During this conversation, I offered up a phrase that captured our emerging plan for creating resilience in fire prone areas: “Harden the Houses and Soften the Land.”
“Hardening” houses means making them more airtight and less flammable—a term I’ve learned this week from deep and interesting conversations in our Land and Leadership Development Community, with Californians who were affected by fire.
By “softening the land” I don’t mean smoothing out the rough edges, I mean making the land more spongy, springy, porous, open, accepting, alive, strong, healthy, juicy, resilient and moist. I also mean making the surfaces of the land less paved, less hard, less gravelly and rocky, less xeric. Less sealed and more open to infiltration, whether it’s soil or sidewalk. I also mean waterways that are less straight and cemented, and more leaky and meandering and allowed to overflow and spread out their blessings even if our feet get wet sometimes.
To do this the land needs to be more full of diverse juicy plants with deep roots that move water from land to air to mist and clouds and back again. And more full of trees that can catch the fogs that roll in off the coast and the dew that forms at night, even during the dry season. It needs to be more crawling with tiny and large beings that—in the process of eating and excreting and moving around—provide water and nutrients (that were bound up in the cells of whatever they were eating) back to the land. More full of grazing animals—from insects to elk to quail to sheep—that can turn leaves into manure and nitrogen rich urine, and spread it around like mobile compost heaps. More full of mycorrhizal fungi that shuttle nutrients and find hidden water, and more full of saprophytic fungi that turn flammable dead grasses, tree limbs and leaves into moist piles of humus and moss and mushrooms, without us lifting a finger. More full of beavers who can engineer uphill dams and ever-changing wetlands that refill groundwater and diversify rivers and streams and re-localize water management.
We need to practice less killing and tilling, and more sowing and growing.
We need to let go of control and allow the enormous workforce of life to do its God-given work.
By softening I also mean “less brittle” in the sense that Allan Savory defines some places as more brittle than others on a scale. You might say “but brittleness is a reflection of the regional climate and rainfall.” Brittleness is not permanent. Rainfall can change, and will change, depending on the amount and type of forest and other vegetation, the amount of life that is cycling water, and the depth of the soil sponge that provides water at the root zone for that vegetation. Rainfall can also stay the same or decrease, or come in torrents, but softer spongier land can always hold far far more of whatever falls.
To soften the land, we need to soften our hearts, and fall back in love with the world around us. (But that’s the other conversation I had today, with Ali Bin Shahid. Stay tuned.)
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