This is my front lawn as of Thursday afternoon, August 31, 2023 after a long hot dry summer which doesn’t seem to be over yet.
In the Spring it looked like this.
We had rain and the sunflowers activated. Their seeds had been lying on the ground all year, waiting for their chance. Hundreds of them sprouted and grew, tall and proud.
Many times I stopped to look at them, their faces uplifted to the sun, when I stepped out on my bike in the morning and it would make me laugh a deep hearty laugh to see them standing there. Some of them were well over 8 feet tall. That’s impressive, I’m 6’ 5” and don’t encounter that many things taller than me in the everyday world. They shot up from ground zero to such a height in just a couple of months. It took me 20 years.
But then they all died out, their era over, and I chopped them down (probably a mistake) for brush pickup. This is what that looked like.
Twice a year a giant truck from the City of San Antonio comes by, grabs whatever I have stacked in a pile along the curb with it’s long articulating arm, drops it in the back and drives off.
Since the demise of the sunflowers my yard has lain barren. I don’t water it in the summer, cause what’s the use? Nothing can survive the sun exposure and the parched conditions. It’s just dumping water on the ground.
It is, however, an eyesore for the neighbors and a cruel fate for the microbes baking in the soil - it’s the microbes that give life to the soil. So for these reasons and others I have determined to regenerate my little plot of land as in this short trailer Regenerating Life. I’m going to revitalize the soil and come up with some kind of landscaping strategy that can sustain ground cover and keep the water in the soil and the microbes alive. Stay tuned.
Here in my neighborhood they’re transforming a parking lot into a park.
One acre of impermeable black asphalt is being turned into this verdant nature park.
Hurrah! Brilliant! Exemplary! Inspiring! Kudos to the Sunset Ridge Collective and their sponsor the Sunset Ridge Church of Christ which sits on the hill across the street from the former parking lot. Soon trees and flowering plants and grasses will be sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and releasing oxygen instead of flat black asphalt reflecting back all the heat of the sun.
This is just one of the ways (photosynthesis) in which Nature modulates the climate and keeps it in balance. As it turns out Nature, good ole Mother Nature, is the best regulator of the climate and regeneration of our natural world is one of the best tools for fighting climate change.
For example, the oceans govern 95% of the heat dynamics of our blue planet. Ocean currents carry cold water from the poles to the tropics and warm water from the tropics to the poles. When water evaporates into vapor it absorbs heat, when it rains it releases heat and falls to earth where it cools the plants and the soil. Hurricanes are basically a giant air conditioner that sucks up the warm water from the tropical zones, spins it and blows it and drops it as rain in more northern zones, cooling the planet in the process. Marine algae are the biggest source of fresh oxygen and sequestration of carbon on the planet. One acre of algae can remove up to 2.7 tons per day of CO₂, Some algae can soak up 400 times more CO₂ than trees in ideal conditions. Roughly half of the oxygen production on Earth comes from the ocean, according to the scientists.
The most effective and least expensive way of mitigating climate change is by regenerating nature. Restoring ecosystems to their healthy natural state stores carbon and reverses climate change. It allows Nature to do what it knows how to do: balance the temperature of the planet for the benefit of all the flora and fauna that have evolved in its biosphere. That’s why it’s called ‘Nature’. It’s natural.
We need to think of Nature not as something we control but as an ally that we work with, facilitate, benefit from by benefiting it, the old law of symbiosis.
We need to stop wrecking the forests and plant more trees. You could have a forest in your backyard or your neighborhood even if it’s tiny. Restoring ecosystems to their healthy natural state stores carbon and reverses climate change.
We need to let the rivers run free so they can fill up the aquifers instead of flowing to the sea. We need to reduce the ‘heat island’ effect of cities where everything is paved over by creating more green space, encouraging wildscaping and home gardens. We need to treat the land like a person, like it has a presence and a character. Whatever little piece of land we have, if it’s a quarter acre lot where our house sits or a clay pot garden on the porch railing, we need to love it as if it were a member of our family, an esteemed member.
Sounds weird I know but it’s our Mother Earth isn’t it?
And I need to regenerate myself too in the process. I am a biosphere. I am a planet-like creature, 70% water just like planet Earth and with feedback systems that keep it healthy and sane. I have inhabitants, trillions of little people in my gut, on my skin, in my ears, everywhere. We exist in symbiosis, not harming each other (unless I take antibiotics).
Maybe that’s why the regeneration nation idea stuck in my brain as a model of what needs to happen - could happen to me too. Sleep, diet, exercise, meditation, staying in rhythm with my body. Being powerful and agile not all decrepit. That’s my favorite word since I heard Nicholas Kristoff use it in a New York Times opinion piece ‘Hungry Mosquitoes, Irritable Bears and the Glories of Wilderness’. He mentions hiking with his daughter thru the Pacific Crest Trail when she was just 14 and strong enough and he wasn’t yet decrepit. Ha, ha hilarious.
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