Slow money
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Earthworms to the rescue
For truly innovative solutions to carbon emissions, we may need to stop looking up, and start looking down, says Woody Tasch
W
ild gyrations in the Dow. The national debt. The price of gold and oil. Retail sales.
Parts per million in the atmosphere. The number of Chinese cities that had their hottest day on record in August. The number of earthworms per acre in Boone County, Iowa. What? The number of earthworms
per acre in Boone County, Iowa? We’re used to looking up in the sky
when it comes to climate change, but not to looking down at the ground beneath our feet. Turns out, we’ve got lots of friends down there, working away on our behalf – that is, if we don’t kill them first. We of the Slow Money persuasion – thousands of investors and
entrepreneurs in the US who are working together to put money into local food systems and, through them, to support small organic farms, and through them, to put carbon back into the soil – are all about a radical kind of re-friending. Re-friending not only the earthworms, but re-friending too the too-many-trillions-to-count of bacteria, fungi and microscopic critters who inhabit and bring life to the soil. Awareness of the centrality of soil health is nothing new. Aristotle laid the foundation for the Humus Theory of plant nutrition; his student Theophrastus is often called “the father of botany”. The homo of homo sapiens is derived from the Latin humus, for living soil. Leonardo da Vinci observed:
“We know more about the movement of the celestial bodies than about the soil under foot.” Darwin spent his last years studying the role of earthworms in soil fertility. After WWI, Sir Albert Howard, perhaps the father of 20th- century organic agriculture, heralded the problems that would follow the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers by munitions factories looking for new post-war markets for nitrates: fertilizers offered farmers boosts in yield, but had deleterious effects on the health of micro-organisms and the processes of growth and decay that are vital to the preservation of humus. Me recently, the Worldwatch
Institute called soil erosion “the quiet crisis of the 21st-century”. And this July,
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ISSUE 04. SEPTEMBER 20
ISSUE 01. MAY 2011
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