Plants provide the energy, ingredients and conditions for life
How can we make sure they are getting what they need? Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems, Part 3. And...a workshop to dive deep this Sunday.
Happy Day, Earthlings. I invite you to join me for a workshop to discuss this article on Sunday, April 26th at 3 PM EDT.
“Nested Intelligences: Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World: The Role of Plants.” Click here for details and to sign up.
Whether you are a mushroom or a moose, a ladybug or a wasp, a tuna fish or an alligator, you get your food and energy from plants. Whoever we are, we feast on dead plants or live plants. Or we eat other beings that ate plants. Or we drink the milk or blood from beings that ate plants. Or we eat beings that ate beings that ate other beings that ate plants. etc. You get the picture.
Plants take the sun’s energy and give it to us in a form we can use, and then provide the oxygen we need to actually make use of that energy. Sunlight energy gets passed along through life, and shows up as movement and heat and energy in our bodies. We can lift things and pull things, make nests and art and babies, make electrical signals to think about the world around us, and move our lips or beaks to communicate with each other, using energy from the sun.
Plants source minerals (from rocks and relationships), CO2 from the air, and water from the soil, and pass them along to us as well in complex molecules that plants produce as the ingredients of life. These macro and micro nutrients move through life (as we consume each other) and help to determine how well we can use sunlight energy: for example whether our tissues repair themselves after a hard day of working, flying, or burrowing; whether we can fight off a virus; whether our blood can carry enough oxygen; and whether we perceive clearly and make good decisions.
When plants get just what they need, in the right amounts, at the right time, they can create and pass along all the things—energy/carbohydrates, fats/fatty acids, protein/amino acids, enzymes, phytochemicals, fiber, minerals, and vitamins—that allow membranes to form, inner and outer signaling to happen, metabolism and mood to be regulated, and individual and systemic intelligence to develop.
If plants don’t get what they need, that deficit gets passed along through the entire food web. For example, if plants don’t get what they need to create compounds that ward off viruses and insects and fungal diseases, neither do the rest of us. If plants don’t get enough selenium to create antioxidants, deal with stress, and keep their immune systems working….neither do the rest of us.
Likewise, if plants take up something excessively, those excesses get passed along to the rest of us. Heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium), neurotoxins (from pesticides and pollution), and nitrates (from synthetic fertilizer use) can interfere with life’s processes in extreme ways.
Plants also create the climatic conditions for life as we know it. Through their relationships and metabolism, plants intelligently regulate everything we need to live here: oxygen levels, CO2 levels, the temperature of the earth and sky, the formation and movement of clouds and rain, and the ability of land to soak up water, rather than letting it all run off into the salty seas.
So, as we consider all the nested intelligences at work in life, it’s really important to consider whether plants are getting what they need—because plants provide the energy, ingredients, and conditions for life.
(And yes, for those—like me—who are picky about details, there are a few exceptions. Extremophile and chemosynthetic archaea and bacteria that live in volcanos and deep sea vents, for example, don’t get their energy from plants. There was life on earth before photosynthesis, after all.)
In my first article in this series—Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems: Why We Can’t Think and What to Do About It—I outlined an entire flow of intelligences. In part two—Wisdom at the Edge—I wrote about membranes, and how their discernment of what to take in and what to leave out creates the boundary between the living and non-living aspects of our world.
Today I am pointing to the place we can make a difference (surprisingly quickly) in the ability of all life to adapt and respond to the chaos of the moment. The conditions we create for plants—in farms, forests, fields, oceans, and even lawns—really matters to the life that eats those plants. And even though it seems utterly unrelated to violence and pandemics and politics, our most important intervention point right now might just be how we treat plants.
Because when plants don’t get what they need, the most basic layers of intelligence stop working correctly: Cell membranes lose the wisdom of knowing what to take in and what to leave out. Genetic patterns and memory go in strange directions. Community dynamics fail. Bees get confused. Frogs and calves are born with missing limbs and intestines outside their bellies. Minerals needed for oxygen in our blood switch forms, and babies turn blue. Fertility drops. Rain stops. Heat rises.
And increasingly, people really can’t think very well—about each other, about living systems, about governance, capitalism, our addictions, and all sorts of things.
So, what are the conditions in which plants get their needs met?
This is going to be a messy list—because life is not an organized bulleted list—but hopefully you can follow along.
The basics
The first two conditions are pretty easy these days:
Plants need CO2 from the air
And sunlight
The CO2 for plants in a natural system comes directly from the respiration and outbreaths of the other life all around the plants. Mice, mushrooms, grazing animals, worms, soil microbes, people, etc. exhale CO2 and it is taken up straight away into the stomata (tiny openings on the underside of leaves, ready for us, as we stroll along breathing under the trees, or scurry under the grasses, or burrow underground). This is a nice arrangement, since plants provide us with the oxygen for our in-breaths.
Nowadays crops get a lot of their CO2 from the general wafting around of air full of CO2 from burning of fossil fuels and other fires, and way less from the life living around them, because we don’t allow life other than plants on most farms. No mice, no fungi, no foxes. (We kill 'em, trap 'em, spray 'em, or fence 'em.) Hardly even any people. But car exhaust and burning cities still provide CO2, and plants can still use it to grow, even though I imagine it probably is a little strange to them.
Sunlight? It’s still here. Though in places with horrible air pollution, the dimming can be hard on plants.
The other basic need is not that simple these days:
Plants need water. In order to have water on land, they need two things:
Plants need rainfall
Regular rainfall and deep, consistently refilled groundwater supplies rely on a “living climate” which is created by….plants! Plants make clouds and rain, and move rain across continents, and this requires a tremendous amount of diverse vegetation with water at the root zone: enough water so the plants can transpire that water and cool the area, and also create bio-aerosols that the water vapor can condense onto.
Condensation (of plant-transpired water onto plant-created aerosols) creates low-pressure areas that pull the clouds and rain across continents. This process requires intact diverse forests, deep prairies, and oceans full of phytoplankton (plants). We have cut forests and replanted monoculture tree farms, tilled the prairies and planted crops (or simply paved them over and built cities). And we have killed off the whales whose poop fertilized the phytoplankton.
So, plants need rain, but rain also needs plants. When we mess with forests, prairies, and oceans, we mess with rain.
Plants need spongy soil to hold water at the root zone, protected from evaporation.
I have written and taught a lot over the last ten years about the “soil sponge” and the rainmaking abilities of a “living climate.” But here’s a very quick review. The soil sponge is the structural and functional integrity of soils: a living matrix that only forms when diverse plants are allowed to grow continuously in undisturbed soil, and feed the biological workforce of soil life.
Soil life binds tiny rocks—sand, silt, and clay particles—into aggregates (tiny clumps), leaving pore spaces in between. Fungal hyphae and roots tie those aggregates into little bundles. Life (roots, nematodes, mites, worms, insects, voles, snakes) moves through creating tunnels of all sizes. These pores and tunnels are strong and sacred space—cathedrals underground—that make life possible: providing water, air, space for roots to explore, some clever little oxygen-free zones for the weirdos, and underground climate control—not too hot, not too cold. The soil sponge also holds nutrients in place in a “reserve pantry” without leaching out during rain.
Most places no longer have a soil sponge. It has been plowed up, paved over, and crushed under heavy machinery, and the workforce that could rebuild it has been poisoned and starved. Plants feed the workforce. Plants need the sponge, and plants create the sponge.
The workforce
Plants need to live amongst a diverse and active biological workforce for all sorts of reasons:
They need
soil life that:
organizes broken-down rocks into structured soil that holds water, air, and nutrients (see above)
transforms and transports nutrients to plants
all the other animals, birds, and insects that:
nibble and graze to help keep larger plants from shading out smaller ones
break down life’s materials and turn it into fertilizer in the form of manure and urine, and in doing so transport microbes and nutrients and seeds and pollen
and return nutrients uphill against gravity.
Why is this moving, nibbling workforce important?
Plants need nutrients to be brought to them
Plants can’t travel to go find food. Most other life can. Life eats and excretes, breaks down rocks and bones, takes apart dead things, transforms chemicals, and releases and transports nutrients—across landscapes, between plants, and uphill. This provides plants with all kinds of interesting minerals and compounds and enzymes in forms that they can actually take up and use.
Plants pass all that along to us—in forms we can take up and use. Whenever we consume and digest each other, we keep some of the nutrients in our cells and bodies, and we release the rest for other life to take up and use. We walk and slither and fly, and as we move from place to place, we excrete and poop and pee and deposit the excess nutrients right onto the soil.
Yet most humans have taken their entire excess nutrient stream and dumped/flushed it into clean drinking water. When you think about it, it’s one of the strangest and least intelligent decisions we have ever made. (We have done something similar by housing—rather than grazing—most of the domestic farm mammals that now vastly outweigh wild mammals in sheer mass: 96% domestic versus 4% wild land and marine mammals).
In conventional agriculture, this loss of biological fertilizer has been replaced with synthetic fertilizers—which is like asking a human to live entirely off of vitamin water or Gatorade. NPK only has three macronutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, and yet it is considered “complete fertilizer.”
Synthetic fertilizer provides a huge boost in yields for the first couple of years, but then disrupts the natural relationships between plants and soil life, and once plants get addicted to synthetic fertilizers they are less likely to feed soil life, and less likely to develop healthy root structures. This reduces their ability to access water and nutrients, so it’s a vicious addictive cycle for both farmers and crops.1
Most plants need specific pollinators, or specific animals for seed transport, to help them reproduce and to ensure genetic diversity.
With the increase in use of biocides/pesticides—and in particular insecticides— pollinators are becoming more and more scarce. You have probably heard about the study from Germany in 2017 that showed that over 25 years, the biomass of flying insects was reduced by 75%. Birds and other insect-eating animals are declining as well. Air pollution, light pollution, a changing climate, and other factors also contribute to this decline.
Farms and yards that provide pollinator strips and native plants are helping to provide habitat for pollinators, but without a dramatic change in pesticide use we are swimming upstream. Not only is it possible to grow food without pesticides, if done well it can be very sustainable and profitable. In Andhra Pradesh, India, net financial returns for crops grown without pesticides or synthetic fertilizer were 50% to 722% higher than conventionally grown crops. Research by LaCanne and Lundgren showed that regenerative farms in the U.S. were 78% more profitable than conventional.
Their research also shows that the lower the pesticide use, the lower the incidence of “pests.” Why is that? Because for every crop-eating insect (the vegetarians) there are about 1,700 insect-eating insects or “predators” (the carnivores). When farmers spray insecticides, the poison doesn’t distinguish between pest and predator. If you decimate the population of both types of insects, which group has abundant food first, to help them recover? That’s right, the vegetarian insects that eat your crops.
That brings us to three other big (and related) points:
Plants need predators (from ladybugs to owls to wolves) to keep insect populations and grazing animals moving and balanced.
Plants need diverse companions in the plant world to attract pollinators, feed beneficial soil life, (and who knows, probably to have interesting conversations with.)
Plants need an environment that is relatively free of toxins that interfere with the basic metabolic processes of plants and all their biological companions.
Herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, de-wormers, antibiotics, industrial pollutants, microplastics, PFAS, heavy metals, you name it, these are all problematic, and commonly found in conventional farming, as well as lawns and public spaces, and wafting through the air and floating through the water and settling over the land.
The climate and microclimate
Plants need particular temperatures (air, surface, and subsurface) to photosynthesize, and particular seasonal cycles/conditions to survive.
Some plants only photosynthesize in cool weather, others need warm or hot weather. Growth and reproduction cycles for each species of plant in each location must be seasonally aligned with their unique pollinators’ growth and reproduction cycles. Freeze/thaw dates must work for each plant species' timeline and not kill them.
In natural systems, plants create the climate for life, including their own microclimates. Air temperature in heavily vegetated microclimates (with ample water at the root zone so that plants can transpire) can be 10-15°F cooler than surrounding areas. Surface temperatures of bare soil, versus plant-covered soil, versus pavement can be even more dramatically different (up to 60°F cooler under a cover crop).2
When allowed to do their work of cycling water and carbon, cooling air through latent heat fluxes, creating clouds and rain, and moving water from oceans onto land and across continents, plants regulate the atmosphere and climate so that our planet is just the right temperature, not too hot, not too cold.
They do this intelligently and purposefully: phytoplankton (free-floating ocean plants) emit DMS to create big fluffy ocean clouds when the temperature gets too hot. Forests emit bacteria that can condense cloud droplets into rain, when they need water. Clouds provide shade when the sun is at its peak, and rain falls in the afternoon bringing water back to the earth, so the nighttime skies are clear and heat can escape back to space.
Plants need a climate that works for life, and the climate needs plants to regulate it.
Finally,
Plants need humans who understand how to live and farm and build neighborhoods in ways that create these conditions, so that all life can flourish. Every other species knows how to play their role and do their work. We have forgotten.
All these conditions are meant to work together.
You can see that while thinking about this for the past month, my sense of humor has declined slightly from the beginning of the article to the end, but I will try to keep my chin up if you will as well.
We can create conditions where bodies and brains and minds can develop and we can think. When we aren’t kept indoors, and fooled by artificial flavors and advertisements, people, cows, and everyone else knows just what to eat, when, how much, and in what order, based on information embedded in the smell and taste and texture of foods—the micronutrients and biological labor of that particular place that come together in unique ways in the secondary metabolites that local plants create: the terroir.
If and when we create conditions where all life can live, and eat well at the feast of life, our bodies won’t have metabolic syndrome and cancer and autoimmune disorders. Our farms and fields and even cities could be full of birdsongs and incredibly interesting insects to accompany our children as they learn.
We could reclaim our place in the nested intelligences of the world.
And we have some work to do.
Last Saturday a group of us gathered for a preliminary workshop to look at all this together, and our big takeaway was this: We live in an incredible awe-inspiring world, and there is a LOT we can do to help it work the way it is supposed to.
Join me for a new workshop on Sunday April 26th at 3 PM EDT to discuss all of this in depth with an incredible group of your fellow human beings.
“Nested Intelligences: Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World. The Role of Plants.” Click here for details and to sign up. See this in your time zone.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-its-time-to-stop-punishing-our-soils-with-fertilizers-and-chemicals#:~:text=Haney:%20I%20believe%20it%20does,the%20soil%20rather%20than%20less.
See our recent workshop about the microclimate at Village Homes in Davis, California, and this article in the Guardian.
thanks