It’s no secret that times are changing. Humans are reshaping the world, transgressing her boundaries, and causing potentially irreversible damage to life as we know it.

There is a lot of talk about climate change, and for good reason. The climate is becoming warmer and more volatile, and these changes can be traced directly back to human activity. You’re probably used to hearing people talking about the greenhouse effect as it pertains both to the carbon dioxide emissions of burning fossil fuels and the methane emissions from industrial animal agriculture. These gasses have been shown to trap heat in the atmosphere, hence leading to global warming. You may be concerned, or terrified, or somewhere in between. You may think it’s a bunch of alarmist hyperbole. Whatever your thoughts on climate change, odds are you’re somewhat wary of these discussions because you’ve been trained to see them as inherently political.

It’s easy to turn one’s head immediately to politics when confronting a problem of this scale. After all, what entity, if not a government, could do anything about something as cataclysmic as the breaking of the world?

Consciously or not, this is the foundational question that makes climate change a political issue in the first place.

What’s happened in much of the recent public discourse in The United States around climate is a conflation between an empirical description of what’s happening and an endorsement of any number of prospective government policies aimed at reducing emissions at all costs. Terms like “climate denier” and “climate nihilist” are often applied to people who don’t deny the human impact on climate so much as they reject a policy that immediately affects their way of life. A carbon tax, for example, would make gas more expensive, which is enough of a reason for some people to oppose it, by virtue of priority. I don’t know how many people actually believe that human-caused climate change is an outright hoax, but I’ve spent a lot of time touring the internet’s right-wing echo chambers, and can safely say that the overwhelming majority of what I’ve seen from those opposed to the likes of a green new deal is more a denial of government than a denial of science.

Even so, without proper awareness, the practice of tethering science to specific policies risks birthing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Call someone a climate nihilist for long enough and they might start manifesting it.

Secondly, all that’s not to vindicate the oil companies or the pundits and politicians on their payroll who all have a vested interest in downplaying the validity of climate science. I just want to point out that distrust in government efficacy does not translate isomorphically to distrust in the scientific method, and making this distinction is important, because the stakes are very high.

The truth is that no matter what the US government does, it won’t be nearly enough.

It turns out that greenhouse gas emissions and even climate change are only a fraction of the story that is planetary collapse. In fact, the Stockholm Resilience Center classifies climate change as one of nine planetary boundaries, the others being freshwater use, land-system change, biosphere integrity, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, biochemical flows, and introduction of novel entities. The crossing of any one of these is defined as a state of planetary collapse, and each of these parameters is as consequential as climate change.

Current estimates in 2022 say we’ve crossed between five and seven of these boundaries.

So what can we do? What sort of sweeping worldwide regime change would even make a dent in this?

To answer this, I turn to one of my favorite quotes. It comes from Andrew Breitbart, of the far-right Breitbart news. He said that “politics is downstream of culture,” and reasoned that if he changed the culture enough, the politicians would surely follow. This is why Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and much of the alt-right spend so much energy on the culture war. If you can rile up a base behind a shared cultural identity, you can create a formidable political coalition. The goals of the regeneration movement are quite different than the goals of the alt-right, but the tactic is real. Maybe we don’t have a green new deal because we simply do not have a culture that values the foundations of what we are, in the context of the web of life on earth.

Most people have no personal connection to the source of their wellbeing, which is part of why most people aren’t well. What I mean is that many people have lost their connection to the land on which they live. Western culture does not emphasize valuing a sense of ecological place. If I may ask, where does your water come from? How about your food? When and where was the wheat in the bun of your hamburger harvested? How many cows are ground up in there? Where did they live? What did they eat? What conditions let those tomatoes get so big?

If you had an answer for some or all of those questions, good for you. Some of them were softballs, but I think you get the point. Through no fault of our own, we’ve become entirely disconnected from what we are. We are animals.

The typical suburban lifestyle with a cookie-cutter house and a concrete backyard, and a job where you sit in a chair and stare at a screen all day is not normal. It’s actually super fucking weird.

Not only that, but this disconnection from place has led many of us to drift away from having a strong sense of localized community. We used to need the people in our immediate vicinity for the basic tasks required to sustain life, and now we don’t need to interact with our neighbors at all.

Of course it’s worth being grateful for the magical convenience of the twenty-first century, but in falling through so many levels of abstraction into this bizarre, contrived existence, many of us have lost sight of what it really means to be human.

There’s a weird assumption permeating western culture that humans are somehow not part of nature. We certainly are a unique animal in terms of how we impact our environment, but this assumption is wrong to its core. It only makes any sense in the narrow context of the concrete, light-up, noisy carnival of a civilization we’ve created for ourselves. Assuming that humans aren’t part of nature is just as silly as assuming that we are rational actors. Trust me, we’re not.

We’re supposed to be dirty. We’re supposed to kill all our food ourselves or pick it off a plant. We’re built to be moving around constantly, eating bugs and running through the thickets. More than anything we need a culture that values getting its hands in the dirt and planting trees. Not only that, we need to know which trees to plant where. We need a culture that understands the local watershed and how to protect it.

Californians should know that the water cycle is contingent on the evapotranspiration of plants, and that restoring their wetlands is imperative if they ever want to bring back the rain. They should also know that the longer they wait, the more likely it is that the sink faucet will stop working. Imagine that.

We definitely should not be pooping and peeing into clean water. Freshwater use is one of only two planetary boundaries that we for sure haven’t crossed, but we’re pooping and peeing our way there one piece of poop and one pot of pee at a time, every day. Wars will be fought over water, yet the pooping and peeing persists.

All this to say, let’s change the culture.

Of course there is always some role for public policy, and there are many dedicated people working on that, scoring small victories and pushing the needle. I’m not saying we don’t need those people, but in order to get another Montreal Protocol, we’re gonna need a massive cultural shift in terms of our connectedness to land and place.

You might be freaking out a little, asking the question “what can I do?”

Obviously that depends on who you are. We’re all in this together, and we’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve got. I don’t know all that much, but I do know that the privilege of spending time outside with people I love has taught me that there is a lot worth saving. The best advice I can give is to get outside into nature. Look for the source of your water, and try to remember what you are.

Following a lead on Earth Regenerators, I embarked on a southbound pilgrimage to Barichara, Colombia, in an effort to collaborate with a ragtag team of people on regenerating a unique and diverse ecosystem. It’s a quaint town with cobblestone streets and colonial architecture comprised of fewer than ten thousand people. Located in the foothills of the northern Andes, Barichara exists in a rare ecosystem known as a tropical dry forest. Overlooking a vast river canyon with a proper cloud forest rising from the other side, there is something of an edge effect at play, and the biodiversity is truly staggering. The few remaining old growth forests have ceiba trees of gargantuan proportions and bamboo shoots of girths I didn’t know were possible. There are frogs that sound like laser beams and rhino beetles strong enough to push a plate across a table. There are butterflies in every color of the rainbow, and dragonflies so pink it’s kind of silly. Exotic fruits litter the ground and various bioluminescent arthropods light up the night. The birds are something else entirely. There’s one that I always hear singing perfect fifths, another that gets microtonal, and a third that straight up sounds like a guy whistling. I kept wondering where the guy was. Turns out it was a bird. In this place there are trees with cactus instead of leaves, and plants that look like someone took coral out of the ocean and stuck it in the ground. There are massive iguanas and stinkbugs that smell like the worst kind of shit. I’m told that one of the dogs killed an armadillo the other day. There’s also this hefty beast that looks like a cross between a spider and a scorpion. There are plenty of spiders and scorpions as well, some of which are bigger than I would appreciate. And all of that’s not even to get me started on the ants.

The ants… They are hormiga culona, a species of leafcutter ant. The Guane people native to this region have consumed the ants for hundreds of years, and the tradition of eating them lives on. The ants are significant, and they are everywhere. Their castles house millions, and their supply chains are wide-reaching and hyper efficient. They cut leaves to bring to fungus that they farm in underground chambers. They later eat the fungus, hence practicing a mutualistic form of agriculture. Look at that! Agriculture that isn’t causing massive disruptions to the planet.

Due in part to a local climate that is able to grow almost anything, a passionate community has begun to coalesce in Barichara around a shared interest in agroforestry, the basic premise of which stems from the simple observation that the foundation of agriculture is ecology. There is significant overlap between agroforestry and permaculture, though the latter is a much broader category, encompassing the likes of social order and architecture in addition to agriculture. Ernst Götsch is someone who is commonly pointed to as a notable educator in this space, but versions of agroforestry have been practiced by various indigenous cultures around the globe for thousands of years, and many people to this day are still quietly doing what might be called agroforestry without labeling it as such. The idea goes something like this: given knowledge of ecological systems, we humans can deliberately massage our environment into providing a diverse array of edible substances, eventually relying on natural ecological tendencies to perpetuate a sustainable food forest. One reason why this isn’t the agricultural norm in many places is that it takes time and requires a deep connection to and investment in land, over a multigenerational timescale.

There is a complex network of roles that plants play in an ecosystem, and there are many intelligent ways in which to construct a functional agroforestry system. That being said, it’s no easy task, especially in a globalized world, where certain invasive species can easily dominate an ecosystem. On top of that, there are cultural barriers in the way many people think about food. Trees are integral to any forest, and thus to food forest as well. Oak trees, for example, have been a source of food for thousands of years across the northern hemisphere. Have you ever eaten acorns?

You may have heard of the “three sisters,” corn, beans, and squash. For a variety of reasons, these crops thrive together, and there is a rich history in the Americas of native peoples leaning on the trinity for their main staples. I was helping a local woman in Barichara named Carolina on her farm the other day, and she pointed out that her neighbor was growing las tres hermanas. Reading up on the three sisters, corn monocropping starts to make less and less sense. It actually only makes sense because folks decided to start cramming corn into everything, and the structures of capitalism incentivized farmers to churn out the most profitable crop as much as possible. Because monocrops lack the holistic security and nutrition that a healthy ecosystem can provide, they tend to attract pests and degrade soil, thus demanding synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The downstream effects are concerning for a variety of reasons. It turns out that the solution was right here all along.

It feels bizarre in light of our history that prolific scientists of the western ilk are now looking to indigenous ways of knowing for solutions to the problems of today. It’s got me thinking a lot about justice in the context of land use. How does one reconcile a bloody and sociopathic history with a pressing need to collaborate on regenerating earth?

As is the case with much of the world, the Barichara region has undergone a great deal of trauma at the hands of colonialism, including a brutal degradation of indigenous traditions. On top of the lacerating genocide that took place here not all that long ago, the western tradition has not been keen on valuing indigenous knowledge until quite recently, and deliberate efforts to vanquish as much indigenous culture as possible into oblivion have not been unsuccessful. A cultural undervaluing of place-based knowledge has even infiltrated the local farming community surrounding Barichara, and many campesinos are abandoning their family farms in search of a more lucrative livelihood elsewhere.

To speak to one example of the lingering effects of colonialism as manifested through agriculture, many of the forests around Barichara were supplanted by pastures and livestock by the Spanish. In particular, invasive brachiaria grasses were brought over from Africa to feed large herds of cattle, and they still dominate much of the landscape. While durability and reproductive efficiency make the grasses useful for grazing cows, they command a great deal of space and can suffocate more vulnerable native populations. It doesn’t make logistical sense to eradicate the brachiaria, because cows have become a touchstone of the local economy, and the organic matter they provide can make for a serviceable mulch. The question then becomes: to what extent must one clear out invasive plants, and to what extent is it reasonable to let them be? Agroforestry is full of questions like this, and the only way to seek an answer is by truly getting to know the land and getting a sense for the broader ecosystem.

It’s a pivotal time to be in Barichara. Despite receiving a warm welcome across the board, I can’t help but notice a tragic undercurrent tainting the local atmosphere, expressed loosely through murmurings on the streets and longing eyes gazing out from open windows on the outskirts of town. Everyone here is watching in real time as this place rapidly transforms from a small, quiet town into a popular tourist destination, and I am woefully aware that my mere presence here is exacerbating this already divisive process. Local campesinos are routinely selling off their ancestral land and leaving town to make room for urbanite foreigners whose monetary wealth and lifestyle preferences are leading to higher prices and increasingly lavish infrastructure. It’s crystal clear to everyone paying attention that this transformation and the gentrification that accompanies it are completely inevitable, like a rising tide, and it does no good to demonize people for wanting to go to a beautiful place. The only villain here is the ghost of an unjust past. At the same time, it’s imperative that those of us who choose to come here are aware that we are inherently complicit in the transformation taking place, and that there is no upper bound on the amount of effort that we can and should put into cultivating a sensitivity to the ways in which we exist in this space.

The above statement actually applies everywhere, and this problem of rapid gentrification is by no means unique to Barichara. I would also argue that the cultural dichotomy has less to do with national identity than class status. In fact, the vast majority of tourism here is domestic, as Colombian travelers from Bucaramanga and Bogotá come and dump money on carefully curated tourist experiences, veering the local economy away from its ancient agrarian origins and into a fancy and hospitable network of restaurants and boutiques. A similar dynamic certainly exists in many places in the United States and elsewhere, and in some ways there is more of a cultural gap between a businessman from Bogotá and a campesino than there is between a Colombian and a Californian of similar class status. That being said, an increasing number of international travelers from developed countries are trickling in too, and given the history of colonialism and its racial underpinnings, that does have its own set of implications to consider.

Having existed in various places as an opportunistic tourist, I know what it’s like to come into a new place with a self-interested agenda and a lack of cultural sensitivity, taking advantage of the favorable exchange rates and not offering up much in return, not out of malice, just out of ignorance. I’ve been incredibly impressed with some of the efforts I’ve seen from other members of the international community here to pay attention to their surroundings and embrace the local language and customs, but I know from experience that it’s very easy to isolate oneself in a bubble of what’s comfortable and familiar. Without being aware of the space that one takes up, problems can emerge as travelers sequestered to their cozy fabricated echo-chambers start to feel entitled to the space they occupy regardless of the work they put into integrating into a community. Despite a keen sense of respect for indigenous ways of knowing that many foreigners here share, there’s no escaping history, and some of what I’ve previously encountered in my travels around the developing world can comfortably be described as a sneaky form of colonialism that’s been sugar-coated in hippy rhetoric. I’m quite optimistic about the potential for a more symbiotic amalgamation of cultures than has been done here in the past, and there are plenty of examples to point to of people modeling cooperative behavior, but I don’t think the solution to navigating Barichara’s transformation is trivial, and the more discussion we can have about it, the better for everyone involved.

With all that in mind, I’ve managed to have a fantastic time in Barichara thus far. I spent my first couple of weeks here getting oriented with my girlfriend, Lizzy. We planted some trees and participated in some community organizing, but mostly just invested time into getting to know the land and its people.

I’m staying at a campground called Guiamaro. It’s about a mile outside of town, and is an absolutely lovely place. The owners are a Dutch couple named Joep and Julia, and in my view, they are exemplary models of how to do the expat thing right. They both speak fluent Spanish, have a devout sensitivity to the community, and seem universally loved by the people of Barichara. They’ve been here over a decade and are deeply invested in regenerating their own little slice of land. They’ve worked with quite a few local builders to put together a magical haven of sustainable architecture (Julia is an accomplished architect), and are experimenting with agroforestry, rainwater catchment, and a variety of other regenerative endeavors. A wide variety of travelers pass through their place, and so far everyone I’ve met here has had a fascinating story and a unique perspective. Joep and Julia are leading by example in the effort to show that you really can make a difference in the world by investing time and energy into a single place, and Guiamaro is without doubt one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. There’s a trail through the hills that leads to Barichara, and walking it almost every day has been a wonderful exercise in appreciating the journey. The mysteries abound!

I don’t know how long I’ll be here, but I feel compelled to stay a while. Hopefully there will be more to share soon.

After finishing college in the midst of a pandemic and working a variety of part-time and seasonal jobs over the course of the next year, I started to really get the sense that I wasn’t doing nearly enough to help the planet.

I reached out to my friend Charles, who sent me this link

He also invited me out to the Mojave Desert, where he was leading a watershed

reconstruction project on an oasal plot of land with a running well and a central drainage. I quit my job in Boston, and journeyed southwest, to camp out in the desert and help Charles and the owner of the land (a man called Jolly) with a number of simple tasks, including carving trails, planting plants, and building check dams

At first it was just three of us there, but more people began to arrive, each of them with a unique trove of knowledge and a deep passion for regeneration. There was talk about the small water cycle and how we can rebuild local watersheds to bring back California’s rain. There was talk of permaculture, of the integration of agriculture and ecology, of the soil-carbon sponge and the significant role that plants and biodiversity play in stabilizing earth’s climate. There was talk of sociocracy, and of organizing prosocial coalitions outside the boundaries of traditional statist politics. There was talk of alternative banking, and what the future of money might look like. I found myself swimming through a sea of book recommendations. I felt simultaneously woefully ignorant and deeply inspired.

Most of the people who gathered there in Acton had met each other through an internet community known as Earth Regenerators (linked above), which started as a book club for a work called The Design Pathway For Regenerating Earth, by Joe Brewer. Upon leaving the desert, I inhaled the book and joined the network, and was graciously welcomed by Joe and those surrounding him. I found that my broader feelings about being a human in our time were contextualized in a new light.

I have been struggling to make peace with the feeling that I’ve wasted too much time ignoring earth’s problems, instead engaging in meaningless and narrow-sighted activities inherited from a culture that is far too disconnected from humanity’s natural roots. Joe writes a lot about grief and trauma in relation to environmental catastrophe, and I found that some of my past mistakes make sense through the lens of grief for a dying world. It’s natural to make mistakes out of anger, to live for periods of time in distraction and denial, to justify contrived tasks by bending over backwards to connect them to distantly related problems, and to sometimes feel paralyzed by sadness. It can be excruciatingly difficult to accept reality.

In some sense, my time in the desert and my introduction to Earth Regenerators felt like a reset button. I came away feeling like I was starting over. I was no longer able to deny that I felt compelled to act on behalf of a sustainable future, and I was all-too aware that I knew almost nothing about what goes into regeneration at a hands-on level. I decided my next task was to learn all I could about permaculture. This blog is where I will share what I find, from the perspective of an absolute beginner.

After visiting my homeland in the Sierra Foothills, I found my way back down to Southern California, to the quiet hills of Valley Center. Here I was to spend some time on an organic farm called Chandelier Springs that I’d found through WWOOF, learning about permaculture and soil composition from a family with deep roots in the area. They ran an off-grid homestead of sorts, sustained on well water and solar power, with many growing experiments. The owner, a man named Doug, also owns a small-scale soil company, and possesses a tremendous amount of knowledge pertaining to soil and fertilizer.

Doug was excited to share his knowledge with me. He said it had taken years to craft the ideal organic fertilizer, but he had boiled it down to three important components:

NPK, humic acid, and chelation.

Anyone who has bought fertilizer is familiar with the three numbers on the label representing the respective percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium in the mix. These three macronutrients each have an important role to play in plant health, but according to Doug it’s not always the case that more is better. Different plants will have different nutrient needs, and different fertilizers will offer different ratios. A lack of nutrients can starve and kill a plant, but over-fertilizing can cause its own set of problems, analogous to the diseases a human might get from habitually overeating. Good soil must have a reasonable balance of NPK. Doug was a big fan of fish meal, which has an NPK of 6-10-2. He particularly liked to use it for citrus trees, since they’re pretty robust and fish meal is too potent for certain plants.

I had never heard of humic acid before, but according to Doug, it is quite powerful in bolstering soil integrity and helping plants derive nutrients. His favorite method of attaining it is through earthworm farming. He made his humic acid using a worm farm, wherein worms would feast on decomposing organic matter and secrete a “tea”  that he would mix in with his fertilizer. There’s a paper that goes into more detail by Atiya et. al. cited below (1).

A chelating agent is used to protect the plant from potentially harmful metals. I asked my chemistry team* to explain chelation to me, and they said it was “pretty much like entrapping a toxic metal substance in a cage of claws so that the plant is protected when it absorbs it. More can be read about chelation here.

In terms of soil composition, Doug really liked having pieces of coconut shell in there. He said that in addition to providing some essential nutrients, the shards of shell serve as ramps that slow the passage of water. I had never thought about this before, or the fact that gardeners use pumice or perlite to increase water retention. I remember getting in trouble as a kid for pinching perlite chunks to dust in nurseries, but I never stopped to think about what the perlite was doing in there in the first place. Cool stuff!

Not far from Chandelier Springs, there is a quaint establishment called the Yellow Deli, owned and operated by the residents of the neighboring Morningstar Farms. They are a chapter of the globally recognized cult known as The Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Myself and another WWOOFer were invited to one of Morningstar’s weekly celebrations, so of course I had to go check it out. We strode up a long walkway adorned with grapefruit and palm trees, and arrived at a shaded pavilion where fifty or so chairs were arranged in a circle. The men all bore beards and wore plaid shirts and jeans. The women were clad in purple headpieces and dresses. Most of the people wore diadems. They all had Hebrew names, like Adasha, Yavala, and Yashar.

Immediately upon arrival we were offered tea, and everyone was very eager to get to know us. I got the sense that their community was rather insulated. I saw no electronic technology beyond lighting supplied by solar panels and a tuner on Yashar’s guitar.

Their ritual began. They joined hands and began dancing in a circle. They sang joyous songs and grinned gleeful grins as they pranced and clapped and spun. Their mirth was infectious, but I couldn’t help noticing that not everyone was partaking in the merriment. Several of the men hung back in the shadows, looking weary and resigned.

The people sang of joining together and following their savior into the next age. They sang of starry crowns and a future beyond imagination. They sang of birds and trees, of harmony with nature. They sang of the evil one, and of judgment day. Their musicianship was remarkable, and I smiled at the sight of young children joining in with instruments of their own.

When the ritual ended, we were invited into their hall for dinner. There, we were granted a feast of fresh produce that they had grown, and meat that they had raised and slaughtered. I was impressed by their self-sufficiency and their communal mentality. The food was delicious.

After dinner, we jammed.

I had seen guitars on their pamphlet, so I’d brought my mandolin. That ended up being a great decision. They had guitars and fiddles and a bass and even an accordion, and they could play the shit out of it all. We taught each other some songs, then I bid them goodnight and went back to Chandelier.

I would never dare join the cult, because they have a lot of really specific lore that doesn’t make sense to me, and to join requires sacrificing a great deal of freedom, but even still, there is a lot that many of us outside could learn from their connectedness to land and community. The Twelve Tribes are invested in regeneration, and despite political barriers between me and them, that is meaningful.

1. ATIYEH, R., LEE, S., EDWARDS, C., ARANCON, N., & METZGER, J. (2002). The influence of humic acids derived from earthworm-processed organic wastes on plant growth. Bioresource Technology, 84(1), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0960-8524(02)00017-2