Unseen Connections between Life and Climate

If we want to have a positive, nurturing, cooperative, supportive relationship with the natural world, we will learn how life works and how life supports our climate

Here is the single greatest untold story in the environmental world: That if we protect and nurture life, we will thereby save the climate. Absent that, it doesn’t matter what we do with CO2.

Issues addressed herein:

1. How living systems support the climate

2. How water flows through living systems

3. How living systems act like a sponge, holding onto water, regulating the climate and bringing gentle, consistent rainfall

4. How biomass (the weight of living things), organic matter (once living things) and biodiversity (the diversity of living things) all depend on one another, and how we remove biomass and organic matter at our peril

5. How a blue winged wasp represents positive changes in my home landscape

6. How the black backed woodpecker needs fire and dead wood

7. How the Plant Health Pyramid could show the way to eliminating pesticides and increase biodiversity, thus turning our farmland into a climate solution, instead of a climate problem

How could protecting and nurturing life possibly be good for the climate? Because life creates a sponge that holds onto water, thereby supporting those living systems through which water flows, thus nurturing living things and regulating our climate.

As opposed to what? As opposed to this article which appeared yesterday in WIRED: New Report Finds Efforts to Slow Climate Change Are Working—Just Not Fast Enough | WIRED

It’s a pretty good article, for what it is. But what is it? It’s an article that completely embraces the shallow mainstream idea that all climate revolves around CO2; that temperatures are completely determined by CO2; that somebody somewhere has a plan for lowering CO2; and that elevated CO2 is the primary threat to both human life and wildlife.

This view completely neglects the importance of natural systems and completely disregards the positive impact that natural systems can have if we protect them.

Let’s look at how that works.

How do living systems regulate climate?

If we protect the plant communities on which wild animals depend, then they will cast shade and nurture our water cycles, while fostering biodiversity, generating biomass and generating organic matter. When we have more biomass, more biodiversity and more organic matter, then this holds water and holds carbon.

Definitions:

• Biomass refers to the total weight of living things

• Organic matter refers to once-living things

• Biodiversity refers to the diversity of species

I learned this from John D. Liu. Ecologist, filmmaker and producer of The Great Work of Our Time, John D. Liu, taught me that in any given ecosystem, biomass, biodiversity and organic matter are proportional to one another. As one grows, they all grow. As one diminishes, they all decline.

What makes for a healthy climate?

In the climate conversation, everyone agrees that we need to hold onto more carbon. But our climate also benefits when we have more plant communities that cast more shade and provide a sponge that soaks up rainfall.

If we protect the plant communities on which wild animals depend, then this is good for wild animals and also the climate. If we do not protect the plant communities on which wild animals depend, then this is bad for the climate, because we will have removed the plant matter that casts shade and provides a conduit for healthy water cycles.

This is why our climate is becoming increasingly erratic. This is why we have both floods and droughts. This largely is why we are experiencing heat waves.

Here’s how that works.

More vegetation means less flooding and drought

If you have more vegetation on the land, this will absorb more rainfall, reducing flooding, and also drought, because there is less drought when the land holds onto the rainfall.

The vegetation not only absorbs rainfall directly, as rain clings to the leaves. But the vegetation also improves the soil, so that the soil has more organic matter. Soil rich with organic matter absorbs and holds onto prodigious amounts of rainfall.

Let’s see how this works in a forest ecosystem.

Our forests hold onto rainfall, if we don’t degrade them through logging

If you remove living and dead trees through logging, you thereby degrade the biodiversity. It’s a vicious cycle. As you degrade the biodiversity, you thereby further reduce the biomass and the organic matter in that system.

The logging industry wants us to believe that our forests benefit, ecologically and otherwise, from the large-scale removal of both living and dead trees from our forests.

For the sake of definition, living trees are biomass, and dead trees are organic matter. When you remove both living and dead trees, you degrade the biodiversity of the forest.

Woodpeckers live on the beetles and ants that thrive in dead wood. So when you remove the dead wood (organic matter) you are reducing biodiversity, because you are starving woodpeckers.

Pictured below is a pair of black-backed woodpeckers.

Black backed woodpecker (Picoides_arcticus). Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Wikimedia Commons

Black-backed woodpeckers thrive in forests sections that have been burned. They are under threat largely because of post-fire logging, which removes their food sources, mainly the larvae of beetles that also thrive in a burned forest.

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An example from my home garden

Below is a picture of a blue-winged wasp.

Blue winged wasp visits my white wingstem, and nothing else, every September, and at no other time. Photo by author.

The blue winged wasp has a decided preference for my white wingstem (Verbesina Virginica) in September. Every year since I established this garden in 2022, the blue winged wasp has appeared to feed upon my white wingstem. The blue winged wasp comes only in September and visits only the white wingstem.

This represents an increase in biodiversity, because the white wingstem supports an insect species that would not otherwise appear in my landscape.

Biodiversity leads to more organic matter

This additional diversity represents an increase in organic matter, because the white wingstem, like any plant, takes carbon out of the atmosphere and puts it into the soil, via “root exudates.” Root exudates contain sugars and complex carbohydrates that are food for bacteria and fungi.

In this way, plants add biomass, organic matter and biodiversity to the soil. They add biomass because they give food to the soil biology. In the same way a child gains biomass, or weight, by eating food, the soil organisms gain biomass by eating the food provided by the plant via root exudates.

Plants add organic matter

In the same way, plants add organic matter, because all living things contribute organic matter. If nothing else, they die at some point. Organic matter is matter that was once living and is now dead. Plants live and then die, producing organic matter. Soil organisms like bacteria and fungi grow, live and die, producing organic matter.

And also, in the same way, plants, bacteria, fungi and the rest of these organisms produce biodiversity, increasing the total number of species in this system. Over the course of time, plants provide food for a diversity of organisms, especially when you have a diversity of native plants.

My garden contains a hundred or more species of plants. This diversity of plants creates a diversity of soil organisms and attracts a diversity of insect visitors, including pollinators, predators and “pests.” I put pests in quotes because I don’t consider them pests.

Caterpillars consume a plant, producing biomass and organic matter

I stumbled upon these caterpillars eating a white wingstem plant.

Unidentified caterpillars devouring my white wingstem, creating biomass and biodiversity. Photo by author.

Or was it a yellow wingstem? In any event, these caterpillars completely devoured a single plant in a day or two.

But that’s okay, because I have a lot more of this same species of plant. Insects tend to devour the weaker specimens, thereby creating biomass, biodiversity and organic matter.

The plant health pyramid could increase biodiversity, biomass and organic matter

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This is the plant health pyramid.

Plant Health Pyramid, from John Kempf, Advancing Eco Agriculture. Used by permission.

This is from John Kempf, an Amish farmer and agronomist in northeast Ohio who--most would agree--is one of the brightest minds in regenerative agriculture.

At the bottom of the graphic, John makes an assertion, even a promise--that healthy plants become completely resistant to diseases and insects.

The promise is that if your plants are healthy, you won’t need to use insecticides.

Pesticides reduce biodiversity, biomass and organic matter

How does this relate to our topic? Because insecticides reduce biodiversity. And farming covers a lot of land. Farming that makes heavy use of insecticides and herbicides seriously degrades the biodiversity of serious amounts of land.

Remember the Liu principle: That biomass, biodiversity and organic matter are all related. As you increase one, you increase all three. And as you degrade one, you degrade all three.

As pesticides degrade biodiversity, they degrade the biomass and organic matter of our farmland, thus making our farmland more of a climate problem than a climate solution.

Farmland: A climate solution or a climate problem?

Our farmland could be a climate solution. Instead, it is a climate problem.

Here’s how.

Biomass holds water. Living things contain a lot of water. Living things are mostly water, by weight. The more biomass you have in a given space, the more the landscape soaks up rainfall like a sponge, holding more water.

If you have more water in a given space, then that water tends to regulate the climate and moderate temperatures. It also tends to bring more consistent, gentle rainfall.

Organic matter also holds water

If you have more organic matter in a given space, then you have more water. Soil organic matter (the measure of healthy soil) holds about eight times its weight in water. Again, the more water you have in a given space, the more the landscape acts like a sponge, soaking up rainfall, and holding onto it, with the net effect of moderating temperatures and bringing consistent, gentle rainfall.

So if we want our farmland to be a climate solution instead of a climate problem, we will seek to increase the biodiversity, resulting in an increase in biomass and organic matter.

We can do that by finding alternatives to pesticides. If you are a farmer or a gardener, John Kempf will advise you to work on your soil health, because only healthy soil can advance your plants through the four stages of plant health, thus making them healthy and resilient.

And I would add that healthy soil and the plant health pyramid are the way to turn your garden or farm into a climate solution, instead of a climate problem.