a leaf is life is water is life
why the machines are not going to save us
Hello friends
Orkney is often mentioned as a place that’s at the forefront of the transition to ‘green’ energy, with marine renewables and wind power already generating 120% of our electricity and more big development projects already underway. There will be more to come. The incoming Labour government seems to be getting behind a massive expansion of renewable energy generation in the UK.
Good news. Perhaps?
But in all the talk of green technology and reaching net zero, all the plans for more wind turbines across moorlands and along the sea horizon, the arrays of solar panels, heat pumps, EV’s, carbon capture and storage, and (god help us) new nuclear power, something seems to have gone missing from the conversation.
Nature itself.
In his essay “Putting the land back in Climate” activist and writer
asks:What if there’s another side to climate change, one less concerned with what we put in the atmosphere than what we do to the land?
He points out that our singular focus on atmospheric carbon emissions has led us to forget that there is another, equally powerful force at work in our climate that has, in recent decades, largely dropped out of the conversation: water.
Though we tend to think of climate in terms of carbon, water is in fact the primary medium of Earth’s heat dynamics, perhaps not surprising on this 71% water planet. Water not only has the highest heat capacity around, it’s also a shapeshifter, continuously phase-changing between water, vapor and ice, absorbing and releasing heat at each juncture, elegantly distributing heat along the way.
Richard Heinberg has also argued eloquently that the machines are not coming to save us. Restoring nature’s cooling cycles is our only viable climate solution.
On the large scale, ocean currents move enormous amounts of water around the planet, shifting more water onto land via precipitation than evaporates from it. On the small scale, water falls as rain or other forms of precipitation, is absorbed by soil, is drawn up into plants, and transpires or evaporates back into the atmosphere. This dual water cycle has a net cooling effect.
To restore these complex water cycles we must:
Re-vegetate the planet. Restore soils so they hold more water. And get rid of pavement wherever possible.
Every leaf is a life boat
In the green fullness of high summer in the northern hemisphere, everywhere around us we see the most powerful, efficient, miraculous, machines unfolding themselves spontaneously into the sunlight: leaves.
Each leaf is water-fountain, cloud-maker, carbon capture and storage mechanism, rain-bringer, flood-preventer, shade-bringer, soil-builder, air-cleanser, food source and habitat, all rolled into one perfect, tiny, life-saving buoyancy aid.
Every leaf is miraculous.
I’ll leave the last word for now to the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, who in 1919 famously remarked:
How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. But the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.
It’s not by turbines, but by leaves we live.
The Life Raft Co-Working Session
As usual, our co-working session will meet Wednesday at 3pm (UK time) for some conversation and quiet work together. You’re welcome to join us if you want a supportive space to get some writing, art-making or even some boring admin you’ve been avoiding done!
And here’s last week’s replay for those who can’t join us live.
May you live by leaves this week!
– Sam
Spot on. You and @Alpha Lo seem to be looking at the same solution path. And it's a good one. For myself, I am dispairing. I see the "anthro" in Anthropocene as the root problem. There are way too many of us and the burden of our numbers is changing the planet. Imagine fair Orkney with 200,000 people on it.
You're very right, so often 'green infrastructure' is built at the expense of nature, and so many 'green activists' seem to overlook nature. Yet nature is vital.