On Ecology and Going Back to the Land

Life begets life, making Earth livable. — Dr. Glen Barry

Grow your own food as you restore ecology

Not much new land is being made, yet land’s well-being is central to the well-being of human and all life. On land, in a miraculous act of biological emergence, plants and animals have naturally evolved and self-organized to form ecosystems and ultimately the biosphere. Yet existing land and its ecology have has been treated incautiously and with great malice for centuries.

Land ensconced in natural vegetation is the living membrane that encompasses Earth and mediates energy and material flows between air and water. Naturally evolved terrestrial ecosystems are a majestic miracle, provider of life, and humanity’s habitat home. Over countless eons pulsing lifeforms emerge and radiate creating the panoply of a living Earth.

Life begets life, making Earth livable.

The history of natural land destruction is largely synonymous with human settlements and agriculture. The disease of ecological colonialism radiated from Europe, utterly decimating land and its productive capacity globally. As the myth of a perpetual growth economy has been universally embraced; about 90% of Earth’s original old-growth forests have been pillaged, 50% of top soil has been lost, and about half of global land cover no longer remains in a natural condition.

The global ecological system has percolated from a state of human settlements enmeshed within a sea of life-giving natural ecosystems, to a sea of unnatural human endeavors surrounding islands of nature. Such ecological overshoot is not sustainable and this terrestrial ecosystem loss is collapsing our one shared biosphere.

Rarely has a species gone so rogue and utterly lost their place within the natural world.

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