A Symbolic Gift

It is our wish to share this gift with you.

This symbolic gift is a picture of soil from the garden that Cindy and I have been nurturing. For 35 years, we have been enjoying an amazing volume of produce from germinating, growing, and reproducing seeds. Over this time we have been able to nourish our lives & our family.

SOIL

We would like to send a handful of our soil (the gift) to you, but in the interest of keeping the cost and Greenhouse Gases down, we are sending a picture of the soil in my hand. This is one way to test soil; take a handful of damp soil and squeeze it, then open your fist to see what it does. It should keep the shape of the inside of your fist. This tells us a story of hundreds of years of organic matter that microorganisms have decomposed, creating soil that holds moisture and shape. The minerals from silt that eroded from the mountains over thousands of years contribute to making it light, fluffy, and fall apart easily when you touch it, so that roots can grow in it easily. It should smell like the forest floor.

But we feel the real gift is in the way it fits into our lives.

It is said that it can take from 100-500 years to build one inch of topsoil in nature. Nowadays we try to reproduce this by sustainable or regenerative farming/gardening practices. Sustainable or regenerative includes organic practices and other practices like NO TILLAGE. Growing vegetables this way is very labour intensive, especially if you try to do so without using combustible energy machinery. It takes a lot of organic matter and preferably involves animals of some kind, as their wonderful manure helps to build the microorganisms that are so important for healthy soil. We are also trying to use mushrooms to help with this process.

It is no secret that growing healthy plants requires good soil, but the hard part is producing food on that soil year after year without depleting the nutritive value or polluting it with harmful fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides for future generations. This includes not killing beneficial insects, birds and other living things. Furthermore, the chemicals can run off into water systems that go as far as producing dead zones off the mouths of rivers in the oceans or polluting the groundwater. We hope you purchase food that is grown locally (so it does not travel, producing more pollution before it gets to you) and is sustainable so that the soil will produce food not just for you, but for the next generation.

WATER

Having the right amount of moisture in the soil is also needed. If the soil is too dry, plants can not grow; indeed, droughts can cause desertification! If the soil is too wet, it can not hold the oxygen that is needed for the roots of most plants and microorganisms, and the soil becomes too acidic. If there is so much water that the soil is flooded, there is risk of erosion that washes all that sustainable soil away, never to be seen again. The more atmospheric rivers, tornadoes, or monsoons that happen because of high temperatures, the warmer the atmosphere becomes and the more moisture it can hold.

In a lot of places in the world there is talk about lack of water for irrigation; not only surface water but also ground water. The agriculture industry has been drilling deeper and deeper over the last 30-50 years to get the groundwater that is not being replaced as fast as it is being pumped out of the ground. This is causing nearby towns to run out of well water as they are not able to keep up with how deep the agriculture industry needs to drill. All life needs water, but too much is not good either.

As you probably have heard, the glaciers are also melting. The arctic and Antarctic are melting, and all this water is running into the oceans around the world and mixing with the salt water. We are hearing of ocean waters rising and the salt water flooding farmland on the lower deltas and seeping into wells. Some land based glaciers are the only sources of irrigation for some farming communities and once the glaciers are gone, the farmland will dry up. There are cities in India and Africa that have run out of water in recent years and have had to truck in the water for the public.

INSECTS

I have heard that beneficial insects outnumber harmful insects in the world. Without beneficial insects, the harmful ones may become more of a problem. Insect population has dropped 10% each year over the last 5 years worldwide. In areas where there are usually lots, there have been noticeably less dead insects on their cars when travelling on highways.

Worldwide, about 40% of the world’s population eat some kind of insect for protein. We have tried to grow crickets, mealworms, super-worms and black soldier flies (BSFs). We were able to get all of them to reproduce, but the black soldier flies were the best as the larvae are over 40% protein and high in calcium. The BSFs also eat our waste food and turn it into compost faster than worms or composting it! We have been growing them to feed our poultry (who love them), and it is a cheap protein.

You can buy protein powder made from crickets, mealworms, and BSFs. I understand that there is a restaurant in the lower mainland of BC that uses only insects as their proteins. Yet we still eat factory raised poultry, pork, and beef that have a high CO2 footprint and contribute to antibiotic resistant bacteria. A lot of them are fed hormones, and most of their food is harvested by tractors with conventional farming practices instead of sustainable practices where the animals salvage the food themselves while they fertilize the fields. In conventional factory farming, the manure is contaminated with antibiotics and hormones. And guess where it runs off to when there is a major flood? Right into the closest stream or river to contaminate the wildlife, local water reservoirs, or wells.

From my point of view, we need to request and support local restorative or regenerative farming practices as much as we can. If we can not find local meat to eat, we should start to consider using insect powder for our protein. If nothing else, we need to make it more normal for the next generation of humans so they are not afraid to eat insects. It is getting harder and harder to make it at farming.

SUNSHINE

I love watching the sun as it is exposed to our part of the world for another day of growing food. The Earth spins around at the equator at 1000 miles an hour to make each day. As the earth travels around the sun over a year, we are given the seasons that are needed for rest or growth. The sun is so important for the plants; just as important as soil, water and air, but too much of a good thing will cause disaster. In 2021 the heat dome in BC burnt previously untouched perennial plants. For example, a lot of the berries on our 200 blueberry plants dried up before ripening, and the tips were damaged badly enough that they have very little flowers this year. In 2021, the world temperature was 1.11c, and this year 2022 it is 1.2c. With the rate the Green House Gases are going up, so is the global temperature, the scientists estimate that we will reach 1.5 by July 2023! What will the heat waves of the future bring us if we can not hold the temperature from going over 1.5? The governments keep saying, “it will be OK”…

The radiation from solar flares that originate from the sun are reflected past earth by the magnetic field, which stops the radiation from burning everything on earth. We are very lucky to have this magnetic field protecting us every day.

BIODIVERSITY

How beautiful is it that we have so much knowledge of the biodiversity around us to enjoy. Like the diversity of flowers (colour, variety and fragrance) and the capability of life to reproduce itself. Yet so much of life lives in a very small variance of possibility. Each species requires specific temperature, moisture, light, and oxygen to live and reproduce.

The oceans are highly acidified because of the absorption of CO2, indeed the temperature of both oceans and the atmosphere are rising because of rising Green House Gases (GHG). Together, these are affecting that environment needed for us and the biodiversity of life to live.

We know more than we ever have about the world around us, but at the same time we are polluting our world around us faster than ever before. We are told this is not sustainable and that the reason we are in the sixth mass extinction is because of human actions. It is also said that humans are the only way to get out of this sixth mass extinction. Time is running out before the global warming “positive feedback loops” get out of control. We have been told that we need to act now like we are in an emergency state.

TAKING ACTION FOR THE FUTURE

I know that you have heard this before. I started this letter as a Symbolic Gift of a picture of soil that we work so hard to have every year, but that soil is not enough. The real gift we want to give to you is to take the time to stop and think of all the wonderful knowledge of life around us that allows us to live and see the world with all its beauty and splendor. From the magnetic field protecting us, to the fine balance of chemistry of our atmosphere. The soil was only somewhere to start this gift. I hope you get some value out of seeing how lucky we are to have this amazing place to live in this galaxy we call home.

PLEASE, ENJOY IT WHILE YOU CAN AND PRESERVE IT FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS.

I hope you will ask yourself with every action you take: DOES IT STEAL THE FUTURE OR HEAL THE FUTURE?

I feel that we are all responsible for becoming more ethical than the society we grew up in.

I am doing my best to walk softly through my life so that the future will be even more wonderful than the world we live in now. I hope that you will help end the silence on global warming. We can lead by example and sharing.

There is a lot of information around us telling us many different things, but I feel we need to think about the future and vote with our dollar! What you buy affects the economics and sends a message to the governments of the world.

Thank you for your time.

Science tells us that we need to act now.

We need to talk about all of this.

Sending love,

Paul and Cindy

Resources for Learning & Taking Action

Talking about Global Warming Denial

CBC The Current on eco-anxiety (about 10 minutes):