Green Love Story

Last year I woke up from fearful lockdown dreams into a full-blown love affair with spring. I was intoxicated, enchanted…and couldn’t look away from this beautiful green leaf multiplying in size in a silent fractal dance right outside my window.

Perhaps because of COVID rules, I slowed my roll enough to finally notice the vine that had been growing there for several springs. Usually I’d be rushing past, impatient for a product—hops. After all, before COVID I had important things to attend to— meetings, appointments, family gatherings with people. Plants had been mere set decorations, a blur in the background. Sound like the familiar story of a relationship taken for granted?

From personal experience, it seems to me that humankind needs marriage counseling so we can renew our vows with our beloved partner— Nature. And who better to be our “marriage counselor” than Dr. Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree? Her enthusiasm is contagious (in a good way) and she says she’s super hopeful.

“If humans get it and start working collaboratively with plants, we can change global warming really fast,” she tells Fantastic Fungi filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg.

This is a marriage we’ve come close to abandoning in our instant gratification society of stress and competition. By producing megastorms and destructive wildfires, Nature seems desperate to attract our attention. Should we worry? Are our lives at stake? Well, we do have to think about food.

From chickens to pomegranates, everything we eat begins its life dependent on the green emergence of plant life through photosynthesis.

I’m not kidding.

Sure, I have a garden and know a lot about growing tomatoes and cucumbers and corn. But as a pragmatic foodie and basic eater, I’ve been missing the green magic.

I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for recipes on the internet, tracking down exotic ingredients, focusing on presentation and nutritional balance and admiring the photos of master chefs’ creations in magazines like this one without considering the source of what I’m cooking.

So what do we call the crucial invisible force that gives us food? Where were the poets and preachers and marketing experts when the term “photosynthesis” was coined? No word could be less inspiring! We’ve got to come up with something better.

Because we’re talking about alchemy here! Green Magic! New life forms from invisible air and a little moisture when green cells use the sun as a catalyst and create more life!

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that our bodies ARE part of Nature. And together with Nature, we have a reciprocal relationship and, potentially, it’s beautiful. All plants take CO2 (carbon dioxide) and separate the carbon in this molecule, combined with a little water, to grow a green leaf or pine needle using chlorophyll that absorbs sun energy as a catalyst.

Plants use carbon and exhale oxygen, which we are required to inhale to stay alive. What could be more symbiotic than that? But it’s about more than oxygen. Everything we eat is created this way when plants feed sugars (carbohydrates) to soil microbes through their roots. Our very lives depend on the work green plants are doing in healthy fungi-dominant soils.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, only about 3% of the earth’s habitable surface is cities. Another 12% is forests and about 40–50% is agriculture, with the rest being deserts and other wildlands. So, it’s logical to assume that the way we do agriculture has a big impact on our biosphere and affects global warming. In fact, it’s been proven.

“Over the last 12,000 years, we have lost billions of tons of carbon from our soils as humans converted grasslands and forests into agricultural fields and rangelands, building roads and cities,” says ecologist Dr. T. Jane Zelikova. “One of the major drivers of that loss was the plow. With each pass of the plow, those plant roots and soil aggregates, that we know are really important, are broken apart…” releasing greenhouse gases into the air that contribute mightily to global warming. That degradation of soils, in which they lose their health-giving nutrient density, is something we’re quickly learning to measure. And finally, healthy soils—well managed and left untilled—sequester carbon. Bingo.

So, I believe we need to give all our grocery money to farmers who practice regenerative agriculture. We need to ensure them a living wage while they keep carbon in the ground. There are no-till farmers and ranchers in our region just waiting for us to popularize this demand. An organization has formed in the Pajaro Valley called CORA—the Campaign for Organic & Regenerative Agriculture—hosting educational events and getting us organized.

Area farmers like 2019 Organic Farmer of the Year Israel Morales, Sr. are developing ways to manage soils that prioritize living roots and moisture retention over industrial convenience.

“About one third of what plants make via photosynthesis is put into the soil as carbon, so the plant with living roots in the ground is a carbon sink. Growers that utilize cover cropping during winter in conjunction with conservation/reduced tillage with enhanced residue management help keep moisture in the soil for longer and slow release of CO2 to the atmosphere,” says one of his advisors, Gina Colfer of Wilbur Ellis in Salinas.

Besides changing our shopping habits, what can regular folks do? We can declare ourselves stewards of the land, trees, green plants and waterways right where we already live. Our motto: No bare soil and no bystanders!

Wonder why this movement hasn’t gained more traction yet? Because we’re all driven to eat whenever we are hungry and policy changes that disrupt our food supply scare us. We blink. We look away. We reach for a bag of chips.

If, like me, you were thrilled by watching Watsonville’s hillsides turn green after the first rain, you’ll join me in looking for ways to regenerate the life-giving green magic in plain sight all around us.