We've got this negative idea about CO2, but actually it's what we're made of. It's what your apple is made of. Cows have made of it. It’s the currency of life. Yeah, we've got to come up with a different way of looking at how this all works. I thought cars were the big problem. I didn't know buildings were as big a problem as transportation.
And I didn't know land use was a huge problem because we've been abusing our soils, tearing it, burning down our forests and just, you know, acting like nature was there for us to chop. Climate change and biodiversity loss are not two crises. They are inter dependent and they need to be addressed together. nature on the planet today is not in a good shape.
We, we lost, over half of our forests, half of our coral reefs, three quarters of the wetlands and two thirds of the world's rivers have been dammed. We've decided to go from a system which was balanced, and decouple it into the system that's completely out of balance. And we've now we're suffering the consequences with, with that. So essentially you had, CO2 in the atmosphere. It was taken up by plants photosynthesizing, and it's sequestered into the soil into, into very stable forms.
And of course, over the, you know, thousands of years that would then be put into fossil fuels and sort of locked away, deep. deep, deep down. But the cycling CO2, the stuff that's sort of in and out is, is, It’s the currency of life. There's lots of mechanisms that keep the climate cool, including, you know, keeping soil covered so it doesn't get very hot. It could be 40 degrees hotter on a on a bare soil than it can under vegetation.
You know, big trees can be like have this incredible cooling effect. They cool through that process of transpiration, under you can just feel it when you're under a tree, you know, in the hot sunny weather. It's just that's why animals go under there. It's, it's it's it has that cooling effect and so it's not re-radiating heat back out into the atmosphere, which is having that heating effect. In a very healthy system, like I say, CO2, will be taken up by the plants, put it into soil structures.
And then eventually eaten and then released in a cycle. So there’s thisv kind of whole system function that just works completely. And it worked for a very long time. And we had herbivores in the system. We had huge herds all over the, you know, the world of different, grazing animals, all belching methane. And it was being reabsorbed and, there’s various methods of, of sort of, oxidising methane, all these very natural processes that all work together.
I then was finding out people who were looking at nature, farming forests, pastures as a way to heal like nature as the healer, nature as the first step, giving nature a seat at the table. And that changed my life. I found out that there was a way of grazing that emulated the way Bison moved across the Great Plains here in the U.S. and it was changing farms quickly and beautifully and getting farmers out of debt and changing the water cycling on their farms.
Give you an example Farm after farm, ranch after ranch. Throughout the from 2013 to 2018, when I was making a bunch of short films about this, I would hear the same story. My grandfather told me there was a stream. My dad said it dried up and when we changed the way we did our grazing, the stream is back. I heard that story so often that I would be like, okay, yeah, your stream’s back. You know, I would be silly about it and facetious about it, but, but actually it was amazing.
And I learned that if you treat soils well, they absorb carbon. If you treat them poorly, they exhale carbon basically. A functioning, healthy economy is dependent on functioning, healthy ecosystems. now there is a lot of studies that show that, most of our economic activity is, reliant on nature providing certain services that we just take for granted.
regulating the climate, providing pollination services, fertilizing, the soils, diversity of, living beings, the biodiversity on the planet, flood protection, storm protection, clean air. We really know that, it's less costly to conserve, functioning healthy ecosystem than trying to restore it. Plus, once the degradation reaches a certain limit or a tipping point, it loses its self regenerative properties and the ecosystem can collapse. A lot of people like clean air and clean water.
As a matter of fact, every human being I've ever met likes clean air and clean water. they don't know what they're looking at when they see a field that's empty, uncovered soil is is a disaster. You know, when you see a field that has no plants growing in it between crops, fallow fields, that's like an oil spill. But it's a solar spill, but it's just as destructive An ecosystem is a plant photosynthesizing, putting, carbon through its roots into the soil, food web.
The whole fertility of that plant depends on everything eating each other. It depends of bacteria absorbing nutrients from the rock. It depends on the protozoa eating the bacteria and then releasing through the decay necromass and sort of excretions of those organisms. The plant gets fed. That's just death and decay at a small microscopic level. But they're all living creatures. And then those plants will be then eaten by an animal and, balanced by an animal.
The insects that are eating the plants will be regulated by, you know, predation and wasps and the whole system is utterly intertwined and balanced through the interaction between plants and animals. I think that's the only way forward, is to sort of for everybody to get a proper understanding of how functional ecosystems work. The farmers tell me they get to see a lot more nature, like they're seeing a lot more nature like spiders in the morning.
That bit in episode one, right when we meet Cooper and Katie and they're like, did we not notice the spiders before? Or there are a lot more spiders, right? And, and then you find out there's a lot more dragonflies and what do those dragonflies eat? They eat mosquitoes. And so all of a sudden, you know, these and these bugs that were problems before because they only had one type of thing growing and that bug thrived on that one type of thing.
When you have a lot of things growing, a great diversity of forage, you draw in a lot of bugs. And when you draw in a lot of different bugs, that bug that was a pest is now in check because there's other bugs that might eat it. And it actually in a balanced bug system, it might become like a great member of society where it does its function and it's not out of whack. When we have diversity, it's a stronger, more resilient system so that when one bug shows up, that is a true pest.
There's a lot of people that will say, Thank you, you're very tasty and, and it's checked and and so therefore you don't have to spray pesticides and insecticides and it just keeps going that way. I call it unintended benefits. Alan Williams calls it compounding benefits. So you can sort of spiral in the right direction or spiral in a much more desertified direction, a much more unproductive direction where you need all those inputs. You need fertiliser because nothing else is providing it.
You need insecticide because you've only got one kind of plant growing and you've got bugs that are out of whack. Really what's required is a whole different paradigm, because you can see that happening in the wider world is people are saying, oh, well, we need food production. We need food production to become more efficient so we can hand more land back to nature. And the problem is that nature doesn't stop at a fence. You know, nature requires a whole system.
You can't just say, right, well, we're going to be really intensive there. Use lots of fertiliser, lot of sprays, and then that's not going to impact nature. So we're going to put that area over to, to those, you know, wild species. But those wild species need a clean environment and healthy watersheds and not to be killed by pesticides and to be able to migrate across land. And have a shared ocean that's not polluted by fertilisers.
So it just doesn't work that you can separate and segregate nature and then be really efficient somewhere. Ecosystems, such as mangrove forests, salt marshes, seagrass meadows, they are real climate and nature champions. A lot of people don't know this, but actually, wetlands occupy less than 5% of the global land area. But blue carbon ecosystems are responsible for about half of the total carbon that is buried in ocean sediments yearly. They're also critical for biodiversity.
You know, they are actually providing a lot of food and refuge and, nursery habitat for many of, the mammals, reptiles, birds and fish that are, driving global fisheries worldwide. They're also amazing in terms of storm protection, protecting coastlines against, damage and change and flood waters. So how come they have all these incredible properties and we still losing them? You know, we're still they're still in decline. We lost 30 to 50% of of the mangroves.
And ultimately we have to get to a point where we've got nature working completely everywhere. How do you look at these problems differently, how do you reframe things. How do we increase biodiversity? How do we improve the watershed? How do we build soil so that we can make money from sunshine and water into the future forever, and pass that on to our next generations?
Okay, how can we stop and just envision a really different world, I believe that we live in really extraordinary times where we can create a future where nature and people thrive. And the way to do that is to reconnect to nature, because we can only protect what we love. I hope you've enjoyed this weave of inspirational voices. Each clip brought in from our longer interviews.
I've created this episode as an example piece that starts to compile the huge range of wisdom and knowledge that our guests have generously shared over the past few years. There's so much potential packed into our library, and I wish to keep exploring the possibilities of sharing regenerative understandings in new, accessible formats suited to different styles and places of learning.
If this episode prompted an idea for bringing knowledge to your own community or classroom, do please reach out to explore that together. And if you enjoyed this piece and would love to support the creation of more like it, you can find a growing range of ways to do that, including purchasing or distributing our art prints and greetings cards. Find the details in the description. A huge thank you to each of our guests, who are, in order of appearance.
Caroline Grindrod, founder of Roots of Nature and trainer of Regenerative Agriculture. Peter Byck, director of Roots So Deep and Wrangler of scientists. Diana Denke, co-founder of Fair Carbon, and expert on nature based solutions. You can find their full individual interviews linked within the description, and be sure to subscribe as we'll be catching up with each of them alongside hearing from many new voices as we get moving into this new season of We Are Carbon.
So let's keep figuring this all out together.