I’m a wine critic and author with 30 years of tasting and fieldwork experience. It was the changing taste of my favourite wines that brought me to climate change, I founded The Wine and Climate Institute in Oxford (www.twacci.org) in 2016, after having published my first book on wine and climate change in 2014. This blog contains extracts from my UN research, my talks, articles and books, and it is all about wine, climate change, freshwater management, the water and earth sciences, coastal and maritime cultures such as the Vikings and the Saami, Northern issues, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and TEK, etc. Basically, all things Water and anything else that interests me. My greatest hope is to be part of the solution.
Water conservation starts in the dirt ... Agroforestry, RA, and crop suitability
/The most effective way in which to improve water conservation is to improve soil health. This is one of the aims of both Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Regenerative Agriculture (RA). A note: Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices, a subset of Regenerative Agriculture, whilst important, have as their aim to make soil more resilient to climate change events. Regenerative Agriculture goes one step further and has as its aim to renew and restore degraded soil. Soil is the home of water.
The part that soil plays in water management is greatly underestimated and misunderstood. When soil is healthy and retains all the water that it can, then costs go down, and yields increase (naturally) as does income (Hawken 2017 - read his ‘Drawdown’). All soils are composed of the same basic materials: air, water, mineral particles, and organic matter It is the proportions of these ingredients that vary and create the different soil profiles (O’Hare 1988). Decaying organic matter, or humus, is where the water and carbon (60%) are held. Farming practices that assist in protecting and renewing soil health and aid water and nutrient retention are those such as biodiversity, diverse cover crops, diverse and indigenous trees, no-tilling, and no chemicals.
Critical to protecting soil health is allowing it to live in a biodiverse environment. This means having indigenous trees that “act like lungs” (agroforestry). They give shade, provide livestock fodder, act as drought protection, provide firewood, provide leaves for mulch, and aid in soil regeneration (Hawken 2016:119). View trees as assets, as a capital expenditure with healthy returns (Schumacher 2011). Biodiversity allows a natural habitat to function in sync. Every plant will have more than one purpose and will complement the function of its neighbour. An example of what this looks like is Kristen Krash’s cacao plantation in Ecuador.
A biodiverse paradise
I had the pleasure of talking to Kristen Krash and am a great admirer of her work. She is the director of the Sueño de Vida Regenerative Farm in the cloud forest zone of northwest Ecuador. Since 2016, Kristen and her partner Juan have been regenerating degraded land via agroforestry. By implementing time-tested, indigenous methods proven to build soil fertility, create wildlife habitat, and produce optimal yields (as opposed to maximum yields), Kristen and Juan have transformed barren cow pastures into lush and productive secondary forests featuring Ecuador's famed heirloom indigenous cacao variety, Aroma Nacional. According to Krash, weeds, along with banana and plantain, are nature’s pioneer plants because they rapidly cover bare soil and begin performing helpful ecological functions. Weeds jump-start the system by protecting the soil from erosion and replenishing organic matter. Then, by planting different heights of indigenous trees, they produce different heights of canopies that perform different roles thus creating an eco-system where everything has multi-functions. Banana, plantain, and mango are neighbour trees that shelter the cacao from the wind and disease-carrying moulds and keep the soil and undergrowth moist.
“Irrigation can’t do that. Not even drip irrigation can mimic nature and the sort of moisture that is needed” Krash explains. The banana leaves fall to the ground and act as mulch and weed control. Such activity attracts the birds that eat the insects. “All of this is for free, and I don’t need pesticides, fertilisers, or herbicides” (Krash 2022). She laments the idea of there having been acres of cow pastures on her land before she bought it. “What about crop suitability? What was a cow pasture doing in a subtropical rainforest? They need a meadow or a savannah” (Krash 2022). Further, she then plants turmeric and cardamom under the cacao, creating a three-tiered system that creates additional revenue streams. This is reminiscent of the Native American “Three Sisters” system where corn, beans, and squash are grown together. The corn stalks hold up the beans and the squash is ground cover and eventually, mulch.
Crop Suitability as a resource manager
Biodiverse, indigenously planted, regenerative, and organic farming systems are the solution to sustaining ecological and economic wealth. These systems use ten times less water than chemical systems (Shiva 2016). Another farming practice that substantially contributes to a healthy and sustainable ecosystem is crop suitability. This term is often absent from the narrative or coupled with the discussion on indigenous plantings. Crop suitability is about matching a plant to its optimal ecological habitat. Nature does this easily for us: Vitis vinifera is indigenous to southwest Asia near the Caspian Sea, nestled in the Caucasus mountains. Having wandered far from home, the grapevine is still most suited to a relatively narrow geographical and climatic range; most often in mid-latitude regions that are prone to high climatic variability (between 30 degrees NS and 50 degrees NS latitude). But when brought overseas to the much warmer and drier climates of the New World, and subjected to the mechanisation of chemical conventional farming, the plant struggles. Cacao is native to the Amazonian rainforests and prefers a temperature between 18-32℃ with no direct sunlight or winds, yet today, half of the world’s chocolate is grown in Africa, in Ghana, and on the Ivory Coast. Sugarcane is native to tropical Asia yet is also grown in sub-Saharan Africa. Tobacco is indigenous to Argentina, yet the world’s largest producer is China. Even rice paddies are being grown in California’s Sacramento Valley, with flood irrigation.
The act of growing crops outside of their natural habitats is taking them out of their self-sustaining system. When they are taken out of these systems and grown as a monoculture, this false habitat then has to be manufactured for them, disrupting whichever ecosystem to which they have been moved. They can pose a threat to the indigenous species in the displaced habitat. (Vandana) Shiva provides a good example of this. The story of sugarcane in India in the 1970s began when the World Bank subsidised mechanical water withdrawal systems which ushered in an explosion of sugarcane plantations in Maharashtra just as it was hit hard by drought. The sugarcane fields literally converted groundwater into a commodity and left people and staple food crops thirsty for water. Sugarcane is only cultivated in 3% of this district but consumes 80% of the irrigation water and eight times more than other irrigated crops. Ironically, as the state was struggling with famine, the sugarcane sector was flourishing. Today, the water is gone (2016).
Fundamentally, one can say that Traditional Ecological Knowledge finds its origins in crop suitability. In the past, indigenous cultures predominantly consumed what was grown where they lived with additional forays into small-scale crop cultivations within a biodiverse system. The ecological unbalance was triggered not so much when cultivation commenced, but rather, when cultivation of non-indigenous crops became the dominant system, and this system was then further subjected to both intensive and chemical farming methods.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute
www.twacci.org
Nature’s capital: Water scarcity begins with water ownership
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Continuing on from the theme of my previous post, nowhere is the battle between water and man fought so earnestly than in America’s southwest where it germinated in the context of the post-Civil War industrial revolution. When writing about water ownership and the dams in the American West in Water Wars, Vandana Shiva provides several damning (excuse the pun!) statements perfectly illustrating the prevailing relationship with water: “W.J. McGee, President Theodore Roosevelt’s chief advisor to water programs, projected that the control of water was ‘the single-step remaining to be taken before Man becomes master over Nature” (Shiva 2016:54). And she quotes Francis Grove, the chief of construction in 1944, describing the blocking of the Sacramento River to build the Shasta Dam: “We had the river licked. Pinned down, shoulders right on the map. Hell, that’s what we came up here for” (Shiva 2016:54). One voice seemed to prophesy the future. In 1893, Wesley Powell, the Director of the US Geological Survey (and namesake of Lake Powell), warned that there was not “sufficient water to irrigate all the lands which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated.”
The idea that mankind had to vanquish nature in order to “come of age” and attain the epitome of its production potential is at the root of why “things are not going as well as they ought to be going” (Schumacher 2011:2). The noted economist E.F. Schumacher* wrote: “The arising of this error … is closely connected with the changes in the last three or four centuries in man’s attitude to nature. I should perhaps say: western man’s attitude to nature, but since the whole world is now in a process of westernisation, the more general statement appears justified. Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature, but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side” (2011:3).
*(A great read: Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered)
The “dehumanisation” of water, the replacement of its spiritual value with a commercial value caused a fatal disconnect. Positioning water as a disposable possession rather than as a rare gift makes it difficult to engender respect for it or a wish to protect it. It becomes a tool with which to overcome any obstacle on the road to “progress”. Schumacher argues the business case for water conservation is simply made if water is treated as a capital item as opposed to a limitless income. “We have been living on this natural capital of living nature for some time, but relatively modestly. It is only since the end of WWII that we have succeeded in increasing this rate to an alarming proportion”. If water were treated as a capital item, any savvy businessperson or policymaker would be primarily concerned with its conservation and with minimising its rate of use. Schumacher states the obvious when he states that “water is not made by man - once the well runs dry, it is gone” (2011:4 ). In 2010, the United Nations affirmed that access to fresh water is a fundamental human right. However, this does not then mean that this access to water cannot be privatised, controlled, and commercialised - which rather limits this right.
Water cannot be owned. It is common property and all efforts to curtail this basic right are at the root of all political-ecological injustices (Jenkins et al. 2017). A principal deterrent to water-smart agriculture is the water laws regarding water use and water ownership. A comprehensive treatment of the topic of international, national, and regional water laws is outside the scope of this post but it merits a mention.
Lawlessness and conflict
From the out-of-date, antiquated laws, to the new bills blatantly supporting short-term political agendas, water ownership is clearly one of the greatest impediments to the attainment of water freedom and water protection. “Neither international nor national water laws adequately respond to the ecological and political challenges posed by water conflicts. No legal document in contemporary law mentions the most basic law related to water - the natural law of the water cycle. Water conflicts continue to escalate and, to date, no appropriate legal framework exists to resolve these conflicts” (Shiva 2016:77). Indeed, it seems clear that every technological process to capture water interrupts its natural cycles. Man-made water conflicts could be minimised if water were recognised and treated as a common resource.
What does Hoover Dam got to do with wine? In the 1930s, the dam formed Lake Mead (our family used to water ski on it). It is one of several man-made reservoirs that take water from the Colorado River, which supplies household water, irrigation for farms and hydropower to Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and parts of Mexico. Today, water wars are raging in the wine regions, where water rights are traded like a commodity and dodgy legislation is hurtling the environment ever closer to its inevitable demise.
Last year I spoke to Mimi Casteel, owner, and winemaker at Hope Well Wine in Oregon, USA. She is an outspoken crusader for regenerative farming practices. She summarised the mindset of her contemporaries to me, as being one of control and power over legislative rights. The local laws engender an “if you don’t use it, you lose it” mentality, and only those who are “first in line” get the water. The idea that it may run out, is perceived by most to be “not my problem”. “With irrigation in the vineyards, you do get better yields, yes, but only for a short period of time. But with local producers, their irrigated acres are the most productive ones and they can’t get out of that cycle. Our system drives this abuse. They can’t even afford to take a year off and fix the soil. ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ and public perception is still very much the US mindset” (Casteel 2022). Casteel is concerned that only producers with money will be able to afford the transition to sustainable and regenerative farming practices, and then they will charge a high premium for their product, be it wine or another crop. There are shortcuts being taken as producers pay for green certifications to get greenwashed so to justify their premium price. “The land has to come first. Then we would have an abundance for all. Our covenant with Nature is to give more. But now it is all about keeping the wealthy, wealthy, and we cannot disengage from the commodity system” (2022). Shiva would add that the destruction of water resources and of forest catchments … aquifers and privatised water distribution, and polluting wells and rivers is a form of corporate terrorism. Shiva also proposes that a three-pronged approach be used when creating a legal framework for water: a movement against dams, a movement against the ecological hazards of intensive irrigation, and a movement for water rights (Shiva 2016). (Another great read: Vandana Shive: Water Wars).
What are the water rights in your area and how are they legislated? Is there a way a back to communal water ownership?
LJB, Founder of The Wine and Climate Change Institute, www.twacci.org
Joining Porto Protocol's Expert Panel ...
/I am honoured and thrilled to be joining this unique team of people and hope to contribute as much as I can to providing adaptation and mitigation solutions to climate change.
“The Porto Protocol Foundation is an international non-profit institution, founded by Taylor Fladgate Port, with hundreds of other members committed to making a greater contribution to mitigating climate change. Born in the wine industry and spread across the whole value chain, we strive to be a catalyst of climate action. Our belief is that, if we share our successes and experiences, our response to climate change will be more effective. We are a community of practice, an open platform, a dynamic database of resources and workable solutions, a place of inspiration for change and collaborative sharing. Porto Protocol has been awarded the prize for best Green Initiative by The Drinks Magazine Green Awards 2020.”
VISIT THEM : https://www.portoprotocol.com/
Water Wars: A Western mindset divorced from Nature
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Our modern, Western relationship with Nature, and, crucially, with water, is broken. This is the crux of the issue. The ancestral knowledge Westerners have left behind in their pursuit for “progress” and “civilisation”, was inherently tied to the animistic religious traditions of earth worship, where nature presides over man. In this worldview, religious, scientific, political, ecological, and economic systems are one and the same, with the protection and preservation of nature being the common denominator. Today, TEK is being studied and researched within modern contexts. Although some academics argue that this is because indigenous communities are “the targets of ‘socially inclusive’ neoliberal policies and protagonists in global anti-capitalist movements” and that the position of these social (pro-indigenous) movements in mainstream development is often ambivalent” (Laurie et al. 2005). Regardless of the intention behind the modern movement towards embracing IKS, the knowledge has always been there and it is befitting that it be re-adopted. The resistance by Western corporate and political stakeholders to validate and implement this vastly wealthy data pool is caused by the modern disengaged relationship of man with nature. This needs to be acknowledged and repaired.
Man vs Nature: The disconnect
The relationship between the Judeo-Christian God and Man has long been debated and revolves around the interpretation of the Book of Genesis 1:26-28. The verse reads “and God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” One interpretation is that man is indeed given complete control over the earth to exploit it at will, whilst the other suggests that man is given stewardship over the earth. But in both of these academic interpretations, dominance is conferred to Man, and his accountability is dismissed. Monotheism’s doctrine of man over nature, of subduing nature, is unique amongst the world religions. This is the disconnect.
In the words of historian Lynn White, Jr in his 1967 paper in Science, this is where we find “the historical roots of our ecological crisis. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.” Further, when the ancestral faith systems were rejected, so were the goddesses. For the pre-monotheistic people, “nature was not just a treasure trove of natural resources, nature was a Goddess and the whole of the environment was sacred” (Berkes 2001:113). The misogynist tint of the monotheistic religions erased the image of the goddess, of Mother Earth, of Gaia. “Not only has TEK been oppressed and marginalised as primitive knowledge, but native women’s knowledge and practices, in particular, have been denigrated and made invisible” (Nelson and Shilling, 2018).
The roots of pre-Christian animism still shallowly lurk beneath the veneer of the modern vernacular. The daily acts of personifying inanimate objects, such as the naming of a car or a boat, conversing with a plant, requesting the rain to stop, and the sun to emerge for an outdoor event … all are animistic hangovers. Animism (from ‘anima’, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in Latin), is man’s first belief system and is the acknowledgement that everything is energy. It is the belief that everything is imbued with energy, spirit, feelings, awareness, thoughts, moods, needs, and wants, and can be communicated with, directly, by humans, as all beings are connected to this energy. This personification of inanimate objects, plants, and natural phenomena comes very easily to humans. It was the first spark of the notion of a soul – a notion then taken and shaped by every world religion to make their own. In every pagan tradition, from Aristotle to Zoroaster, animists believe that all things possess energy, or a soul or spirit, either intrinsically or because they are inhabited. Prehistoric religion saw humans as being part of nature as opposed to dominating nature. It was a belief in a power beyond, but not necessarily above, or greater, that was evidenced by the first religious act: the burial of the dead, and even more, burials with objects denoting belief in an afterlife. Animism manifests in different ways: in the worship of spirit animals; totem objects; river gods; sacred places; holy springs; guardian spirits; amulets; and animal cults, such as bear and reindeer. It culminates in hunting rites and in burial rituals, and in the need for an intermediary such as a priest or shaman (Johnson-Bell 2022).
Water Worship
Earth. Air. Fire. And water. Of all the elements, water is the most sacred and magical. Wells, springs, streams, oceans, and lakes have been central to all pagan cleansing, healing, and birthing shamanic rituals. Water has the power to elevate every human endeavour into an act of worship. Temples and shrines were often built near water. And some form of the sauna has been used by the Siberians, Sami, and Finnish since 10,000 years ago. The Balts constructed holy bathhouses for rituals from birth to funereal. Many Creation stories begin with the words "at first there was nothing but water". The Vikings allegedly used wells for human sacrifices, and Odin gained his wisdom from drinking at Mimir’s well.
Water has spawned deities in every pantheon since the dawn of time. Water worship replete with water deities is present in every indigenous cosmology; both ancient and active. Every indigenous culture, including the Native American Wappo tribe of the Napa Valley; the Columbian’s Quimbaya, Chibchas, and Kalina (Caribs) cultures; Pre-Columbian Ecuador and its Las Vegas culture; Argentina’s Tupi-Guarani cosmology with their Mboi Tu’i, god of the waterways; and the Caribbean’s Erzulie in the guise of La Sirene. For the Slavs, rivers and springs were the dwelling place of the rusalki or the souls of those who died unnatural deaths. These water portals were thought to be thresholds between the realms of the living and the dead. The Celtic druids erected their temples near water and used water in their rituals. But “the spiritual worship of water was wiped out in Europe with the rise of Christianity. The new religion called water worship pagan and denounced it as an abomination” (Shiva 2016: 136). In AD 960 the Saxon King Edgar issued a decree forbidding the worship of fountains (Shiva 2016). Still, so profoundly was the relationship with water flowing through the collective DNA, that the North European pagan customs were absorbed into Christian rituals and reinvented in the guise of baptism, hand washing, and much later, spas and medical retreats.
Fast forward a few centuries - and bringing the topic back to wine a bit... in a recent interview I had with Nicolas Joly, the French winemaking pioneer of the biodynamic movement, he argued this Western mindset was also created by the West’s adoption of Descartes’ Cartesian education, which teaches that the mind is separate from the body. “We lost our connection to nature and adopted an automated way of thinking”. He adds, “with the twenty-two different permitted additives or 'tastes', today’s wines are artificial and cut off from all links to the soil”.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute
All sources are cited on the TWACCI site for easy reference.
Our renaming of ancient wisdom: Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)
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Traditional Ecological Knowledge: co-opted by the West
The latest nomenclature for sustainable farming practices is Regenerative Agriculture. Regenerative farming practices are meant to restore degraded land and include no-tillage, diverse cover crops, on-farm fertility, no, or minimum, pesticides or synthetic fertilisers, and multiple crop rotations in order to restore its carbon content (Hawken 2017). By doing this, the soil’s fertility, texture, water-retention ability, and all of the fauna return. Living organisms such as archaea, bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, protozoa, mites, nematodes, earthworms, ants, and more, all inhabit healthy soil. Hawken projects that “from an estimated 108 million acres of current adoption, regenerative agriculture to increase to a total of 1 billion acres by 2050. This increase could result in a total reduction of 23.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide, from both sequestration and reduced emissions. Regenerative Agriculture could provide a $1.9 trillion financial return by 2050 on an investment of $57 billion” (Hawken 2017). This is assuming that the increase will be realised both from an increase in organic farming methods as well as an increase of Conservation Agriculture to gradually transition to regenerative. Conservation Agriculture also focuses on improving soil but allows synthetic fertilisers and pesticides. Conservation agriculture is a more static system aiming to achieve sustainability, while Regenerative Agriculture is a more dynamic system, aiming to renew and rebuild.
Not coincidentally, Regenerative Agriculture embraces all of the components of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and its subset, the Traditional Ecological Systems (TEK). It aligns agriculture with natural principles, which is the way our indigenous populations and ancestors have always done. Jessica Hernandez, an environmental scientist, is cited by Wheeling (2022), as saying that Western conservation movements often ignore or co-opt indigenous science as their own, while sidelining the people who have produced that knowledge. It has been estimated that the market value of pharmaceuticals derived from indigenous medicine to be in the tens of billions (Wheeling 2022). “The conservation movement has a long history of sidelining indigenous peoples and discounting their ecological expertise. When the United States established its national parks system, ultimately setting aside some 85 million acres of territory, it forced Native American tribes from lands they'd stewarded for millennia” (Wheeling 2022).
We’re ignoring the past. This disregard for indigenous knowledge is replayed throughout history. The newly Christianised Norse population of Greenland, reliant upon crop cultivation and dairy farming, was not able to survive the Little Ice Age at the beginning of the 1400s and migrated (D’Andrea et al. 2011). The Inuit population, deemed as pagan, backward, and inferior, survived with their seal-hunting and whale-eating skills. The Norse on mainland Scandinavia ignored the knowledge of the indigenous Scandinavians, the Sami. These are the people who have inhabited Scandinavia for over five thousand years. The Roman historian, Tacitus, wrote of them in 98 C.E. They are reindeer hunters and fishermen. Again, they ate what was there. The hunter/gatherer model mixed with fishing and some farming seems to continually outperform Western food cultivation as the best defence against climatic changes.
More recently, in March 2010, The Arctic Ocean Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Chelsea, Canada, was convened. Ministers from Canada, Norway, the US, Denmark, and Russia were invited to discuss “responsible development”. The Chair of the conference, from The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, stated that the aim of the conference was that new frameworks for gas pipelines and fishing stocks to be built upon “a solid knowledge base – built on Arctic science, research, and traditional knowledge”. He added that “the Arctic Ocean coastal states have an important stewardship role in the region. By looking ahead, we are better placed to build a region that can fulfil its true potential and to ensure that change benefits its inhabitants.” Yet no representatives from the indigenous Inuit, Inuvialuit, or Sami community organisations were invited. As Jessica Hernandez points out, indigenous people are “seen as areas of expertise rather than experts… as research subjects rather than researchers” (Wheeling 2022).
Indigenous Knowledge Systems and TEK: Working with Nature
Traditional Knowledge Systems (TEK) are defined as “a cumulative body of knowledge, practice, and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship of living beings including humans with one another and with their environment. It is a subset of indigenous knowledge, which is local knowledge held by indigenous peoples or local knowledge unique to a given culture or society” (Berkes, 2001).
Indigenous methods vary according to habitat. They are different everywhere but are inherently localised systems that share common goals. Dennis Martinez, a community organiser from California’s San Joaquin Valley, has summarised the “essence of the indigenous model” as comprising five ideas: “1) the indigenous concept of ownership; 2) the ‘minimum necessary yield’ or leaving a biodiversity surplus trumps ‘maximum sustained yield’; 3) that people are obliged in the creation of biodiversity to promote ecological stability and diverse production in a constantly changing environment; 4) to obey the Natural Law, e.g., do not force plants or animals to grow; 5) to use incentives for wealth redistribution” (Nelson and Shilling 2018: 169-170). Martinez also asserts that the reasons for Western science’s rejection of the indigenous expertise in land stewardship are that they believe that “nature was so bountiful that little or no effort was required by indigenous peoples to survive reasonably well; that indigenous populations were so low that they could not have made much of a difference in the structure and composition of the landscape even if they had wanted to, and that their technology was too primitive to have had any significant effect on the environment” (Nelson and Shillin 2018: 154-155).
TEK can be directly applied to freshwater management and irrigation. Its main themes of soil health, biodiversity, crop suitability, dry farming, rainwater harvesting, and minimum necessary yields are the natural directives that will steer the sector through the climatic trials to come. Indigenous knowledge systems are critical for restoring the agricultural crisis and the balance of the earth’s biospheres. It is this ancestral knowledge, tried and tested, upon which sustainable farming systems should be modelled. “Indigenous peoples have secure land tenure on 1.3 billion acres globally (18% of all land area), although they live on and manage far more. Under their stewardship, there are higher rates of sequestration and lower rates of deforestation (Hawken 2017).
The past is the only way to preserve the future.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute
CHEMICAL WINEFARE: The War is over, but not the Revolution ...
/Have you ever wondered from where the use of modern chemicals in agriculture originated and how irrigation and chemicals became related? After World War II, the modern use of supplemental irrigation to increase yields was aligned with agrochemical farming, or what became ‘conventional’ agriculture. The post-World War II Green Revolution was the application of science and technology to increase global food production. The genetic engineering of high-yielding varieties (HYV) was the lead technology. An example of this is the well-intentioned work of the Nobel prize-winning American agronomist Norman Borlaug, who, in 1944, left for Mexico to fight a wheat fungus and developed a high-yielding, disease-resistant variety. So productive was this new variety, that the wheat stalk tipped over due to the excess weight of the grain. It was then crossed with a Japanese wheat variety which produced wheat with a shorter stalk able to remain upright. This development doubled wheat yields in Mexico, and then in India and Pakistan, where it staved off famine. However, the global population rates are increasing more rapidly than food production (Borlaug 1958). And unbeknownst to this agricultural pioneer, the chemical accoutrements that accompanied genetic engineering were to go on to breed social injustice and substantial ecological damage. Agricultural fertilisers and pesticides are essential for the HYVs of cereal crops, which ingest nutrients, and water, from the ground faster and in much greater quantities than indigenous varieties.
The world was under the enchantment of the promises of great productivity and profit, mostly undertaken by the chemical manufacturers. Greater food “production” became confused with food “security”, and both upstaged food “quality”. Meanwhile, the chemical manufacturers, Bayer (Monsanto), BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, Griesheim-Elektron, and Chemische Fabrik vorm, had formed IG Farben in 1925, and became the largest single campaign donor to Hitler's election campaign and his war effort, only after having discharged all of their Jewish employees. A major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort, IG Farber developed the nerve gas Sarin, and the hydrogen cyanide-based pesticide, Zyklon B, used in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Disbanded by the Allies after the war, IG Farben’s employees were either jailed or moved on to collaborate with other chemical companies in new professional positions. With the war over, the remaining chemical companies and their international subsidiaries had to find a new market, and so they turned to the world’s farmers, effectively declaring war on the world’s food supply and nature - the new enemy.
“Industrial agriculture has pushed food production to use methods by which the water retention of soil is reduced and the demand for water is increased… the shift from organic fertilizers to chemical fertilizers and the substitution of water-prudent crops by water-thirsty ones have been recipes for water famines, desertification, waterlogging and salinization” (Shiva 2016). The Green Revolution forced Third World agriculture towards wheat and rice production. These new, non-indigenous, genetically modified crops demanded more water than millet and consumed three times more water than the indigenous varieties of wheat and rice. The consequences have been costly and the main goal still remains unachieved (Shiva 2016). Their indigenous irrigation methods were also replaced, deemed too inefficient, and were “replaced by oil engines and electric pumps that extracted water faster than nature’s cycles could replenish the groundwater” (Shiva 2016).
The post-World War II Green Revolution separated agriculture from the land. This long-held wisdom, that the world cannot be fed without chemicals and synthetic fertilisers may be losing its hold. Soil and water depletion costs $37 billion in the United States annually and $400 billion globally. This presumably is impetus enough to initiate new investigations in farming methodologies that reject tillage and chemicals (Hawken 2017). “Evidence points to a new wisdom: The world cannot be fed unless the soil is fed” (Hawken 2017).
However, this is far from a new idea…
LJB, Founder of The Wine and Climate Change Institute
History Repeating: The great river civilisations and irrigation ...
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Irrigation initially provides an increase in soil fertility and thus, increased yields. But excessive or long-term supplemental irrigation leads to soil salinisation and biological depletion and soil death. The great river civilisations were victims of this irony - of reaching their optimal productivity levels with the help of irrigation to then only decline due to this very success. The North American Hohokam tribe lived along the Salt River Valley in Arizona's hot and dry the Sonoran Desert 600-1600 years ago. Highly-sophisticated irrigation engineers, they created the greatest and most complex canal system, 1,500 kilometres (932 miles) of canals in the prehistoric Americas. Initially, this system worked and crop production was abundant. It was the accumulation of salts that damaged the soil and eventually killed the crops. Interestingly, there is evidence that they also farmed in areas away from the riverbanks, in purpose-built terraces that caught rainwater.
The occasional great floods could flush the salts out of the soil and allow them to gain a small reprieve, but such floods then caused other, insurmountable problems. It was their total reliance on river water irrigation that invited their downfall. Salinated soils and soil erosion due to irrigation are recurring themes throughout agriculture's history. There is solid evidence that the Mesopotamian civilisations along the Tigres and Euphrates flourished and then failed due to human-induced salinisation. After almost five thousand years of thriving irrigated agriculture, the Sumerian civilization failed.
The Mayans of Central America had a productive, sophisticated farming system that supported its major population growth. So to sustain this growth, crop cultivation encroached onto more marginal land, stressing the soil and water resources, which in turn created a more vulnerable system. The response was further intensification. They developed irrigation and agricultural technologies so to adapt and continue as long as possible, which only weakened the fragile ecological system further. Then there is the Viru Valley of Peru, the Indus Valley civilisation, and the Yellow River Valley … all have long been plagued by salinisation. In fact “historical records of the last 6,000 years show that civilized man, with few exceptions, has never been able to continue a progressive civilization in one locality for more than…800 to 2,000 years. And in most cases civilizations grew for a few hundred years, then declined or were forced onto new land” (Gelburd 1985). These cautionary tales echo today’s current ecological state of emergency, verbatim.
The lessons have not been learned. Soil salinity is still the greatest threat to agricultural productivity and sustainability. Shabir, Zaman, and Heng (see Sources page) report that statistics on salt-affected soils vary according to different data sources. But confirm that saline soils already occupied more than twenty per cent of the world’s irrigated area by the mid-1990s and that since then, the extent of salinity has likely increased. They assert that in some countries, salt-affected soils occur on more than half of the irrigated lands (2018).
The United States is the greatest offender of water waste. “In the western states, irrigation accounts for ninety per cent of total water consumption. Irrigated land increased from 4 million acres in 1890 to nearly 60 million in 1977, of which 50 million were in the arid western states. Irrigation waters contribute 500,000 to 700,000 tons of salt annually to the Colorado River: the loss of yield due to salt is estimated at $113 million a year. In San Joaquin Valley, California, there is an estimated loss of $312 million annually” (Shiva). These figures will have only increased as they are sourced from 2001. Shiva further asserts that with aquifer depletion, such as with the Ogallala Aquifer in Texas, which has between five and eight million acre-feet of water extracted annually, the only option left will be to transition “to water-prudent dryland farming or to abandon agriculture altogether” (2016).
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute, www.twacci.org
Irrigation’s salty tears
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What we have come to know as ‘conventional’ farming methods, use science and technology to increase yield productivity and production efficiency: genetic engineering, mechanisation, pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilisers, tilling, and irrigation water are all examples. Conventional agriculture “treats the soil as a medium to which mineral fertilisers and chemicals are added. The soil is ploughed, tilled, cultivated, or disked two or more times a year. Herbicides clear the weeds, insect infestation is treated with pesticides, and blight or rust is sprayed with fungicides. Lack of water is compensated for with irrigation which can cause salinization of the soils.” (Hawken 2017).
Conventional, large-scale irrigation does not work anymore - actually, it never did. Proponents of industrial irrigation argue that irrigation has been used by man since early history. Indeed, there is evidence of irrigation for six thousand years in Egypt. The earth and its biospheres have existed for 4.6543 billion years. Homo sapiens have been on earth for about three hundred thousand years and only developed agriculture during the Holocene, ten thousand years ago. Up until then, humankind were hunters and gatherers. People ate what was there, in their immediate environment. It was through our transition from the Hunter/Gatherer Mesolithic to the farming Neolithic era that this greater timeline shows us the impacts of what is a decidedly “modern” farming technique. Irrigation was used, yes, making it the greatest technological invention ever created, but then it was abused and caused the downfall of several great civilisations. Lessons have been learned. Or have they? The transition from hunting and gathering to growing crops under rainfall quickly graduated to using irrigation and then to using supplemental irrigation as populations and economies grew.
The International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) defines irrigation as “the replenishment of soil-water storage in plant root zone through methods other than natural precipitation”. And defines “supplemental irrigation” as “the addition of small amounts of water to essentially rainfed crops during times when rainfall fails to provide sufficient moisture for normal plant growth, in order to improve and stabilize yields” (ICID). Interestingly, this definition suggests that the intention of supplemental irrigation is not to increase yields but to maintain them. Clearly, the idea of increased irrigation to the extent to artificially increase yields was an irresistible next step.
Water for irrigation can be taken from surface stores such as lakes, reservoirs, and rivers, or from groundwater. These waters can be distributed via canals, dams, dikes, aqueducts, and water storage facilities. Types of irrigation range from the total flood system as is used with paddy fields, to spray, to drip irrigation, Partial Root-zone Drying (PRD), and Regulated Deficit Irrigation (RDI), where precise amounts are measured out to each individual plant, as is seen in viticulture.
Irrigation became the new technology that permitted irrigation in arid and extreme environments; an efficient coping mechanism. However, history reveals that it is not a sustainable solution, economically or ecologically. Supplemental irrigation may be the quick fix to stabilising and increasing yields, but ultimately it reduces yields because it renders the soil incapable of sustaining agriculture due to salinisation. Further, as irrigation flushes the humus out of the soil, nutrients are then replaced by chemical fertilisers, replacing the soil’s own, organic nutrients, further sending the soil hurtling towards its demise.
The real problem with irrigation is Salinisation, which occurs when groundwater levels are close to the surface. In clay soils, this may be within three metres of the surface, whereas on sandy and silty soils, it is less. Capillary forces bring water to the surface where it may be evaporated, leaving behind any soluble salts it is carrying. Salinity problems can occur under all climatic conditions and can result from both natural and human-induced actions (irrigation). Generally speaking, saline soils occur in arid and semi-arid regions where rainfall is insufficient to meet the water requirements of the crops, and leach mineral salts out of the root zone.
Salt-affected soils occupy, on a global basis, 952.2 million hectares of agricultural land. And in the world’s vineyards where irrigation is legal (the New World, and now even parts of the Old such as southern France and Spain), salinisation is the greatest threat. Speaking to producers from Australia to California’s Central Valley, the new topic is soil regeneration …. They are desperate to bring back their over-irrigated, nutrient-deleted, dead soils.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institutewww.twacci.org
Freshwater Management and the UN's SDG deadline …
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From the whisper of a drop of rain falling onto a humid forest floor to the roar of a sea storm thundering against a stony cliff, water speaks. It shares its memories, conveys its needs, and imparts its wisdom. Despite all of its forms, the many voices of this elusive and magical shapeshifter are not being heard. And time is running out. In 2015, the UN fully committed itself to implement its 17 Sustainable Development Goal Agenda by 2030. Presently, the concern is that COVID-19 and its far-reaching, socio-economic impacts have retarded this progress, and an urgent call has been raised for new and innovative approaches to further propel the needed implementation actions. The UN suggests that the Covid pandemic is the main setback, but there are other, more critical factors that are hampering progress, particularly in the agricultural sector and pertaining to freshwater management and luxury crops. Here, the implementation of sustainable farming practices is being impeded by
1) a lack of understanding of the severity of conventional farming’s ecological impacts,
2) a disregard for, and resistance to, Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), and
3) a Western mindset divorced from nature. Combined, these factors create an inability to perceive an incentivising business case sufficiently robust to trump these obstacles.
With more prolonged and severe droughts and irregular rainfall patterns, increased freshwater irrigation is being relied upon as the primary adaptation tool, when it is mitigation’s greatest foe. One of the greatest threats to the climate is the use of agricultural irrigation, which accounts for 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal. This can be changed. The transition away from freshwater irrigation to dry farming or to rainwater harvesting could substantially reduce agriculture’s water footprint, reducing surface and groundwater depletion as well as increasing soil health and yields. Investing in sustainable agricultural practices needs to be understood to not be an obligation, but an opportunity. This is particularly critical in the context of luxury crops such as cacao, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and wine, where large-scale, industrial irrigation is unnecessarily used in excess to increase yields and profits, compromising ecological viability in favour of economic gain. In this context, the risk of not irrigating is mistakenly perceived as greater than the damage and short-term advantages of irrigation.
The cultivation of luxury crops has fallen into the same intense farming systems as the cash, subsistence crops. Wine, as well as cacao, coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane, have become mono-cultures, grown in non-indigenous climates and habitats. The foreign habitat and lack of biodiversity create the need for chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides. This is then acerbated by freshwater irrigation used to further artificially increase yields resulting in soil degradation, erosion, salinisation, and inferior crop quality, which further increases carbon release and feeds the cycle of extreme drought and rain patterns, imploding the eco-systems. There is no case for employing freshwater irrigation in luxury crops. The combination of dry farming and limited supplemental irrigation through harvested rainwater, using region-appropriate TEK and native varieties, is the only viable economic, ecologic, and socially-responsible solution towards securing optimal sustainable crop yields.
LJB, Founder, The Wine and Climate Change Institute
www.twacci.org
Is Earth going to run out of water?
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Freshwater East in south Wales
A few years ago I was on a trip to the U.S. - not something I do often. I had left Scottsdale, Arizona for Paris, France, as a student in 1989. But the memories of our garden have always remained fresh in my mind. Our sparkling blue pool was framed by vibrant crimson bottlebrush bushes, shimmering silver-dollar trees, and rampant bougainvillea (none of these being indigenous, by the way). There were grapefruit, orange, and lemon trees surrounded by manicured lawns … all kept drenched by a daily flood and spray-sprinkler system from the neighbourhood canal in which we used to catch crayfish and play. It was an oasis of heavenly perfumes and colours. Yet the landscape below me then, as the plane approached Sky Harbour, was shockingly unfamiliar. As we cruised over Camelback Mountain, I handed the flight attendant my pile of empty plastic water and wine bottles, looked out the window and spotted the family home … a patch of dark green in a vast tableau of brownness. In fact, the only green I could detect were the patches of gardens and the larger swathes of golf courses. This time, this trip … the tired topography was ever starker and I felt as though I were looking down upon a different planet.
Headlines scream of water shortages, dried-up aquifers, emptied reservoirs, and drought. Can the Earth really run out of water? It certainly seems as though it can, but, no, it cannot. So does that mean we have nothing to worry about? No.
Water, in all her physical manifestations, will always remain on Earth, as part of Earth’s atmosphere. Whether a cascading waterfall, a tropical rainfall, an Arctic iceberg, or the steam from your tea kettle, her cycle is never-ending and almost perfectly self-contained. Nor do we have to worry about Earth becoming the next Venus: the scientific consensus is that the Earth does not absorb enough sunlight for the same runaway greenhouse scenario.
The problem is that we don’t have enough freshwater available. Further, the freshwater we do have is not where it used to be found. This gives the artificial impression that water shortages are “local” problems, which too easily allows us to say “ah, so then it’s not MY problem”. This is dangerous, for the fact is that any shortage, anywhere, is indicative of something going terribly wrong somewhere within the global water cycle: it is a holistic system and isolated issues are inherently impossible.
For me, it feels like climate change is pushing water from one state into another too quickly … its transformations are in fast-forward. Heat is evaporating it from rivers and melting it from icebergs … its natural rhythms between each of its physical forms are not being allowed to play out in real-time. We are using freshwater faster than the Earth can replenish it. We use too much and we mismanage what we use. We are not working at the Earth’s pace, we are working against it - literally swimming upstream.
70% of the Earth’s surface is water. And 97.5% of that is seawater and unfit for human consumption. So of the some 3% freshwater, only 1.2% can be drunk, the rest is locked in glaciers, ice caps, permafrost, or the ground. And of the little freshwater we have, 70% is used by global agriculture. Most of our drinking water comes from rivers and streams – and we’re not at all doing a good job in keeping that clean and safe, are we?
Ultimately, it is water’s ability to endlessly morph, and to be uncomplainingly used and reused, that is her greatest gift. But this knowledge offers little solace against the great threat of our continued mismanagement and over-use of what is our most essential ingredient to life.
Welsh Wine Week is almost here! Join us ...
/FROM THE WELSH WINE WEEK WEB-SITE:
Hot, sandy beaches dotted with palm trees ... medieval castle ruins nestled in rugged coastlines ... a buzzing indie food scene and days spent meandering through wine country sipping crisp whites, fruity reds, and refreshing sparkling wines. Where am I? Italy? No. I'm home in Wales, a wine-producing country and a food-lover's heaven.
With staycations now the "new norm" and climate change warming things up, the timing is perfect for the Welsh wine scene to show-off its treasures.
Whether the Romans brought their wine to Wales or grew it, is a subject for debate. But we do know that after the medieval period of monastic viticulture, the first commercial vineyard in Britain was in Wales, planted by the Marquess of Bute at his Castle Coch, outside Cardiff, in 1875. This definitely bestows upon Wales a distinct historical pedigree.
There was another spurt of vineyards in the 1950s, but the real revival in Wales began in the late 1970s.
“The savvy growers watch and learn,
and aren't repeating the same mistakes
made by other regions.”
The Welsh may make less wine than the English, but it's making its mark on the wine world in a uniquely Welsh way. Winemaking here has increased seventy percent over the past decade and its future is more than promising. The secret is that the grape growers know how to turn their perceived disadvantages, into advantages. For example, Wales will always be small, but this means that large-scale industrial winemaking won't ever make sense. And it creates an enormous potential for discovering individual, distinguishing micro-climates. Their vision is that of small-quantity, terroir-driven, quality wines.
In wine, smaller is better. If Wales is considered the smaller sibling, it knows how to take advantage of that, too.
The savvy growers watch and learn, and aren't repeating the same mistakes made by other regions. They know that they are perfectly positioned to leapfrog into the lead. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in their work in sustainable, organic and biodynamic growing practices.
Many producers are choosing to go with the Old World-wine style. They can do this. Welsh grapes taste, well, "Welsh". They taste of the cool climate, the distinctive soils, and the lush landscapes in which they are grown as opposed to tasting as though grown anywhere, in bulk. Wales has a rich geochemical diversity. Think of its mining history and ancient volcanic activity. Wales, too, is on average, topographically higher than south-east England, providing vineyards with optimum exposure.
You'll find many of the same cool-climate grape varieties being grown in Wales as in England. They both started with the successful German hybrids, from Bacchus to Solaris. However, climate change means that the classic French and International varieties, particularly the three Champagne grapes (Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier), now grow alongside them. And as with England, the sparkling wines are taking the lead. Welsh sparkling wines are consistently winning international awards. That said, I've got my eyes on the reds: the Pinot Noirs and the new Cabernet Franc plantings.
Where to start? From Glyndwr in the Vale of Glamorgan established in 1979, to the newbies at Gwinllan y Dyffryn (Vale Vineyard) in Denbighshire, you are spoiled for choice. Welsh wines are world-class, and they have indeed, given us the world at our feet.