Joel Salatin: Nature is a Benevolent Lover That Wants to Be Caressed

There's a thing that keeps getting repeated and it's that we only have 60 more seasons left in our topsoil. This is a thing that gets repeated almost as if there's no solution to this, that because we have to feed so many people we're doomed. And what you're saying is no, we just can't do it this way because this way is unsustainable and it's unnatural to begin with. That's exactly right. So we have to fundamentally change. We have to use our carbon, our biomass strategically, which includes food scraps by the way. Use everything strategically. You can't just throw stuff away. This is sunlight that's supposed to be decomposed. I mean the fact that landfills get green environmental awards for poking methane tubes in the landfill and running the excavation equipment on the methane from the decomposing material in a landfill, it's… It shouldn't be in there. No, no, it's unconscionable. What we need to do is hook up. We need hookups. We need to where the waste streams, like they move right into the use streams and you have circles not linear thinking. I mean just another one for example is ponds. A lot of people don't realize that before the Europeans came to North America, North America was 8% water. Today we're less than 1%. I mean surface area. Think about the United States being 80% water including… 8% right? I'm sorry, 8%. 8% water. I mean think about that in Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. All right? Where did all that water come from? Beavers. Massive, massive beaver populations. I mean there were 200 million beavers and we now know archeologically digging up skeletons, some of them were as big as a Volkswagen car. Really? These were big, big. The megafauna is incredible. I mean it's the same as the wombats in Australia. Now these wombats are like 80 pounds or little, cute little wombats. They know by digging up skeletons they used to have 9 foot wombats in Australia. 9 foot wombats. So when we look at the megafauna that was here, the fact is that the planet used to have more animal weight on it than it does today with all the animals, all the factory farms and all the people. So it's not people and animals that are messing up the planet. It's the human management of the ecosystem that's messing up. The abundance here is through the roof. So imagine if we, and this is what we've been doing on our farm, is every time we get a few extra dollars we build another pond. Now we're not beavers, but we have excavation equipment that we can go in and build ponds so that when we have a flood and everything is flooding, we're actually trapping a lot of that, not all of it, but trapping a lot of it up on high ground permaculture style that we can then dispense for irrigation in a dry time so that we never pump from an aquifer. That's the commons. When you pump from an aquifer you're depleting the commons. But if you're reducing flooding and using that in a drought to keep vegetation growing when there's so much sunlight, then you're actually increasing the commons. And we believe very strongly that as a result of our farming we should not be depleting the commons, we should be increasing the commons. As a result of our, there should be more soil, more water, more breathable air, more wildlife, more pollinators, more… There's also been a false narrative that attributes most of our greenhouse gases are a significant number, a significant percentage of our greenhouse gases coming from cows and cow agriculture. And one of the things that they found through using satellite imaging and when they're trying to detect methane, they're finding it's landfills. These landfills are a huge, huge problem in terms of greenhouse gases. That this, the total wrong way of approaching it, the way you were saying, burying this biological material in the ground instead of using it as compost is actually not just counterproductive, but it's actually detrimental. It's not the wrong way to do it because it doesn't serve the soil. It actually fucks up the air. It's not a zero, it's a negative. It's a negative, but with the same amount of biological material. It's just managed incorrectly, which is really crazy when you stop and think about it. Sure it is. If all the biomass that we have, what's the word, non-leveraged or thrown away, if all the biomass we've thrown away in the last 100 years, if it had instead been leveraged for soil building, feeding chickens, I mean, whatever, today we would not have all that methane and today we would have soils that would be a lot richer and we would have better earthworm populations. We'd have a tremendous amount of soil, maintained soil abundant fertility. The beautiful thing is that this is not that difficult to bring back. I've been preaching this message all my life and it's exciting to now suddenly have people stepping back and realize, wow, we just kind of put a pause button and there are now dolphins in Venice again. In Shanghai you can see across the street. How about LA? Amazing pictures. Amazing pictures. When people say let's get back to normal, look, I don't want the – whatever. The tragedy that we're having, but I also don't want to go back to normal because normal was this foot on nature's neck saying we're going to – so that's where you start saying well what does the future look – what could a future look like? That's where we start talking about decentralization, integration, integrating all of our streams and – Large-scale change. Really large scale change. It's very disruptive, very disruptive, but everybody has a job. Everybody has a new thing. I mean my thing about the carbon economy, of course we're there in that hardwood region of Virginia near the Blue Ridge Parkway, Shenandoah National Park, all that stuff and the federal forests are atrocious. I mean dead trees. The fuel buildup is just ridiculous. Wouldn't it be cool if mommy or daddy could come home and their six-year-old says what did you do today? And mommy and daddy are able to say well we stewarded five acres up on Jack Mountain and kept it from having a fuel load to burn and took that biomass so that a farmer could feed his earthworms so there would be soil for your future, there will be abundance and soil for your future. I mean what an affirming, sacred, righteous vocation that would be. And it would affirm people who want to work outside and have calluses and blisters on their hands. You know we've spent a couple generations marginalizing what we call blue-collar people. And one of the big issues right now as we go to an AI, a techno future, is what do we do with people that like to work outside with their hands and sweat, you know, the Michael Rowe, you know, the dirty jobs. I'm suggesting that a carbon economy is one of many pathways to actually envisioning a future where thousands and thousands of people would be employed in healing ministries so that we'd be caressing our nest. You know, so many times the idea in agriculture and the farming community is that nature is a reluctant partner, that we've got to, you know, we've got to get them in a wrestling hole, we've got to dominate and conquistadore and we're going to make you, you know, we're going to push you. And actually nature is a benevolent lover that just wants to be caressed. And we haven't put attention on caressing in the right places for a long time.