But 10,000 years again, we’ve got mongrel and we got smart, and we said, “Hey, Charlie, if we can actually take these seeds, if we plant these seeds in this healthy soil, we can actually accelerate natural processes. We can grow food. We can domesticate animals. We can actually localise ourselves, and we can increase our population in these areas.” So agriculture evolved 10,000 years ago through humans basically taking intelligence to this natural system and building that agricultural productivity.
Again, that was fantastic, and we went along for all that time. And the whole story, as we’ve said before, of Jared Diamond, civilization was all about those societies that were able to keep managing their soils in that healthy way survived. All those civilizations that stuffed their soils, degraded their soils, obviously went cactus – blood and bone recycled. Pretty hard, pretty tough, it’s just good ecology, right?
So that’s, in a sense, the whole message. And that’s the toolbox that we’ve got. We now are facing exactly that situation. As we say, there are 7.4 billion of us. We are currently using 1.5 planets – the sustainable capacity of this planet. We haven’t got another planet to go to so we’ve got to start backing off, baby. We’ve got to say, all right, how do we actually stop mining, exploiting, degrading and how do we get into soil restoration farming to rebuild the cycling of that planet? It’s really the practical tools and capacity to do that which is important.
This is a clip from “Walk the Talk” with Walter Jehne: Local Solutions With Global Implications filming available for Farming Secrets Members.
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