity of the human spirit to know and be informed by its connectedness with other life forms. The will to do this is a gift and saving grace. For human mentality presents a distinctive feature: the capacity for choice. To be human, to win a human birth, brings the option of changing one’s karma. That is why, in Buddhist teachings a human life is considered so rare and priceless a privilege. And that is why Buddhist practice, in venerable traditions, begins with meditation on the precious opportunity that a human experience provides: the opportunity to wake up for the sake of all beings.”18

Compassion for animals is one compassion we need to embrace and live to have a chance of achieving The Great Healing.

There are four more.

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.

__________________________________________________
Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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1      Compassion Over Killing,  Compassion Over Killing Meatless Mondays Program, 2013, http://cok.net/camp/meatless-mondays/

2     The Humane Society of the United States:  http://www.humanesociety.org/

3     Emily Monaco, Vegan School Lunches Could Become the Norm in Nation’s 2nd Largest School District Next Year, Organic Authority, Dec. 6, 2017  http://www.organicauthority.com/vegan-school-lunches-could-become-the-norm-in-californias-largest-school-district-next-year/

4     Hannah Freedberg, Victory! The Nation’s Second-largest School District Ends McTeacher’s Nights, Corporate Accountability, Apr. 26, 2017   https://www.corporateaccountability.org/blog/victory-the-nations-second-largest-school-district-end-mcteachers-nights/

5     Corporate Accountability, About Our Food Campaign, 2018, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/food/about-our-food-campaign/

6     Julia Gabbert, Victory! National Teachers Union Takes Historic Stand to Reject McTeacher’s Nights, Corporate Accountability Spotlight, 2019 Issue 1,  https://www.corporateaccountability.org/food/about-our-food-campaign/

7     Alexa Kaczmarski, No More Predatory Marketing in Our Schools, Corporate Accountability, Oct. 10, 2018, https://www.corporateaccountability.org/blog/no-more-predatory-marketing-in-our-schools/

8     Mercy For Animals, Compassionate Living, Spring, 2018   http://www.mercyforanimals.org/home2

9     Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Fast Food Genocide, New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2017 pg. 39. 

10     Joel Fuhrman, M.D., Fast Food Genocide, New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2017 pgs. 60-62. 

11     Anna Starostinetskaya, California School District Bans Processed Meat, VegNews, Sep. 25, 2018   https://vegnews.com/2018/9/california-school-district-bans-processed-meat

12    Doug Criss, New York Public Schools to Have ‘Meatless Mondays’ Starting this Fall, CNN, Mar. 12, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/12/us/new-york-meatless-mondays-trnd/index.html

13     Food Revolution, 10 Revolutionary Ways School Lunch in America is Improving (Plus Healthy School Lunch Ideas), Food Revolution, Aug. 31, 2018,  https://foodrevolution.org/blog/healthy-school-lunch-ideas/

14     The Humane Farming Association, HFS’s National Veal Boycott – Campaign Decimating Sales, 2018, https://www.hfa.org/vealBoycott.html

15     The Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index, Voiceless.org.au, https://vaci.voiceless.org.au/

16     Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York, New York: Picador, 2003

17     Cynthia Millburn, How Showing Compassion for Animals Can Improve Your Health, One Green Planet, May 6, 2017  http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/how-showing-compassion-for-animals-can-improve-your-health/

18     Reprinted from World As Lover, World As Self (1991, 2007) by Joanna Macy with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org  pg. 41

What that means is this…

BOOK EXCERPT

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.

Meet Brady Kluge.

What That Means Is This… 

Brady Kluge was crossing the patio area of Hunt Meadows Elementary School at recess, when he realized she was talking to him. She was a 4th grade classmate, someone he knew but not all that well. One of her friends was with her, a classmate who Brady thought was really cute. In fact, he had a crush on her.

            Brady is a soft-spoken, sensitive nine-year-old. He’s a good student who communicates well in class. Other students are pleased when they learn they are teamed with him on a class project because they know they’ll get a good grade — but outside of the classroom, no one pays much attention to him. So, when this girl tells him she and her friend are interested in seeing how fast he can run, Brady hides his surprise. Can he run over to the playground area and back? Would he do that for them?

            It’s a sunny, warm spring day in Easley, South Carolina. Flattered to be spoken to — almost polite to a fault — he glances at the friend, making the briefest of eye contact, trying not to blush as she smiles at him. She smiles at him. He isn’t used to this. So, he agrees. He runs, as fast as he can, over towards the playground. Arriving there, he steps demonstrably onto its surface edge marking his turn so they can see he didn’t cheat, that he is running the whole way.

            Breathing hard, Brady runs back toward them. They are still watching him and they’re smiling — their attention stays on him the whole time. Inspired, he surmounts his fatigue, keeps running. Nearing, he can hear them — they are cheering, clapping - for him! He finishes strong, pulls up before them. “Good job, Brady! That was a really good job.” He thanks them, basks in their smiles. He says an awkward sheepish goodbye, their pretty faces, their eyes still focused on him, especially the friend. She is one of the most beautiful girls he has ever seen. As if he was a camera, he tries to freeze-frame her smiling face and store that image forever in his mind. Brady turns and heads away, not wanting to get all sweaty in front of them, aglow in the remnants of their attention.

            About a week later another classmate, a girl who is a family friend, asks Brady about those girls and the day he ran for them. His spine tingles, nervous concern rising. His running for them wasn’t that big a deal, so why would she even be bringing it up? It turns out she’s friends with both girls and when they told her the story they were laughing. They asked Brady to run because he is overweight, and they wanted to watch his belly fat wobble as he ran. They didn’t seem to be laughing at him — not that Brady could tell — so he had no idea. Apparently, however, they found the story enormously entertaining recounting it afterwards to different groups of friends.

            Brady Kluge has a gentle voice, “I felt ashamed learning that. And it certainly didn’t help my self-confidence.” Like most children, he is acutely self-aware. In the maelstrom most of us get to experience known as elementary school, middle school and high school, we yearn for inclusion, making friends. We also learn to mask that while trying to be cool, to fit in, to be interesting and to be accepted. To come across as too needy — let alone desperate — for friendly attention is a surefire way to attract the wrong kind or none at all.

            When Brady had an experience that was a blow to an already fragile self-esteem, he would take stock, analyzing the situation in his characteristic way: He was polite and had good manners. He was well regarded in classes because he was smart and he knew the material. He even had a sense of humor, so his peers didn’t categorize him as a nerd. And he wasn’t immodest about his academics — he didn’t brag or exude any air of superiority. He offered to help others. He wasn’t bad looking. But he didn’t have any school friends. Not one. At home, he had his three brothers and his parents but every year on his birthday, his party turned out to be a family affair — no classmates ever came. The reason he was ostracized could only be one thing: his weight.

            Brady was 5 feet 3 inches tall. He weighed 190 pounds and had a 36” waist. He had a face widened by fatty tissue, a small double chin and he had a bit of fatty skin across the back of his neck that made him appear slightly hunched over. He conceded to himself that his belly fat would wobble up and down — as it must have done while he was running as fast as he could for the girls.

Five years later, Brady is now age 14 as his mother drives him to Easley Pediatrics for his annual physical with Dr. Gary Goudelock. In an examination room wallpapered with pleasantly illustrated kid-friendly elephants, giraffes and other animals — one that Brady has been returning to for as long as he can remember — his pediatrician enters and performs his exam. Brady’s mom, Tinna, sits patiently as always.

            Brady’s weight is now 215 pounds, his waist 38 inches around. Scanning Brady’s health history, Dr. Goudelock notes Brady’s inability to stop gaining weight. He has counseled Brady about this during previous physical exams. “I know it’s hard. I understand. I’m fighting this battle with you.” His doctor is empathetic. He struggles with his own weight.

            Body Mass Index (BMI) is your weight divided by height squared. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have defined “obese” as a BMI of 30 or higher. Based on this definition, 36% of adults in the United States — over 94 million Americans — are obese.1 Approaching middle age, your BMI to body fat closely correlates: a BMI of 30 means that approximately 30% of your body mass is fat. The percentage is lower earlier in life and increases in your later years. A formula developed by Deurenberg, Weststrate and Seidell in the Netherlands precisely calculates body fat at every age level based on your BMI and taking your age and sex into account.2

            The CDC defines “overweight” as a BMI of 25 to 30. Based on that definition, 181 million Americans are overweight or obese.3 33.4% of children ages 2 to 19 — one in three — in the United States are now either overweight (16.2%) or obese (17.2%). In Brady’s age group, children ages 12 to 19, obesity has increased from around 5% in 1976 to 20.6% today — one out of every five is obese.4 One of them is Brady.

            There have never been, in all of human history, more obese and overweight people alive.

            Obesity is the pathway to diabetes.

            Dr. Goudelock regards mother and son, meets their eyes. Before this medical professional even speaks a word, a concern in his lingering gaze spreads out creasing his face, and Brady and his mother silently realize… there is a problem, something is wrong.

            Based on Brady’s vital signs, his blood sugar level, and his BMI, Brady is pre-hypertensive. Hypertension is abnormally high blood pressure. He is on the path to becoming pre-diabetic. As his pediatrician explains his increasing risk of medical problems should he become diabetic as he approaches his twenties, the 14-year-old fidgets, avoids eye contact with Dr. Goudelock, wanting this visit to end. The slights at school, the glances-at shifting quickly into looks-away, the ridicule whispered sideways between amused confidants — almost privately — Brady’s radar field of nervousness is acutely attuned. Now, in this moment, he is again caught in the headlights, unworthy, weak, a glutton, a failure, the subject of condescending disdain, and all he wants is to mute it out, to flee, and get away to solitude and safety.

            Hearing the word “diabetic” applied to her son actually doesn’t cause his mother immediate or inordinate concern. Tinna is overweight, as is Brady’s father, John. A number of people she knows, including her mother-in-law, are diabetic and the medications they take seem to be handling their situations just fine. Besides, Dr. Goudelock’s prefix “pre” and even better, the “becoming” before that offer the comforts of distance and time.

            But as Dr. Goudelock provides more detail, growing apprehension slows and draws her breathing, the tiny muscles underneath the skin of her face release and her expression falls until she becomes aware of that, and of needing to mask any concern in front of her son.

            A program, New Impact, has just opened at the children’s hospital nearby. Dr. Goudelock feels intervention at this stage is the best plan of action, and he wants to refer Brady there.

            Brady and Tinna are quiet as she drives them home. As a mother, she’s usually savvy enough to think of something to say, to lighten things when moods dampen or topics become dour, but right now her mind is working, she’s thinking things through. She has an action plan in mind before they even set foot on their driveway.

            Tinna and John love their children and are succeeding in providing a nice home for them, the best they can given their steady modest income. Evidence of that love is, in part, the food they serve at their dining table. Their food culture living in South Carolina consists mainly of the rich, fatty, sugary traditional dishes, the comfort food of the American south, combined with today’s national brands of appealing calorie-rich processed foods, snacks and beverages. Her husband, John, and Brady’s three brothers don’t know it yet, but Tinna is now resolved. It’s been torture for her, feeling helpless watching her son get bigger and bigger. She and John have been struggling with weight issues of their own. The entire family will now begin eating a healthier diet and exercising more. Done deal. Junk food and processed foods are going to become scarcer in her kitchen. Even though she doesn’t yet know what that “healthier diet” will consist of, she will be going with Brady to New Impact where they will learn more about it together. The family Kluge is going to be on board, this will be a team effort. Done. “Pre”-done. Even though neither Brady’s older brother, Joseph, or either of his younger brothers, Chandler and Nicholas, are overweight, Brady’s mom knows they’ll rally, that the family will circle the wagons around him. Done. Chandler is strident in his opinions — Tinna knows he’ll put up a fight and will still refuse to eat vegetables — but that can be tolerated. Double done.

Going forward, Tinna will be driving Brady weekly to New Impact. There, he will be provided with four specialists. Dr. Sease will be his medical doctor — she’s the clinic’s director so that sounds like a good thing — and Brady will also be assigned a nutritionist, a psychologist and an exercise advisor.

            Brady and Tinna have just learned from Dr. Goudelock that Brady is on the path to becoming pre-diabetic. And what that means.

            What that means is this…

If Pre-Diabetic is the name of the road you are on, then the city you are heading to is named Type 2 Diabetes. It’s a big city — 95% of diabetics live there. When Brady arrives in that city, his neighborhood — given his young age — has a special name: Early-onset Type 2 Diabetes. Once he moves into Type 2 Diabetes, if he remains a resident there, his life expectancy will be reduced by 15 years.5 Brady will likely not live beyond his mid-60s.

            All those wonderful years of your life’s full span spent living with the knowledge you’ve gained, the experiences and adventures you’ve had, the family and friends you have created, the joys and the sorrows enabling you to arrive at an understanding of life, a perspective unique to who you are, infusing a sharp brain riding high on a healthy savvy body, sensually attuned and more than adequately ambulatory, ready now for new adventures and experiences captained by a discerning mind, clever now, learned, influential, perhaps even wise. These are years young Brady can barely even conceive of, let alone envision — his mid-60’s, the 70’s and 80’s, stages of life that Tinna is looking forward to enjoying and living through for herself, and that she now realizes, if her son becomes diabetic, he will likely never experience.

            Even worse, Brady’s diabetic trajectory into his 30’s, 40’s and 50’s will be years lived while enduring increasingly limited physical stamina and ability. He’ll experience low energy and diminished brain function, years spent in an expanding body at high and ever-increasing risk of heart attack, stroke, cancer, liver and kidney failure, of neuropathy worsening over time into limb amputations, declining vision leading to blindness, erectile dysfunction, brain fog, anxiety, depression and dementia.

            Eventually diabetes reduces kidney function to the point where dialysis becomes imperative for survival, but surprisingly few diabetics need that treatment — just those who actually live that long.

            In the 1960s, type 2 diabetes was rare, effecting 1 out of 100 people. The American Heart Association’s (AHA) 2019 update of its Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics reports 26 million American adults have been diagnosed with diabetes. 26 million is 9.8% of the population — nearly one in ten adult Americans.6

            The AHA estimates that an additional 9.4 million, or 3.7%, of American adults have diabetes that has yet to be diagnosed.7 Diabetes then, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed, affects 13.1% of American adults. 1 out of every 8 of us has it. As of 2015, 1.5 million Americans are being diagnosed with diabetes every year.8

            These are the numbers of an epidemic.

            Our situation is actually even more dire. The same report notes that in addition, “about 91.8 million, or 37.6% of American adults have pre-diabetes.”9 That means half of all Americans — of all ages — have been diagnosed with diabetes, have diabetes and don’t realize it, or are pre-diabetic.

Up until fairly recently, the medical term was “adult-onset diabetes.” This condition has now been renamed “type 2 diabetes” because it is affecting so many children, and at younger and younger ages.

Obesity leads to diabetes.

Childhood obesity rates have tripled in the U.S. since 1980. As of October 2017, the childhood obesity rate nationwide was 18.5%. The rate rises as children get older: 13.9% of 2 to 5-year-olds are obese as are 18.4% of all 6 to 11-year-olds. For 12 to 19-year-olds, 20.6% are obese.10 Obesity rates are rising faster in children than adults.

Obesity in adolescence is significantly associated with severe obesity in adulthood along with the increased likelihood of life-threatening maladies.11 If you are obese as a child it is five times more likely you will be obese as an adult.12 70% of Americans are now overweight or obese.13

            Over 25% of our children have some kind of chronic health problem. Over 50% of all Americans do. Four million deaths are attributed solely to obesity each year.

            Tinna and John love their four sons. They have parented Brady; taken care of him, raised him and are so proud of the outstanding young man he is becoming. He’s a straight-A, honor roll student. He’s the one who makes sure everyone else is okay. He is more than they ever hoped for. And now the family pediatrician tells her that the food they have been providing for their children is harming them?! Tinna’s mad at herself and questions rush to her mind. Questions like, “How is this happening to our son?” “Why is this happening to our son?” “Why didn’t I think to ask more about that while I was right there?” And as she and her son pull into their driveway, “What the heck?!”

            Doctors are delivering diagnoses like Brady’s to increasing numbers of children and their parents. Millions of us aren’t doing so well — despite our education, our medical and technological advances, all the skillsets and tools at our disposal…

We have the knowledge. We lack the understanding.

Diabetes is a gateway.

Diabetes is the gateway to heart disease.

            Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States. And the biggest risk factor for heart disease aside from smoking is pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.14 Should Brady become diabetic, the odds that he will have a heart attack become much greater. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), “adults with diabetes are 2 to 4 times more likely to die from heart disease than adults without diabetes.”15 In fact, heart disease is the number one cause of death for diabetics.

            AHA 2019 statistics show that 800,000 Americans die each year from heart disease, stroke and other cardiovascular illnesses. That’s 1 out of every 3 deaths. 48% of American adults — 121.5 million people— are living with coronary heart disease, heart failure, high blood pressure or the after-effects of stroke.16 On average, one American has a heart attack every 34 seconds.

            47% of all Americans have at least one of 3 key risk factors for heart disease: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or they are a smoker according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).17 As a 4th risk factor, diabetes ranks second among these.

            45.6% of American adults have high blood pressure (based on the new thresholds of 130/80).18 And nearly half of them do not have it under control. 77% of people who experience their first stroke had high blood pressure at the time. Strokes kill over 132,000 Americans a year, which means they are the 5th leading cause of death. They can happen at any age. Strokes are a leading cause of serious long-term disability in the U.S.19, making them particularly nasty.

            Joel Fuhrman, M.D., specializes in preventing and reversing disease through nutritional and natural methods. In his compelling book Fast Food Genocide, the connection between a poor diet heavy in fried foods, fast food, and processed foods and the increased risk of disease is evident: “The epidemic of strokes, occurring at younger and younger ages, has sparked an entire industry of health care facilities that cater to impaired young people who have destroyed large sections of their brains with fast food.”20

Diabetes is also a gateway to cancer.

            In 1960, 1 in 80 Americans could expect to get cancer. Today cancer strikes 1 out of 2 of us. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be 1,762,450 new cancer cases in the United States in 2019 and 606,880 cancer deaths.21  A CDC study reveals that over the past decade overweight and obesity-related cancers constitute 40% of all new cancer cases.22

            Mark Hyman, M.D., the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, founder of The UltraWellness Center and bestselling author of 14 books writes, “We know certain things for sure. Insulin resistance or pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes dramatically increases the risk of most common cancers (prostate, breast, colon, pancreas, liver, etc.). We also know that inflammation increases cancer risk.”23

Studies have shown that insulin resistance (the hallmark of type 2 diabetes) causes the body to produce increased amounts of insulin in order to overcome the opposition to it. This leads to elevated insulin levels, which induces other growth factors. Together insulin and these growth factors act on and promote the growth of cancer cells increasing the risk of developing cancer in diabetics.24

Avoiding or reversing diabetes reduces your risk of cancer. And what you eat plays the central role in this. The American Cancer Society states, “A substantial proportion of cancers could be prevented including” the 18% caused by a combination of excess body weight, physical inactivity, excess alcohol consumption, and poor nutrition.25

Diabetes is a gateway to loss of brain function.

            This affects adults through Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and our youth as well, via ADHD and conditions on the autism spectrum.

Just as adult-onset diabetes was renamed type 2 diabetes in order to be more name-appropriate in our contemporary era, it is now becoming increasingly common in medical circles to refer to Alzheimer’s disease and other brain-degenerative conditions as… type 3 diabetes.

Alzheimer’s disease affected 5.4 million people in the United States in 2018, a number that is projected to nearly triple by 2050.26

Up until recently, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia were diagnosed predominantly in elderly patients, and your genetics combined with an aging body were thought to be key contributing factors. It is now understood that these diseases are progressive and begin much earlier in life.

            Recent research, including a report with this heady title, Midlife Adiposity Predicts Earlier Onset of Alzheimer’s Dementia, Neuropathology and Presymptomatic Cerebral Amyloid Accumulation, has shown that people who have a higher BMI at age 50 have a “robust association” with both the earlier onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and a greater severity of Alzheimer’s neuropathology as it develops in them.27 Other research by Samantha Budd Haeberlein, Ph.D., and Biogen substantiates this, revealing that proteins begin building up and forming plaque in the brain for decades before a person demonstrates memory loss.28 A pervasive correlation has been established between obesity, diabetes and the onset of these cognitive diseases.

            Behavioral symptoms of a diseased brain include anxiety, anger and depression. So not only are you losing your mind, but you’re not too happy about it either.

            Dr. Fuhrman realizes that this deterioration of the brain begins sooner in life, much sooner, during childhood when a child’s brain is developing, earlier still as a baby, even earlier in the womb… “It’s not just children that are becoming obese, it’s that the American diet reduces intelligence in your child, it interferes with your child’s ability to concentrate in school. We’re not just talking about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD], which is linked to that. Even the diet a mother eats in her pregnancy affects whether her child gets autism or not, whether her child gets childhood cancer. Eating luncheon meats and high-nitrated foods, and a lot of processed foods and a low level of phytochemicals in her diet are linked to having a child with an autoimmune condition or childhood cancer. And then your child doesn’t do well in school. Their intelligence is based on how properly they are fed and how properly the mother ate.

“Parents should be wary because even before your kids become overweight, even before they become diabetic, feeding them these high glycemic, greasy, fried fast foods and processed foods is destructive to their potential, to their brain function, to their being able to realize the American Dream, and be economically and emotionally successful in life.”29

Diabetes is also a gateway to liver disease, kidney and renal failure.

            Your blood circulation is impaired when high levels of sugars in your bloodstream react with and damage molecules of the cells lining your blood vessels. Diabetes encourages inflammation and weakens your body’s immune system. As your blood circulation is impaired, so is your body’s ability to cleanse and heal itself. This impacts not just a specific organ such as your heart, liver, or your brain, but the entirety of your circulatory system leading to a myriad of complications. These include erectile dysfunction, retinopathy, which is impaired vision including glaucoma that can progress to blindness, and neuropathy which is damage to your nerves, a condition that often begins as a loss of sensation or a tingling in your fingers and toes and worsens over time until amputations become necessary.

Over the entire span of human evolution, today is a tremendous time to be alive, to enjoy life, to take in every wonderful moment of an elongated optimized lifespan.

            Our science and technology have broadened our knowledge and understanding of this world and everything in it, and we are especially well equipped in the field of medicine with our tools and skillsets. In just the past two centuries, humankind has experienced the virtual eradication of polio, smallpox and tuberculosis. Malaria may soon join that list. As a civilization, we invest significant resources, energy and effort into scientific research and discovery resulting in innumerable medical advances, including antibiotics, vaccines, and surgical procedures that have demonstrably increased our quality of life, our potential and our longevity.

            Until now.

            Our next generation’s life expectancy will decline. Our children, on average, will not live as long as we do.

Dr. Goudelock understood the path that Brady was on and that, over several years, the teenager was unable to correct it. This pediatrician was highly skilled and trained as a doctor but not as a nutritionist — so he made Brady and his mother aware of the hazard, and he provided a resource. He referred Brady to New Impact and a path to healing.

            Brady and his mother would soon come to understand the benefits of preparing their own meals, eating whole foods and a plant-based diet.

            This is the cure, and the solution. Poor nutrition is the fundamental, overriding reason for our current disease pandemic.

            It’s not a secret virus from Russia or some weird gas secreting up from middle earth. Aliens are not weakening us and thinning us out prior to landing.

            It’s all about the food…

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

__________________________________________________

1 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2016 – Individual Charts and Tables, Keyword: Overweight/obesity, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/contents2016.htm

2 There is a more accurate calculation of Body Fat based on Body Mass Index, which has been validated and shown to be precise. The relationship between BMI and Body Fat percentage is curvilinear, and the conversion depends on sex and age.

In adults the prediction formula is:

BF% = 1.20 x BMI + 0.23 x age - 10.8 x sex - 5.4

In children the BF% could be predicted by the formula:

BF% = 1.51 x BMI - 0.70 x age - 3.6 x sex + 1.4

Where the variable for sex is:  males = 1, females = 0 

Deurenberg P, Weststrate JA, Seidell JC.  Body Mass Index as a Measure of Body Fatness: Age- and Sex-specific Prediction Formulas. Br J Nutr. 1991 Mar;65(2):105-14.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2043597

Thank you Sven Walderich.

3 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

4 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

5 Maria I. Constantino, L Molyneaux, F Limacher-Gisler, et al.  Long-term Complications and Mortality in Young-onset Diabetes: Type 2 Diabetes is More Hazardous and Lethal than Type 1 Diabetes, Diabetes Care, Dec. 2013, 36(12):3863-9. doi: 10.2337/dc12-2455. Epub 2013 Jul 11.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23846814

6 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659  

7 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659  

8 American Diabetes Association, Statistics About Diabetes, Mar. 22, 2018,  http://www.diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/

9 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659    

10 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659  

The State of Childhood Obesity, Childhood Obesity Trends, The State of Obesity, a collaborative project of the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Oct., 2017  https://stateofobesity.org/childhood/

11 The NS, Suchindran C, North KE, et al.  Association of Adolescent Obesity with Risk of Severe Obesity in Adulthood, JAMA, Nov. 10, 2010, 304(18):2042-7. doi: 10.1001/jama.2010.1635.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21063014

12 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

13 Overweight & Obesity Statistics, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Aug. 2017  https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statistics/overweight-obesity

14 Pencina, Michael J., Navar AM, Wojdyla D, et al., Quantifying Importance of Major Risk Factors for Coronary Heart Disease. Circulation, Mar. 26, 2019,  139.13 (2019): 1603-1611.) doi: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.117.031855. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30586759

15 American Heart Association, Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes, Heart.org, https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/diabetes/why-diabetes-matters/cardiovascular-disease--diabetes

16 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

17 National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, Heart Disease Facts, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,  Nov. 28, 2017  https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm

18 Emelia J. Benjamin, Paul Muntner, Alvaro Alonso, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics — 2019 Update: A report from the American Heart Association.  AHA Journals Circulation. Vol. 139, No. 10, Jan. 31, 2019,  https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000659

19 Benjamin EJ, Blaha MJ, Chiuve SE, et al.  Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics 2017 At-a-Glance, A report from the American Heart Association.  Jan. 25, 2017  Circulation. doi: 10.1161/CIR.0000000000000485   https://healthmetrics.heart.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Heart-Disease-and-Stroke-Statistics-2017-ucm_491265.pdf

20 Joel Fuhrman, M.D.   Fast Food Genocide,  New York, New York: Harper Collins, 2017  pg. 32. 

21 Cancer Facts & Figures 2019, The American Cancer Society, 2019 https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2019.html

22 C. Brooke Steele, Cheryll C. Thomas, S. Jane Henley, et al.  Vital Signs: Trends in Incidence of Cancers Associated with Overweight and Obesity – United States, 2005 – 2014, MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2017;66:1052-1058 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oct. 3, 2017   https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6639e1.htm

23 Mark Hyman, M.D.  Eat Fat, Get Thin, New York, New York: Little, Brown and Co., Hachette Book Group, 2016  pg. 167

24 Emily J. Gallagher, Derek LeRoith, Minireview: IGF, Insulin, and Cancer, Endocrinology, Vol 152, Issue 7, Jul. 1, 2011, Pgs. 2546–2551,https://doi.org/10.1210/en.2011-0231   https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/152/7/2546/2457127

Thank you Sven Walderich.

25 American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures 2019. Atlanta: American Cancer Society; 2019. https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2019/cancer-facts-and-figures-2019.pdf

26 Liesi E. Hebert, Jennife Weuve, Paul A. Scherr, Denis A. Evans, Alzheimer Disease in the United States (2010-2050) Estimated Using the 2010 Census, American Academy of Neurology, US National Library of Medicine, May 7, 2013 Neurology. 2013 May 7; 80(19): 1778–1783.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3719424/

27 Yi-Fang Chuang, Yang An, Murat Bilgel, et al.  Midlife Adiposity Predicts Earlier Onset of Alzheimer’s Dementia, Neuropathology and Presymptomatic Cerebral Amyloid Accumulation, Mol Psychiatry. Jul, 2016 21(7): 910-915.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5811225/

28 Samantha Budd Haeberlein, Why This Scientist is Hopeful a Cure to Alzheimer’s Disease Isn’t Far Off, Time Magazine, Jan. 4, 2018,  http://time.com/5087364/scientist-hopeful-cure-to-alzheimers-disease-isnt-far-off/

29 Joel Fuhrman, M.D. as stated in iThrive! Rising From the Depths of Diabetes & Obesity, 9 part documentary series, Executive Producers: Jonathan Hunsaker, Jonathan McMahon, Michael Skye, 2017, iThrive Publishing LLC,  https://go.ithriveseries.com/

Earl ‘the Worm’ plays “an important part in the history of the world.” Charles Darwin, the Sir Charles Darwin, said so.

BOOK EXCERPT

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.

Meet Earl “the Worm.”

 Earl “the Worm”

If someone was about to tell you an interesting story about someone they’d heard of, this guy named Earl who was known around town as Earl “the Worm,” you might assume the nickname referred to a character flaw, that he’s shifty, slippery. Perhaps Earl the Worm plays fast and loose in his relationships with friends and lovers; at best he’s undependable, worst, he’s untrustworthy, even dishonorable.

            Earl the Worm is real. He is shifty and slippery but with regard to how he goes about living his life, he’s in no way flakey. His character is honorable, tried and true. He hails from a noble clan. Earl, as well as his ancestors, play “an important part in the history of the world.” Charles Darwin, the Sir Charles Darwin, said so.

Charles Darwin wrote this compliment about Earl’s forebears in 1881: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.”1

            Unlike Pat the Pooper, Earl the Worm is a soil denizen that you can see with your naked eye. He is a little camera shy.

2

             One of the first things a farmer looks for and hopes to see when he or she unearths a section of their soil is whether Earl and of some of his friends are there. It’s a good sign if they are.

Worms create holes in the soil and with their movement down these tunnels, they force air in, aerating the soil. Their burrowing loosens the soil, helping moisture penetrate and roots to grow. They significantly increase both soil aeration and water-holding capacity.3 Micro-organisms flourish in these areas as well. Worms also create worm castings — worm poop — which is very good fertilizer.

How does Earl do it? How does he advance through the soil? With the topsoil in this photograph of Earl, I get it — he just moves it around a bit and bores down through gaps, but how does he get through dense compacted soil? Press your pinky against it and your pinky’s going nowhere. And Earl has no teeth. Even if he did and his mouth turned into this wild rototiller, where would all the broken bits of soil go? Under the ground, he can’t cast anything aside as there is no aside, just the tunnel hole he’s making for his body…

            And it’s just darkness down there. No space, no light… How does he know where he’s going? And what for? What’s he up to? Do the microbes guide him? Are they his food source as he “processes” the soil?

            Charles Darwin wrote that Earl is one of the most important creatures on our planet. What was it about Earl’s forebears that brought Mr. Darwin to this conclusion?

Earl feeds on both living and dead organic matter. He’s a surprisingly advanced little creature. In the photo, Earl is at least one year old. Earthworms are fully grown at one year and live up to eight years. His digestive system runs the length of his body, he has a circulatory system that circulates blood, and a nervous system that enables him to feel and react to pain. Earthworms don’t have lungs, so they respire through their skin. Earl doesn’t have eyes but he does have photosensitive cells that enable him to perceive light.

            Tonight, Earl travels up to ground level. Night-time is when earthworms are most active. Above ground, their bodies glisten in the moonlight because they are covered in a lubricating mucus they secrete.

            They’ll eat bits of plants or leaves, or they will search for a mate. Earthworms are hermaphrodites — each one has both male and female sex organs. They have two sex pheromones, Attractin and Temptin, social greeting cards, that facilitate things.4 

            Tonight after Earl eats, he attaches his mouth onto and drags bits of leaves, grass or seeds down into his wormhole and along a tunnel several feet long into his permanent burrow. Earthworms are good crop-field weeders as they like to consume weed seeds. Once home in his burrow, he’ll further shred the leaf, eating some of it and storing the rest, creating a future food source because… his burrow contains a cocoon.

            After earthworms mate a ring slowly forms around a section of the body of one of them. As it separates away from the worm, the worm inserts its own eggs as well as the sperm from the other worm into it. It will seal and become a cocoon, and after a time, baby worms will emerge. Earl wants his burrow well stocked with food sources awaiting the arrival of the little ones.

            So, how does Earl excavate the tunnel down to a burrow and then dig out the burrow itself? It is hard to see but his glistening smooth skin is laced with tiny S-shaped hairs called setae that Earl uses to anchor himself as he moves and burrows. The excavation takes some time, but earthworms expand crevices with force, applying 10 times their body weight.5 Slowly, steadfastly, diligently, worms create their network of wormholes and their burrows.

            When worms poop, the casts they excrete consist of soil along with digested plant material. Compared to the surrounding six inches of soil, worm castings are five times richer in available nitrogen, seven times richer in available phosphates, eleven times richer in available potassium, and contain three times more exchangeable magnesium.6 Even more importantly, all these digested and excreted nutrients and minerals are now in the exact forms plants can use. In this manner, earthworms break down larger pieces of organic matter and convert it to humus increasing the soil’s fertility.

            And these guys are busy. Earl rivals Pat the Pooper in output - only he’s at scale: In Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils, authors Nyle C. Brady and Ray R. Weil observe, “In conditions where humus is plentiful, the weight of casts produced may be greater than ten pounds per worm per year.”7 Vandana Shiva notes that earthworm castings “can amount to up to 39.5 tons per acre per year.”8…!

            Regenerative farmers do not need to add fertilizers. They have Earl and his brethren and a diverse sufficient host of microorganisms doing that for them.

            The consistent presence of organic matter on the soil surface provides a food source for earthworms, cools soil temperature and increases soil moisture, building an environment in which they can thrive.

Earl the Worm had spent most of the night eating weed seeds and moving others in multiple trips down the wormhole and into his burrow. By dawn, tired, sated, he decided to call it a night. He nestled in on a tiny, rich bed of leaf and grass bits alongside his unbroken cocoon. His unborn young were developing fine, he just knew. The temperature of the soil would remain cool for all of them, thanks to the composting crop residue covering the surface above ground.

            Earl was sleeping when it happened.

            A noise, a vibration… Not coming from the cocoon — his little ones were not yet ready to emerge. Louder, the earth being struck, shaking. Louder still. Really loud. And all in an instant, darkness was struck through with searing light and his world fell in.

            He cried out with a gurgling noise, an earthworm’s fearful response, as the plow blade sliced through his burrow obliterating everything. Earl was sliced in two and his blood and life fluids drained quickly as his head and the un-severed section of his body was rocketed up through exploding disintegrating soil, into glaring sunlight and open air. He fell atop a mass of clots of severed overturned ground. Earl died on broken soil in searing sun, while the sound and the fury and the vibration of the plow, its blades, and its engine were still nearby, before the dust finished settling about him.

The plow. Time honored, it remains a venerated symbol of the tradition of farming. The Romans during the centuries of their Empire, as well as the Egyptians along the once fertile banks of the Nile River loved to plow, as did the ascendant peoples throughout The Fertile Crescent, Mesopotamia — the “cradle of civilization.” But over relatively short periods of time, they ended up destroying their topsoil. The warning spoken in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland, “Dead men tell no tales…” comes to mind as I reread David R. Montgomery’s observation: “Societies that don’t take care of their soil do not last.” 

            Regenerative farmers understand that plowing is one of the most harmful things you can do to your soil…

When you ask Ray Archuleta about tillage, he doesn’t mince words. Ray has over 30 years of experience as a Soil Conservationist, Water Quality Specialist and Conservation Agronomist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service. He operates his own 150-acre farm in Missouri and has a national reputation teaching agroecology principles. Ray told me in no uncertain terms, “Tillage is the most destructive thing we do in modern agriculture. You are destroying the soil and spreading the weeds everywhere.”

And Ray is only getting started. Once tilled, “The soil begins to cannibalize itself to heal itself. Tilling destroys the biotic glues and compacts the soil so it no longer can absorb the water. The soils have less water capacity, they become less fungal dominant. The soil balance is thrown off with an excessive growth of bacteria. The soil becomes leaky. It cannot hold on to the calcium or the nutrients.” Worse still, tilled soil becomes addicted to synthetic inputs. And Ray doesn’t stop there. The final consequence is seismically worse: “Our soil nutrient density has been cut by 50%, so the nutrients in the crops are 50% less because the soil has been destroyed. This connects to our cancers.” 

Ray even has an apt phrase for this. He calls it “Till-icide.” 

            Earl and his brethren were already plowing this field. Their lattices of wormholes and tunnels, collectively miles in length throughout the field, were aerating and loosening the soil, and enabling it to better trap water. The worms added tens of thousands of pounds of nutrients and fertilizer in the form of their castings while protecting the all-important mitochondria. His death, his murder, was so unnecessary.

            Plowing rips apart keystone creatures like Earl. As it breaks up the soil surface, it also breaks up the soil’s structure, what Kristin Ohlson describes as, “the internal architecture of sand and silt and clay created over the decades by earthworms and other organisms that allowed air, water, and nutrients to circulate.”9

No less significantly, plowing tears apart the soil’s internet.

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved.

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

__________________________________________________

1 Presented in the Wikipedia page on Earthworm, this Charles Darwin quote is from The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, Charles Darwin, 1881  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2355

2 © Maryna Pleshkun/Shutterstock

3 Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books,  2016. pg. 19  

4 Novo M, Riesgo A, Fernández-Guerra A, Giribet G (2013). "Pheromone evolution, reproductive genes, and comparative transcriptomics in mediterranean earthworms (annelida, oligochaeta, hormogastridae)". Mol. Biol. Evol. 30 (7): 1614–29. doi:10.1093/molbev/mst074. PMID 23596327.

5 Earthworm description sourced in part from Wikipedia, Earthworm section, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthworm

6 Nyle C. Brady, Ray R. Weil, Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils (3rd Edition). Pearson   ISBN 978-0-13-501433-2

7 Nyle C. Brady, Ray R. Weil, Elements of the Nature and Properties of Soils (3rd Edition). Pearson   ISBN 978-0-13-501433-2

8 Vandana Shiva. Who Really Feeds The World?. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books,  2016. pgs. 21-22  

9 Kristin Ohlson. The Soil Will Save Us. New York, New York: Rodale, 2014. pg. 9

"There was a moment for me, I was eighteen, nineteen, just a kid really."

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter, and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of the global warming climate crisis which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Along the way there are exquisite creatures, human and non-human. The challenges they face reveal the immensity of the threat facing each one of us — and its urgency.

Meet Marlon Foster.

Marlon Foster 

Marlon Foster lies on his back in the grass, staring up at the clouds. He is unable to rise. This hurts as much as any loss he has ever suffered. More. This…

“There was a moment for me, I was eighteen, nineteen, just a kid really. My best friend had just been shot to death.”

Marlon regards the passing clouds. “We’d do everything together. Pierre and I sang together in the church choir. On the football team he was the quarterback, I was the wide receiver. In track running the 4 by 400, I’d run the first leg and he was always the one I’d hand the baton to. I was this entrepreneurial kid. I was the kid with the lemonade stand. I had an uncle who worked at a make-up distributor so in junior high they called me the ‘Avon lady’ because I was selling make-up to the girls. But he was the really smart, really savvy one.

            “I see so many kids now who are quick on their feet, smart, sharp witted and it’s all about taking those natural gifts and directing them in the right way. My best friend was that to the nth degree. No telling how successful in business he could have been.

“The middle school we went to, Bellevue, had a mix of kids, middle class and poor. Kids would check one another. One of my first days I sat down at a table and the kids started checking each other over who stayed in a one story versus a two-story house. So, I got up and kinda slipped away before they asked me. So, we figured a way. We had this Izod shirt. Every day we would take the emblem off that shirt and sew it on another shirt for another one of us to wear. It was Pierre’s idea to also sew the Izod collar tag in the back. People would call you on your Izod shirt — you know kids’ll grab your collar and see if you got this fake thing going on by looking in the back. Just taking that much time and attention, trying to be ingenious just to fit in with these preppy kids.

“For our prom, kids have these limousines going on. Pierre’s mom worked at a funeral home, so we got their limousine to use that night. I remember, my best friend and I doing senior prom with our dates in the limo from the funeral home…

“Laying in the grass, on my back, looking up at the clouds. My best friend was gone… I was having thoughts like ‘I don’t even want to be here any longer myself,’ I was so distraught. And I turned my head to the side and there was a little blade of grass, right by my eye, just blowing in the wind. And there was something in that moment, this little thin blade of grass… It has life in it. I just began to value life on a whole different level.”

And Marlon rose. He stood up with a resolve, “I want my life to honor his.”

Today Marlon Foster walks amidst six and seven-foot tall sunflowers, their glowing yellow crowns of petals vivid in morning sun. Flourishing out of raised long beds, green onions, Swiss chard, Traviata eggplant, bell peppers, habaneros, jalapeños, and red tie chilis surround us. Deeply evocative scents — of the plants, of their blossoms and of the fertile soil — rise together on the humid air in this beautiful place. Summer is just arriving, which means that also in-season are three kinds of tomatoes - sun golds, black cherries, and heirloom Cherokee purples.

            Marlon is now 46, a handsome man, well groomed, dressed sharply today in pressed long sleeve shirt and tie. He regards the raised beds and smiles proudly. These vegetables growing from the dark rich soil, are even more robust than last year’s and he anticipates record yields. Ahead of us, several greenhouses are staggered, set amidst more long rectangular raised plant beds on this acre of the farm. We walk down the next row, shifting alongside garlic, cucumbers, Clemson spineless okra, emerald tomatillos, beets and carrots. I do see one hundred shades of green. Herbs make their appearance - sage, thyme, basil, dill, cilantro.

            This is Green Leaf Learning Farm, an urban farm in South Memphis, Tennessee.

            We are standing amidst some of the most nutritious food on this planet. Nothing on this farm will worsen diabetes, not one plant growing here will harm your heart or your circulation or put you at greater risk of cancer, neuropathy or dementia. Just the opposite. All of the food growing within the waist-high green border fences of Green Leaf Learning Farm will nurture and sustain everyone who eats it, improving their health, vitality, and mental clarity. These vegetables and fruits enrich lives.

            Just outside the fence, it changes.

            We also happen to be standing in an American food desert: 38126, the poorest urban zip code in the entire United States. The unemployment rate is high, the median household income well below poverty level. There is not one single supermarket or grocery store within the entire community.

Marlon was born and raised in this neighborhood. When he graduated from the local college he had career opportunities elsewhere but he chose to stay. A compassionate activism became a vision and he built all of this. “I look at our farm and our community center, its value set, my compassion that developed despite all this death of humans around me — I can trace it all back to that blade of grass.”

            Forty people now work with Marlon. Green Leaf Learning Farm’s produce is in high demand. They sell out most of what they take to the farmer’s markets. His KQ-90 boxes nourish neighborhood families and contain other incentives to healthy lifestyle choices, and the interest in home-cooked meals, plant strong meals and healthy eating is slowly returning to this community, this food desert. Counselors at Knowledge Quest, the community center he started,  are saving lives and instilling hope.

            For Marlon, it’s a natural progression. It’s just the way to do things.

Wendell Berry distinguishes livelihood as a vocation, as one’s calling. “For all persons there are specific kinds of work to which they are summoned by God or by their natural gifts or talents. The kind of work may be cabinet-making or music-making, cooking or forestry, medicine or mechanics, science or law or philosophy or farming… People who are doing the work they are called to do are happy doing it. For them there is no distinction between work and pleasure. A ‘job,’ by contrast, is understood as any work whatever that one can earn money by doing.”1

            There is a profound, soul-fulfilling essential to livelihood. It is in part subconscious: discovering the calling that feeds and nourishes your soul, the reason why you are on this path, the inner certainty that this is the endeavor, the work, the life-labor that you are here, in this life, to engage in and do.

            In Renewing Husbandry, an essay published in 2018, Wendell Berry observes that husbandry resides at the core of livelihood. The word ‘husbandry’ is the name of a connection… To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve.” While husbandry is a connection to a household, “Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals — obviously because of the importance of these things to the household… Husbandry is the name of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.”2

Marlon took me to the house where he grew up. His grandparents lived with them making theirs a three generational family, “so you had their wisdom and presence while parents worked.” Near the intersection of Phillips Place and Whitford Place, Marlon pointed to the houses of his neighbors. “These two streets, I can still take you to most of these houses now, not only to visit and sit down but to have something to eat and drink. You could even lay down on the couch. It’s that kind of close-knit community.”

            Marlon’s old house appears narrow facing the street, but it goes back a-ways. It has five bedrooms and two bathrooms. “My grandfather, Robert Maddrie, had a high school diploma which was a big thing at the time, and he worked and retired. My grandmother, Doris Maddrie, she left Mississippi because you could only get to eighth grade in Mississippi in her day. They wouldn’t let a black child go higher. She worked at the packing house in Memphis, which was King Cotton. We ate Sunday dinner together every week. Grandfather would always put on a jacket for that dinner. Grandma Doris was the matriarch.

            “At church they’d call our home ‘hotel happiness’ because of the spirit of hospitality. I’d come home and there would be one of the musicians from the church. ‘Oh, you living with us now?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Ok.’ And it was just a thing. People would be having a hard time and need someplace to stay, and my grandmother would have them over. My Aunt and her boyfriend who owned a business came and lived with us when their business did bad – and one of their workers did too.

“People would stay with us a month, three months, six months, and the hospitality was such that that person would get their own room. They’d come with nothin’ but their clothes and a television, and now they’d have a bed and a room. I’d come home and my bedroom would be occupied by somebody. We’d have to double up, make adjustments in other parts of the house.

“As a kid you’d come home and that would be a norm. It was all communal and love and respect. In-laws in my family, in African-American families, are held in highest regard. They are called sons and daughters. Always valued. Loyalty, service, and family hospitality. We had food so we’d share food, we’d feed neighbors who were going through a tough time out of our refrigerator.

“When we had enough stuff, we’d always share. And it was anything. My Grandmother Doris had this thing about ‘You better not give away anything that you did not like or was not nice.’ You didn’t give away a sock with a hole in it or a raggedy shirt with bleach stains. You had to give away nice stuff. She used to say about charity that you always give away good stuff, the stuff that if you saw it, you’d want to have.”

Marlon operates the community centers, the farm, and the classrooms in the same manner. “I like having premium experiences in food and technology, and engaging people in one of the most under-resourced communities with that. I like bringing those two extremes together. We are not just a farm, but a USDA certified Organic farm. We grow the healthiest possible food. When you visit our classrooms, you’ll see kids learning in an iMac environment; when you visit our theater and our performance stage, you’ll see it’s the same stage like the premium one over in the Memphis arts district. We will draw top chefs to our bistro and cooking school. The reality is that the people here are exceptional, they are worth the investment.

“What I do a direct confront to is the idea, ‘What’s good enough for those folks.’ You know what my grandmother would say about that. I love the thrill of building something new and creating something from nothing and challenging traditional structures like ‘What’s good enough for those in poverty?’ We don’t do poverty programs. The best way to eradicate poverty is to not treat it like poverty. The compassionate aspect of this is, why would I identify a person with the most challenging aspect of their life?

“In South Memphis you see these children. If you see an African-American child whose family is struggling in a lot of areas, through that lens it can elicit a certain response — but what if I can get you to see your kid in that kid? That’s a whole different response when that’s my child in that child.”

An essential component of The Great Healing is compassion for your community.

            The Great Healing will not be possible without honoring and pursuing livelihoods, and fostering a balanced, just, vibrant, and compassionate economy of our shires.

            Thomas Jefferson envisioned a democracy of small land owners, of farming families. Whether you are a landowner or not, a homeowner or not, we are each members of a community, the shire we live in. We are each stakeholders with an interest in the stewardship of our neighborhoods.

            John Thackara has journeyed into emerging bioregions the world over. In his book How to Thrive in the Next Economy he writes, “The respectful interdependence of people and living systems is coming back to life… A bioregion makes sense at many levels: practical, cultural, and ecological. By putting the health of the land and the people who live on it, at the center of the story, a bioregion frames the next economy, not the dying one we have now. Because its core value is stewardship, not perpetual growth, a bioregion turns the global system on its head. Rather than drive the land endlessly to yield more food or fiber per acre, production is determined by the health and carrying capacity of the land through time — a factor which is constantly monitored. Decisions are made by people who work the land and know it best… Growth is measured in terms of land, soil, and water getting healthier, and communities more resilient.”3

            As stakeholders, each one of us has an important role protecting and shepherding this evolution. This is compassionate activism for the community.

Marlon and I are walking through Green Leaf Learning Farm’s orchard. We are walking in-between pomegranate trees, persimmons, figs, muscadines, pawpaw trees, “the only native fruit tree in Tennessee,” pear and apple trees, and blueberry and blackberry bushes. For years, the woman who owns these deep lots that we are traversing has been asking for Marlon’s help to keep her grass trimmed. Marlon agreed if she would grant him permission to plant an orchard. While the fruit trees are a year or two away from producing, they will soon be harvesting blueberries and blackberries.

“If you’re going to build a community, the most essential asset is the human capital, the people, and amongst the people is the children. So, youth development was the practical starting point for me. Human development is the starting point for community development.”

            In elementary school all Alexandria, Marlon’s daughter, wanted to do was read. She would never stop reading. And she’s quiet and introverted so she got into trouble with her teachers, she was on the verge of not passing 4th grade and went through this whole bullying thing. They were all set to medicate her and put her in Special Ed. I said to my wife, ‘She needs a social adjustment, a Montessori program. The way she’s operating, that’s Montessori.’ So, through the help of a juiced friend, I got her in Montessori. It was the right place for her, and she was there for the rest of elementary school. Now we have her back in the public school with a thousand some kids and she’s performing honor roll.

“I thought to myself, ‘What about all the other children in the neighborhood just like my baby — smart, that have good potential, and they have the limitations of their learning style not being honored?’”

As a father, when Marlon helps out one of his children, he is incapable of not extending that feeling to the other children in his community. It’s as if it’s in his DNA. Marlon and the counselors at Knowledge Quest cultivate self-worth and instill hope that has been diminished or lost. They help people discover their path. They build and empower community.

            Our actions, like Marlon’s, can collectively have an immense impact. We can save mountains. Every dollar, every spending choice and decision you make, your attitude, your voice, your complacency — or lack thereof — it all matters.

            Heal yourself. Thrive. Find your balance, your strength, your truth. Enlist your voice, and your resolve.

For three years Marlon was a professional volunteer. He then applied for and got a United Way grant and started Knowledge Quest. Over a five year span he built out Knowledge Quest from a single room in public housing to the community center where it is now, married Sheila, had three children, and bought and renovated his two-story house, which is beautiful to look at now, but was on the demolition list when he purchased it. He also entered seminary, graduated with an Ecumenical Master of Divinity Degree, founded a church and began thinking about an urban farm.

            Memphis is like Marlon. The community of South Memphis will turn a new leaf. More and more people are realizing opportunity there. You can buy land for next to nothing. In the coming years, as more and more people are drawn into the neighborhood and rediscover it thanks in part perhaps to Marlon’s farm, bistro and community center, they may discover the opportunity there. Young people living in Midtown or Cooper-Young, where rents are high and the dream of buying property deferred, perhaps they’ll look south. This was once a prosperous neighborhood where black families lived side by side with white families as early as 1900 and for the following 60 years. Marlon is developing educational programs for the schools. He understands the essential value to a community of having good education available. As more and more residents of this community are empowered and leading healthier lives, hope blooms like the sunflowers on Marlon’s farm.

            It’s about livelihood. And community.

            Martin Luther King, Jr., had a dream. And his dream did not end in Memphis. Marlon Foster has one, too.

            And they’re not the only ones.

Excerpted from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, September 20, 2019. Visit thegreathealing.org

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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1 Wendell Berry, The Art of Loading Brush, Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2017 pgs. 78-79

2 Wendell Berry, Renewing Husbandry, Orion Magazine, June, 2018,   https://orionmagazine.org/article/renewing-husbandry/

3 John Thackara, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, New York, New York: Thames & Hudson, 2015 pg. 31

"As lookout, I can report one other thing with certainty.”

BOOK EXCERPT

In The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World, activist, author, screenwriter and feature filmmaker Stephen Erickson identifies our Arch-Villain, the main cause of global warming which now threatens to bring about the end of our Anthropocene Epoch — of us and virtually every multicellular life form. He also reveals our singular solution.

Five Compassions are our path to that solution.  

Look out 

I hope I was a good lookout on my watch.

1

            I wanted to introduce you to exquisite creatures and their stories. Immersed in our daily mob scenes, utilizing tools, skillsets, and talents uniquely our own, each one of us is an exquisite creature. I hope you fully realize that.

            I spotted a snake and I’ve alerted you. A Cape cobra directly ahead of us is set to strike. Each of you are now aware of the threat and its severity. We have to face our Cape cobra. Right now.

            Imagine how potent our collective power, rising, resolved and taking action together can be. Realize how much you can contribute to it, and will benefit from it.

            Now is the time.

            Joanna Macy writes in World as Lover, World as Self, that the task of “restoring our ravaged Earth… not only puts us in league with the stones and the beasts, but also in league with the beings of the future. All that we do to mend our planet is for their sake, too. Their chance to live and love our world depends in large measure on us and our uncertain efforts.”2

            As lookout, I can report one other thing with certainty:

            It’s all about compassion…

Excerpt from The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World by Stephen Erickson. Published by TGH Press, August 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Stephen Erickson. All rights reserved. 

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Stephen Erickson is an author and a dedicated environmental and animal activist for 30 years. He is also a screenwriter, feature filmmaker, and former Home Entertainment executive. He lives in Los Angeles and has 3 children. The Great Healing – Five Compassions That Can Save Our World is his first book.

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1 © Tratong/Shutterstock

2 Reprinted from World As Lover, World As Self (1991, 2007) by Joanna Macy with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org pg. 191