The workshop was a kickoff event for an upcoming course.

With widespread disruption of production and transport of synthetic fertilizers due to the war on Iran - and increasing awareness of the ecological effects of fertilizer use - the world needs examples of large-scale farmer-led transitions away from synthetic fertilizers, using methods that don’t collapse farm production or produce widespread famine.

The Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming (APCNF) initiative is one of the strongest examples of success.

APCNF’s farmers replace synthetic fertilizers (as well as GMO seeds and pesticides) with cutting-edge agroecological approaches that include intensely diverse cover crops, natural biostimulants, foliar sprays and seed pelletization to support healthy plant growth and soil biology, and year-round food production for people, pollinators, and grazing animals.

These extremely low-cost methods use local seeds and ingredients from within the village, unhook farmers from the debts and dependencies of conventional/corporate agriculture, and result in far higher net profits directly to the farmer with little to no loss in yield, even in the first couple of years.

These methods also boost populations of beneficial insects, and birds; increase the health of both farmers and consumers; and provide dramatic local cooling effects and increased groundwater supplies.

Vijay Kumar describes the desperate conditions among farmers in Andhra Pradesh before this project, and then outlines the community organizing (mostly by rural Women’s Self Help Economic Groups practicing mutual aid) that made this project able to scale quickly (from 40,000 farmers in 2016, to 1.8 million in 2026) without any cash incentives or promises of market premiums.

Vijay Kumar traces the development of the innovations used by these farmers, and the scientists that inspired them. He also describes the cutting-edge strategies and research findings that the growing community of farmer scientists are working on.

Kumar’s vision is to transition all 6 million farmer households in the state by 2035. He is also championing replication and scaling Natural Farming in 22 other states in India and in 2 other countries: Zambia and Sri Lanka.

Didi Pershouse and Henry Nichols of the Land and Leadership Initiative provide context with a short historical and socioeconomic overview, describing:

• The history of fertilizer production and use, and its relationship to weapons and wars

• How the current political situation has disrupted fertilizer production and transport

• How this is compounding a global food system that is already unworkable

  • The “Green Revolution” and its unintended consequences on soils, water, farmer debt and dependency, etc.

  • Corporate profiteering on the backs of farmers

• The importance of networks and organizing: to enable a widespread, safe, rapid farmer-led transition to agroecological, regenerative, and natural farming approaches.

  

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Here’s where you can sign up to express your interest in the upcoming course as we get it underway.

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About Our Presenters:

Vijay Kumar Thallam is Executive Vice Chairman of the Indian non-profit Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RYSS), and an advisor on Agriculture and Cooperation to the State Government of Andhra Pradesh. In his 40 years in government, he has spent more than 30 years in leading large scale community mobilization and promotion of livelihoods of rural women, tribal communities and farmers.

He served a record 10 years as CEO of the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty in Andhra Pradesh and led the mobilization and empowerment of 11.5 million rural poor women into thrift and credit based self-help groups, so they could move out of poverty. Since 2015, he has been leading the climate resilient, A.P Community managed Natural Farming (APCNF) programme of the Government of Andhra Pradesh.

Vijay Kumar was the Vice Chair (Production) of the Champions Network for the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. He and his team at Rythu Sadhikara Samstha (RySS) accepted the Gulbekian Prize for Humanity in 2024, and the APCNF project is one of four finalists for the Food Planet Prize of 2026 (to be announced in June).

Henry Nichols works as an editor and researcher at the Land and Leadership Initiative. He has worked with Rural Vermont and the People’s Agroecology School of Vermont. He is an anti-war and agroecological organizer, and believes that farmers and other workers should have the opportunity to work in ways that benefit people and the planet, without being forced to use destructive chemicals or build tools of war against humans and other species. In 2025 he helped Thetford, Vermont become the first municipality in the United States to adopt the Apartheid Free Communities pledge.

Didi Pershouse (that’s me!) is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. She is well known as an innovative educator and writer, and her facilitator’s guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries.

She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving 1.8 million smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.

She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.

She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.

She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by the late Carol Sanford), and is seeding new communities of practice in a wisdom tradition using living systems frameworks.

She writes The Wisdom Underground on Substack.

“Nested Intelligences: Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World: The Role of Plants.” Click here for details and to sign up.

Whether you are a mushroom or a moose, a ladybug or a wasp, a tuna fish or an alligator, you get your food and energy from plants. Whoever we are, we feast on dead plants or live plants. Or we eat other beings that ate plants. Or we drink the milk or blood from beings that ate plants. Or we eat beings that ate beings that ate other beings that ate plants. etc. You get the picture.

Plants take the sun’s energy and give it to us in a form we can use, and then provide the oxygen we need to actually make use of that energy. Sunlight energy gets passed along through life, and shows up as movement and heat and energy in our bodies. We can lift things and pull things, make nests and art and babies, make electrical signals to think about the world around us, and move our lips or beaks to communicate with each other, using energy from the sun.

Plants source minerals (from rocks and relationships), CO2 from the air, and water from the soil, and pass them along to us as well in complex molecules that plants produce as the ingredients of life. These macro and micro nutrients move through life (as we consume each other) and help to determine how well we can use sunlight energy: for example whether our tissues repair themselves after a hard day of working, flying, or burrowing; whether we can fight off a virus; whether our blood can carry enough oxygen; and whether we perceive clearly and make good decisions.

When plants get just what they need, in the right amounts, at the right time, they can create and pass along all the things—energy/carbohydrates, fats/fatty acids, protein/amino acids, enzymes, phytochemicals, fiber, minerals, and vitamins—that allow membranes to form, inner and outer signaling to happen, metabolism and mood to be regulated, and individual and systemic intelligence to develop.

• If plants don’t get what they need, that deficit gets passed along through the entire food web. For example, if plants don’t get what they need to create compounds that ward off viruses and insects and fungal diseases, neither do the rest of us. If plants don’t get enough selenium to create antioxidants, deal with stress, and keep their immune systems working….neither do the rest of us.

• Likewise, if plants take up something excessively, those excesses get passed along to the rest of us. Heavy metals (lead, arsenic, cadmium), neurotoxins (from pesticides and pollution), and nitrates (from synthetic fertilizer use) can interfere with life’s processes in extreme ways.

Plants also create the climatic conditions for life as we know it. Through their relationships and metabolism, plants intelligently regulate everything we need to live here: oxygen levels, CO2 levels, the temperature of the earth and sky, the formation and movement of clouds and rain, and the ability of land to soak up water, rather than letting it all run off into the salty seas.

So, as we consider all the nested intelligences at work in life, it’s really important to consider whether plants are getting what they need—because plants provide the energy, ingredients, and conditions for life.

(And yes, for those—like me—who are picky about details, there are a few exceptions. Extremophile and chemosynthetic archaea and bacteria that live in volcanos and deep sea vents, for example, don’t get their energy from plants. There was life on earth before photosynthesis, after all.)

In my first article in this series—Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems: Why We Can’t Think and What to Do About It—I outlined an entire flow of intelligences. In part two—Wisdom at the Edge—I wrote about membranes, and how their discernment of what to take in and what to leave out creates the boundary between the living and non-living aspects of our world.

Today I am pointing to the place we can make a difference (surprisingly quickly) in the ability of all life to adapt and respond to the chaos of the moment. The conditions we create for plants—in farms, forests, fields, oceans, and even lawns—really matters to the life that eats those plants. And even though it seems utterly unrelated to violence and pandemics and politics, our most important intervention point right now might just be how we treat plants.

Because when plants don’t get what they need, the most basic layers of intelligence stop working correctly: Cell membranes lose the wisdom of knowing what to take in and what to leave out. Genetic patterns and memory go in strange directions. Community dynamics fail. Bees get confused. Frogs and calves are born with missing limbs and intestines outside their bellies. Minerals needed for oxygen in our blood switch forms, and babies turn blue. Fertility drops. Rain stops. Heat rises.

And increasingly, people really can’t think very well—about each other, about living systems, about governance, capitalism, our addictions, and all sorts of things.

So, what are the conditions in which plants get their needs met?

This is going to be a messy list—because life is not an organized bulleted list—but hopefully you can follow along.

The basics

The first two conditions are pretty easy these days:

• Plants need CO2 from the air

• And sunlight

The CO2 for plants in a natural system comes directly from the respiration and outbreaths of the other life all around the plants. Mice, mushrooms, grazing animals, worms, soil microbes, people, etc. exhale CO2 and it is taken up straight away into the stomata (tiny openings on the underside of leaves, ready for us, as we stroll along breathing under the trees, or scurry under the grasses, or burrow underground). This is a nice arrangement, since plants provide us with the oxygen for our in-breaths.

Nowadays crops get a lot of their CO2 from the general wafting around of air full of CO2 from burning of fossil fuels and other fires, and way less from the life living around them, because we don’t allow life other than plants on most farms. No mice, no fungi, no foxes. (We kill 'em, trap 'em, spray 'em, or fence 'em.) Hardly even any people. But car exhaust and burning cities still provide CO2, and plants can still use it to grow, even though I imagine it probably is a little strange to them.

Sunlight? It’s still here. Though in places with horrible air pollution, the dimming can be hard on plants.

The other basic need is not that simple these days:

• Plants need water. In order to have water on land, they need two things:

  • Plants need rainfall

    Regular rainfall and deep, consistently refilled groundwater supplies rely on a “living climate” which is created by….plants! Plants make clouds and rain, and move rain across continents, and this requires a tremendous amount of diverse vegetation with water at the root zone: enough water so the plants can transpire that water and cool the area, and also create bio-aerosols that the water vapor can condense onto.

    Condensation (of plant-transpired water onto plant-created aerosols) creates low-pressure areas that pull the clouds and rain across continents. This process requires intact diverse forests, deep prairies, and oceans full of phytoplankton (plants). We have cut forests and replanted monoculture tree farms, tilled the prairies and planted crops (or simply paved them over and built cities). And we have killed off the whales whose poop fertilized the phytoplankton.

    So, plants need rain, but rain also needs plants. When we mess with forests, prairies, and oceans, we mess with rain.

  • Plants need spongy soil to hold water at the root zone, protected from evaporation.

    I have written and taught a lot over the last ten years about the “soil sponge” and the rainmaking abilities of a “living climate.” But here’s a very quick review. The soil sponge is the structural and functional integrity of soils: a living matrix that only forms when diverse plants are allowed to grow continuously in undisturbed soil, and feed the biological workforce of soil life.

    Soil life binds tiny rocks—sand, silt, and clay particles—into aggregates (tiny clumps), leaving pore spaces in between. Fungal hyphae and roots tie those aggregates into little bundles. Life (roots, nematodes, mites, worms, insects, voles, snakes) moves through creating tunnels of all sizes. These pores and tunnels are strong and sacred space—cathedrals underground—that make life possible: providing water, air, space for roots to explore, some clever little oxygen-free zones for the weirdos, and underground climate control—not too hot, not too cold. The soil sponge also holds nutrients in place in a “reserve pantry” without leaching out during rain.

    Most places no longer have a soil sponge. It has been plowed up, paved over, and crushed under heavy machinery, and the workforce that could rebuild it has been poisoned and starved. Plants feed the workforce. Plants need the sponge, and plants create the sponge.

The workforce

• Plants need to live amongst a diverse and active biological workforce for all sorts of reasons:

  They need

  • soil life that:

    • organizes broken-down rocks into structured soil that holds water, air, and nutrients (see above)

    • transforms and transports nutrients to plants

  • all the other animals, birds, and insects that:

    • nibble and graze to help keep larger plants from shading out smaller ones

    • break down life’s materials and turn it into fertilizer in the form of manure and urine, and in doing so transport microbes and nutrients and seeds and pollen

    • and return nutrients uphill against gravity.

    Why is this moving, nibbling workforce important?

• Plants need nutrients to be brought to them

  Plants can’t travel to go find food. Most other life can. Life eats and excretes, breaks down rocks and bones, takes apart dead things, transforms chemicals, and releases and transports nutrients—across landscapes, between plants, and uphill. This provides plants with all kinds of interesting minerals and compounds and enzymes in forms that they can actually take up and use.

  Plants pass all that along to us—in forms we can take up and use. Whenever we consume and digest each other, we keep some of the nutrients in our cells and bodies, and we release the rest for other life to take up and use. We walk and slither and fly, and as we move from place to place, we excrete and poop and pee and deposit the excess nutrients right onto the soil.

  Yet most humans have taken their entire excess nutrient stream and dumped/flushed it into clean drinking water. When you think about it, it’s one of the strangest and least intelligent decisions we have ever made. (We have done something similar by housing—rather than grazing—most of the domestic farm mammals that now vastly outweigh wild mammals in sheer mass: 96% domestic versus 4% wild land and marine mammals).

  In conventional agriculture, this loss of biological fertilizer has been replaced with synthetic fertilizers—which is like asking a human to live entirely off of vitamin water or Gatorade. NPK only has three macronutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, and yet it is considered “complete fertilizer.”

  Synthetic fertilizer provides a huge boost in yields for the first couple of years, but then disrupts the natural relationships between plants and soil life, and once plants get addicted to synthetic fertilizers they are less likely to feed soil life, and less likely to develop healthy root structures. This reduces their ability to access water and nutrients, so it’s a vicious addictive cycle for both farmers and crops.1

• Most plants need specific pollinators, or specific animals for seed transport, to help them reproduce and to ensure genetic diversity.

  With the increase in use of biocides/pesticides—and in particular insecticides— pollinators are becoming more and more scarce. You have probably heard about the study from Germany in 2017 that showed that over 25 years, the biomass of flying insects was reduced by 75%. Birds and other insect-eating animals are declining as well. Air pollution, light pollution, a changing climate, and other factors also contribute to this decline.

  Farms and yards that provide pollinator strips and native plants are helping to provide habitat for pollinators, but without a dramatic change in pesticide use we are swimming upstream. Not only is it possible to grow food without pesticides, if done well it can be very sustainable and profitable. In Andhra Pradesh, India, net financial returns for crops grown without pesticides or synthetic fertilizer were 50% to 722% higher than conventionally grown crops. Research by LaCanne and Lundgren showed that regenerative farms in the U.S. were 78% more profitable than conventional.

  Their research also shows that the lower the pesticide use, the lower the incidence of “pests.” Why is that? Because for every crop-eating insect (the vegetarians) there are about 1,700 insect-eating insects or “predators” (the carnivores). When farmers spray insecticides, the poison doesn’t distinguish between pest and predator. If you decimate the population of both types of insects, which group has abundant food first, to help them recover? That’s right, the vegetarian insects that eat your crops.

  That brings us to three other big (and related) points:

• Plants need predators (from ladybugs to owls to wolves) to keep insect populations and grazing animals moving and balanced.

• Plants need diverse companions in the plant world to attract pollinators, feed beneficial soil life, (and who knows, probably to have interesting conversations with.)

• Plants need an environment that is relatively free of toxins that interfere with the basic metabolic processes of plants and all their biological companions.

  Herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, de-wormers, antibiotics, industrial pollutants, microplastics, PFAS, heavy metals, you name it, these are all problematic, and commonly found in conventional farming, as well as lawns and public spaces, and wafting through the air and floating through the water and settling over the land.

The climate and microclimate

• Plants need particular temperatures (air, surface, and subsurface) to photosynthesize, and particular seasonal cycles/conditions to survive.

  Some plants only photosynthesize in cool weather, others need warm or hot weather. Growth and reproduction cycles for each species of plant in each location must be seasonally aligned with their unique pollinators’ growth and reproduction cycles. Freeze/thaw dates must work for each plant species' timeline and not kill them.

  In natural systems, plants create the climate for life, including their own microclimates. Air temperature in heavily vegetated microclimates (with ample water at the root zone so that plants can transpire) can be 10-15°F cooler than surrounding areas. Surface temperatures of bare soil, versus plant-covered soil, versus pavement can be even more dramatically different (up to 60°F cooler under a cover crop).2

  When allowed to do their work of cycling water and carbon, cooling air through latent heat fluxes, creating clouds and rain, and moving water from oceans onto land and across continents, plants regulate the atmosphere and climate so that our planet is just the right temperature, not too hot, not too cold.

  They do this intelligently and purposefully: phytoplankton (free-floating ocean plants) emit DMS to create big fluffy ocean clouds when the temperature gets too hot. Forests emit bacteria that can condense cloud droplets into rain, when they need water. Clouds provide shade when the sun is at its peak, and rain falls in the afternoon bringing water back to the earth, so the nighttime skies are clear and heat can escape back to space.

Plants need a climate that works for life, and the climate needs plants to regulate it.

Finally,

• Plants need humans who understand how to live and farm and build neighborhoods in ways that create these conditions, so that all life can flourish. Every other species knows how to play their role and do their work. We have forgotten.

All these conditions are meant to work together.

You can see that while thinking about this for the past month, my sense of humor has declined slightly from the beginning of the article to the end, but I will try to keep my chin up if you will as well.

We can create conditions where bodies and brains and minds can develop and we can think. When we aren’t kept indoors, and fooled by artificial flavors and advertisements, people, cows, and everyone else knows just what to eat, when, how much, and in what order, based on information embedded in the smell and taste and texture of foods—the micronutrients and biological labor of that particular place that come together in unique ways in the secondary metabolites that local plants create: the terroir.

If and when we create conditions where all life can live, and eat well at the feast of life, our bodies won’t have metabolic syndrome and cancer and autoimmune disorders. Our farms and fields and even cities could be full of birdsongs and incredibly interesting insects to accompany our children as they learn.

We could reclaim our place in the nested intelligences of the world.

And we have some work to do.

Last Saturday a group of us gathered for a preliminary workshop to look at all this together, and our big takeaway was this: We live in an incredible awe-inspiring world, and there is a LOT we can do to help it work the way it is supposed to.

Join me for a new workshop on Sunday April 26th at 3 PM EDT to discuss all of this in depth with an incredible group of your fellow human beings.

“Nested Intelligences: Restoring Our Capacity to Think Clearly in a Living World. The Role of Plants.” Click here for details and to sign up. See this in your time zone.

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Join me for a special online workshop

this Saturday, April 18th at 4:30 pm EDT

(that’s Sunday if you live Down Under)

Click here to see this in your time zone

I’m about to publish a new article on this topic, (the third in the Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems series) and I’m hosting a preliminary workshop for us to dig in and unpack it as a community.

Sign up now!

Plants are the basis of food webs on land and sea, and provide the energy and ingredients for nearly all of life’s processes. Therefore, what happens to plants—and the conditions in our farms, fields, forests, lawns, and oceans—determines the clarity of biological signals, and capacity for intelligence that moves through all the layers of living systems.

From humans to bees to grazing animals, plants pass along the nutrients and information that create our ability to sense conditions, respond, regulate, discern, and remain coherent in changing environments.

So what do plants need, and how can we make sure they are getting it?

We will discuss the basic and not-so-basic needs of plants, and how to create conditions where those needs are easily met.

We will also examine how disruptions to these conditions—such as soil degradation, synthetic inputs, biocides, and monocultures—are affecting our own ability to think and make good decisions. These impacts include nutrient deficiencies, neurodegeneration, loss of membrane function, and the accumulation of harmful substances throughout the food web.

We will look at where our conventional agricultural, forestry, and land use practices are creating massive downstream effects, and how we might shift things.

And we will look at the incredible opportunity for intervention: to manage land and food systems in ways that will uplift the health and intelligence of the whole.

Sign up now to join me live on Saturday, April 18th at 4:30 EDT

(Click here to see this in your time zone)

HERE'S THE LINK TO SIGN UP

There are medical-alert dogs working with patients that can tell when a person with diabetes is about to have a blood sugar crisis, or when a person with narcolepsy is about to fall asleep, or a person with epilepsy is about to have a seizure. In three weeks you can train a dog to detect cancer with astonishing accuracy. “We are only at the start of working out everything dogs can detect,” the UK’s Daily Mail quotes researcher Dr. Claire Guest. “It would seem that almost any medical event has an odor change. The clever thing is that the dogs are able to work out what the norm is, and when it changes.”1

An article about canine detection in the New Yorker points to the superiority of dogs’ noses over technology. “In the 1970s, researchers found that dogs could detect even a few particles per million of a substance; in the 1990s, more subtle instruments lowered the threshold to particles per billion; the most recent tests have brought it down to particles per trillion.”

Paul Waggoner, a behavioral scientist at the Canine Detection Research Institute, at Auburn University, in Alabama, told the reporter. “It’s a little disheartening, really. I spent a good six years of my life chasing this idea, only to find that it was all about the limitations of my equipment.”2

One Labrador, for instance, was 98 percent as accurate as a colonoscopy when smelling stool samples, and 95 percent as accurate when smelling breath samples. But it gets better than that—because the dog could also differentiate polyps from malignancies, which a colonoscopy cannot. In addition, the dog was especially accurate at finding early-stage cancers, which are very hard to detect with standard tests, but which, if they can be found, greatly increase the patient’s chance of survival because they are easier to treat than late-stage cancers.3

“Detection of early-stage cancers is the real holy grail in bowel cancer diagnosis because surgery can cure up to ninety percent of patients who present with early-stage disease,” said Trevor Lockett, a bowel cancer researcher in Australia.4

Colonoscopies are highly invasive tests, they cost from $2,000 to $3,000, they require anesthesia, and they have some serious risks. When polyp-like masses are found by colonoscopy, they are snipped out of the intestines and then need to be examined (at more expense) in a laboratory to see if they are malignant.

Colonoscopies are also dependent on disposable supplies, high-tech equipment, and a functioning power grid. So why are we still using colonoscopies when we know that dogs can be trained to communicate diagnoses that are nearly as accurate and even more precise than a colonoscopy? Well, it turns out that dogs’ noses are poking around in areas where they really are not welcome.

In article after article about cancer-sniffing dogs, not a single article concludes that we should simply train more dogs to do this, and work with them side by side. Instead, the articles conclude that cancer-sniffing dogs will be useful to develop technology that can screen for the odors the dogs are detecting. In other words: figure out how the dog does it, then create a technology that mimics it and can be patented, and put that into use to generate profits in a way that a dog cannot.

See the full chapter here.

Join me for a workshop to discuss resilience in health care systems on Thursday, April 9th.

Read and listen to earlier chapters for free here, or buy the whole book!

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(If you are reading this on email, you might want to switch to reading it online, as I will be updating links in the online version.)

When the first oil crisis hit in 1973, I was ten years old. My brother and I sat in the backseat of our unheated station wagon getting bored and teasing each other while our single mother waited in line behind other frustrated drivers to buy gas. OPEC (a group of oil-exporting Middle Eastern countries) had put an embargo on the United States and several other countries for supplying arms to Israel. The price of oil quadrupled. Gas was rationed, with most stations closing (at President Nixon’s request) from Saturday night until Monday morning.

The era of “service stations” was over: gas stations stopped giving away steak knives and green stamps to try to entice customers to buy gas. Attendants stopped washing windows and waving at me and my brother, and they stopped offering to refill the oil or check the pressure in the tires as they pumped the gas. Instead, attendants rushed around with their heads down trying to stay out of the way of angry customers.

Hospitals, which were required to keep their thermostats at a minimum of 75 degrees, were hit hard by that oil crisis, as well as by the second oil crisis in 1979, when oil production dramatically dropped in Iran and Iraq due first to revolution and then to war. When, as a teenager, I went to work for my neurosurgeon grandfather, I didn’t know that Hartford Hospital was struggling to pay its bills—spending $10 a minute just on heating the building on the coldest winter days. Fuel costs were $1.7 million for the year.

When the hospital was designed in the 1960s, oil prices were a mere five cents a gallon, but by 1981 heating oil prices were a whopping $1.00 a gallon, twenty times higher than what they had planned for.1 That second oil crisis during the Iranian Revolution affected hospitals in other ways, as well. Plastic medical supplies like syringes were hard to obtain,2 delayed in production because of shortages of petroleum—which is used as a raw material to make plastics, and as fuel to transport medical supplies from factories around the world to hospitals in places like Hartford, Connecticut.

Today’s hospitals are far more dependent on fossil fuels than they were back then.

In the fall of 2007, the US went through a third oil crisis, but this time I wasn’t sitting in the backseat punching my brother. This time I was the single mother driving the car, and I was the owner of the health-care facility, paying the bills.

The economic crisis unfolding around me was the first of several events that woke me up to the reality of the need to simplify and re-localize the way we care for each other during uncertain times.

By moving from my house into my clinic, I resolved some of my own dependency on fossil fuels, and by changing to a more communal business model, I solved some of my patients’—and my own—financial struggles. But every time I went to visit a patient in the hospital, and started to think on a larger scale, I felt uneasy again. It was one thing to convert my clinic into a more sustainable model. How in the world would a hospital do it, or an entire country’s health-care system? It seemed that in an era of increasing conflicts over oil rights, and increasing pressure to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, hospital care could be dramatically impacted if there were a sudden price hike, another embargo, or simply a shortage of oil, as some people were predicting.

I had been to Cuba to research the amazingly successful way their health-care system responded to sudden oil shortages, but in the US we did not have the public-health infrastructure in place to make the transition as smoothly as they did. I wrote short articles about my concerns about the sustainability of our larger health-care system and posted them online.

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One day a stranger named Dan Bednarz emailed me, saying, “We should talk.”

Dan was a public-health professor who had recently gotten fired from his job at the University of Pittsburgh for insisting on talking about the end of cheap oil, and its impact on hospitals—an unpopular subject.

Dan combines an academician’s love of statistics with a pessimist’s view of the future. I can understand why people didn’t really want to listen to him until after the economy fell apart and hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy hit. It’s easy to discount wisdom that comes from the margins—where the people who have been pushed aside are often able to get a clearer view of the whole. Dan has a somber tone to his voice, perhaps from growing up in Detroit, where his father worked on an assembly line. But he was one of those truly astute people who, from his outpost, saw what was happening, and how it was happening—ahead of time—and was brave enough to talk about it, even if it meant losing his job.

He started a website called “Health after Oil” and then found mine (www.sustainablemedicine.org)—one of the only other websites discussing the same issues at that time. And he had learned, like I had, that it helps to make friends, especially when you’ve made a career out of proclaiming that the emperor has no clothes. Dan pointed me to the Post-Carbon Institute and the Oil Drum, where other people were writing about climate change and the impact of rising oil prices on industrial agriculture, housing, and transportation, but very little about health care.

I suggested that we interview each other about our current thinking and concerns and then post the interviews online. Our interviews (part one and part two) were like a perfect yin and yang outlook on the future of health care—he tackled gloomy looming problems, and I held out hopeful, idealistic solutions. Together we painted a relatively full picture of the conundrums and opportunities of transitioning to a health-care system that was more localized and less dependent on fossil fuels.

Those two interviews brought in emails from concerned medical students, people building clinics in Africa and India, radio hosts, and newspaper reporters. Soon I was appearing on panels discussing the future of health care, giving talks around the state, testifying at the statehouse, and meeting with hospitals. And Dan’s online articles began getting millions of hits.

A Small New England Hospital’s Relationship to Oil

During a meeting with the “Green Team” of a small, independent New England hospital to discuss their fuel use, I asked them to calculate how much the cost of oil would have to rise before they would no longer be a viable business.

Sitting around the table with upper management, a few providers, and the facilities manager, we calculated that if oil prices doubled, the cost of merely heating the building would eat up close to the entire amount that the hospital was currently clearing as profit. In other words, the hospital would just about break even—barely. Then I showed them a list I had compiled of all of the items in a hospital that are made of petroleum, and we started figuring in the costs of all the petroleum-based hospital supplies that would also double in price because they rely on oil for raw materials, production, and shipping.

It appeared likely that the hospital could go out of business in very short order if there were another embargo, or if oil prices suddenly rose. Being dependent on a single resource creates incredible instability in a system: if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a very big way.

Our medical system is completely dependent on fossil fuels from side to side and from top to bottom, with the exception of a few wilderness first responders, herbalists, and hands-on healers who have never forgotten the basics. Our offices, our record keeping, our supplies, our tools, our diagnostic machines, our medicines, and our ambulances are all dependent on petroleum and other fossil fuels.

I showed the Green Team an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association that concurred: if there is an oil shortage due to another embargo, or if we successfully shift away from fossil fuels for the climate’s sake, much of our current health-care system will need to be redesigned.3

The world’s population is expected to increase from seven billion to eight billion between 2015 and 2030, and the US Department of Energy expects that unless we find entirely new sources of fuels by 2030, we will have about half the amount of oil and other liquid fuels that we had in 2011.4 So that’s all of us, plus one billion more people, to share half as much oil and other liquid fuels. [Note that when this chapter was originally published, the “Shale revolution” was underway in the United States, vastly expanding the use of fracking in the U.S., and thus expanding access to fuels—but of course we now have new reasons for fuel shortages. And…yes, in 2026, world population is now well above 8 billion.]

See “A Partial List of Health Care Items Made out of Petroleum”

The upshot is this: by choice or by circumstance, we are going to have to find ways of providing health care that are not dependent on cheap oil.

As I started telling this hospital’s Green Team about very practical ways of creating resiliency in the workplace and lessening dependence on fossil fuels, I suddenly realized I had lost them.

Their eyes were glazed over. Their concern about a bleak future made it hard for them to pay attention to the alternatives I was about to propose. (That was when I understood how Dan Bednarz had lost his job: trying to explain these same issues to his colleagues.)

One of the biggest leadership challenges of this era is this: how do we communicate urgency and relaxed confidence at the same time? Clearly, in that meeting I did not succeed. As I try to get neighbors and colleagues to think about planning for the future, I’ve learned that I need to be able to hold up solutions at the same time that I explain the problems.

The small independent hospital I met with could have made changes that would have benefitted them and the community they served. If, like Muscogee Community Hospital in Oklahoma, they had invested in a geothermal heat pump, which uses the constant 55-degree temperature below the earth to draw in heat in the winter and cool in the summer, they could have recouped their investment relatively quickly through savings on heating oil and they would have been protected from one major aspect of fluctuating oil prices for decades to come (while reducing their carbon footprint at the same time).

Instead, they waited and were bought out by a larger hospital a few years later. This merger merely postpones the hospital’s problem, because as we have learned, “too large to fail” is not an accurate assessment of any institution.

Technological Complexity Versus Natural Complexity: Which One Do We Want to Depend On?

Cheap oil has allowed us to create an extremely complex society and an extremely complex medical system, with a huge amount of specialization, and innovation. Many good things have come out of this. But in order to maintain our medical system at this level of complexity we have to find ways of providing services that are unlikely to be affected by political upheavals, embargos, or the increasing pressure to reduce our impact on the climate. The technological complexity that fossil fuels have afforded us is too vulnerable, and too costly to our atmosphere, to continue to depend on for our entire health-care system.

I’d suggest that the complex systems we rely on for our health care from here on out should increasingly be the complexity of natural systems. We should be putting our time and money into the restoration of functionality of our soils, human relationships, microbiomes, and ecosystems.

The problem is not that we can’t live without fossil fuels. The problem is that we have forgotten how. We have dismantled the landscapes that used to provide us with local food, fiber, and power. We live and work in skyscrapers that become useless during extended power outages, and in suburban neighborhoods that are hard to reach without vehicles. Most of us have forgotten how to travel without fossil fuels, how to build without them, and how to grow food without them. We have also forgotten how to take care of each other without them.

Like most people, I love many aspects of modern technology. I love being able to take photographs of my walks in the woods and send them instantly to my friends. I love being able to read obscure medical research online while sitting in front of the woodstove. I love the fact that a radiologist can show me exactly where my son Alden’s collarbone has fractured (from doing stunts while sledding down the driveway), and predict how long it will take to heal.

Yet in today’s high-speed, competitive, petroleum-based world, vulnerability is not limited to the slender bones around our necks. As we do our daily stunts with our computers and cell phones and medical imaging machines, we are constantly sliding down the slippery slope of increasing dependence on modern technology in an era of increasing power outages, political upheavals, and supply-chain failures. And it is precisely our insistence on holding on to everything that creates the situation that threatens us with the very real possibility of losing everything.

Think about your mobile phone.

In a report by David Korowicz, called “Trade-Off: Financial System Supply-Chain Cross-Contagion, A Study in Global Systemic Collapse,” he writes:

Mobile devices, now ubiquitous, represent the culmination of twentieth-century physics, chemistry, and engineering. They signify thousands of direct—and billions of indirect—businesses and people who work to provide the parts for the phone, and the inputs needed for those parts, and the production lines that build them, the mining equipment for antimony in China, platinum from South Africa, and zinc from Peru, and the makers of that equipment.

The mobile device [also] encompasses the critical infrastructures that those businesses require just to operate and trade—transport networks, electric grids and power-plants, refineries and pipelines, telecommunications and water networks—across the world. [The production of the mobile device] requires banks and stable money and the people and systems behind them. It requires a vast range of specialist skills and knowledge and the education systems behind them.5

If this is what is required to produce a cell phone, imagine then, what it takes to design, produce, and transport all the high-tech equipment used in a hospital. And imagine, then, how many things could go wrong in a war, a long-term power outage, or a natural disaster that prevents some part of the supply chain from operating smoothly.

A surgeon in a high-tech hospital—relying on machines with parts made around the globe, and disposable supplies—has a very high risk of being affected by events on the other side of the world. The risk lowers somewhat with each step toward simpler or more local technologies. A field surgeon trained to work in a tent with little equipment and few supplies is less likely to be affected than the surgeon who only has experience in a high-tech setting. An acupuncturist who uses needles, cotton balls, and alcohol has a small but still real risk of being affected. (In the 2010s I had to deal with needle shortages almost every time I placed an order, but needles are a relatively simple technology that could be made locally if necessary, and can easily be resterilized using an autoclave.)

An herbalist in South America who works with local herbs is very unlikely to be affected by a riot in Europe, a flood in China, or rising oil prices in the Middle East, because the supplies she needs grow right around her. Likewise, a lay midwife or massage therapist doesn’t need much of anything except her own two hands. As we’ll see in the upcoming chapters, a health-care system that figures out how to use public-health measures to support the creation of a healthy, resilient population can also maintain relative health and safety during emergencies.

As much as we might feel comforted by having the most advanced medical technology in the world, at times when natural and human-made disasters knock out power, topple factories, and disrupt supply chains both here and abroad, we may well find ourselves wishing for communities that are good at taking care of each other, and practitioners who are highly skilled in low-tech ways of preventing, diagnosing, and treating illness. It is time to start creating those communities and educating ourselves in those low-tech skills.

Sudden shortages of certain medications and medical supplies have already started. Eighty-one percent of Canadian pharmacies reported that they were affected by drug shortages in 2010, partly due to a diminished supply of raw materials from China and India.6 In the US, more than 90 percent of hematology/oncology pharmacists reported shortages in chemotherapy drugs in 2011. These shortages led to delays in chemotherapy, last-minute changes in the choice of therapies, complications in conducting clinical research, increases in the risks of medication errors and adverse outcomes, and increased medication costs for patients.7

In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control put out an emergency advisory that the United States was going through a shortage of doxycycline—used not just for many respiratory and sexually transmitted diseases, but also the antibiotic of choice for treating Lyme disease and other insect-borne illnesses such as malaria, which are spreading northward due to climate change.8 Tetracycline, used for similar bacterial infections, was completely unavailable at the same time.910 The FDA also reported shortages in life-saving drugs, such as thyroid medication and epinephrine injections (epi-pens) for severe allergic reactions, as well as simple replacement minerals for IV bags, like sodium phosphate and sodium chloride.11

An article in the Washington Post detailed shortages in intravenous nutrition for premature babies that affected the health and survival of babies in the United States far more than anywhere else. Sometimes, even though the supplies are available, in a for-profit system, once a company’s patent has ended there is little motivation to continue manufacturing.12 In six years, from 2006 to 2012, drug shortages in the United States skyrocketed from 70 drugs to 299 drugs, so much so that the FDA started a task force to look for solutions.13

Just-in-Time Inventories Might Be Too Late

According to Al Cook, a member of the Medical Materials Coordinating Group that advises the US Department of Health and Human Resources on emergency preparedness, many hospitals and manufacturers of hospital goods have switched to a “just-in-time” inventory system, meaning that they don’t order new supplies, such as syringes, catheters, manufacturing materials, and food, until the supplies are depleted.14

They do this with confidence, knowing that under normal circumstances, deliveries can happen within hours. This inventory system is considered essential for corporate competitiveness in a for-profit health-care system like ours. But it leaves hospitals, nursing homes, and pharmacies very vulnerable. If deliveries are stopped in an area due to a natural disaster or sudden fuel shortage, patient care is jeopardized.

Cook notes that there are not enough supplies in any local area to support the care necessary during a large-scale emergency.15 This became painfully evident after Hurricane Katrina, when trucks loaded with emergency goods were rerouted, creating lengthy delays in deliveries of food and medical supplies to hospitals and residents in New Orleans.16

Richard Holcomb created a timeline outlining the potential consequences of restricting or halting truck traffic in response to a national or regional emergency in the United States.17 The timeline illustrated that within twenty-four hours:

• Delivery of medical supplies to affected areas ceases.

• Hospitals run out of basic supplies, such as syringes and catheters, within hours.

• Radiopharmaceuticals for cancer treatment and diagnostics, which have an effective life of only a few hours, deteriorate and become unusable.

• Gas stations begin to run out of fuel.

• Medical and pharmaceutical manufacturers using “just-in-time” manufacturing develop shortages of raw materials and other components.

• US mail and other package delivery ceases.

• Food shortages begin to develop in hospitals, nursing homes, and supermarkets.

All this in just the first day. Within a week of the same scenario, hospitals will begin to exhaust oxygen supplies. Within two weeks the nation’s clean water will begin to run dry, lacking the chemicals needed for water purification at water treatment facilities.

This report only deals with the effects of restricted trucking. Supply chains are also dependent on shipping by air, sea, and rail. The daily operations of our medical system are entirely dependent on availability of fuels, stable transport routes, and fair weather, both political and environmental.

Rethinking Disposability

When I went to acupuncture school in the early 1990s, we were still sterilizing needles and reusing them. By the time I graduated, four years later, nearly everyone was using needles that were chemically sterilized and packaged in plastic (i.e., petroleum), and we disposed of them after a single use. Awareness of AIDS, hepatitis C, and other blood-borne illnesses made a booming business out of disposable medical products in the 1990s, and I arrived on the scene just at that turning point. In all of health care, disposable plastics—for syringes, bags, tubing, surgical supplies, pill bottles, and bandages—have replaced reusable metal and glass, and in many areas disposable (petroleum-based) “paper” has replaced cloth items for gowns and pads. Meanwhile we have forgotten we have other options, and most manufacturers have stopped making them.

Climate change, flooding, drought, fires, fuel shortages, and conflicts over water and other resources all act as destabilizing influences on political systems and economies. Local and national economies are increasingly intertwined with those of other countries. We rely on each other, around the world, for the technology, food, and other products we have become accustomed to. When one part of the world is affected, we are all affected.

The question is, do we respond to shortages with mutual aid, cooperation, and collaboration, or with conflict? Can we learn to take care of each other in ways that rely on local supplies, natural processes, and simpler technologies? Should we invest in local manufacturing of essential drugs and medical supplies and ask our hospitals to return to using older methods of resterilizing supplies?

Perhaps we can learn to hold on to technology lightly: “It’s really nice to have disposable plastic syringes and tubing, but I don’t want the hospital to be entirely dependent on them because if the supply truck can’t get through, they won’t have any other way to treat patients. So let’s figure out what else might work, and then only use plastic when absolutely necessary.”

Or, “We should invest in this company making biomarker tests for cancer, but also invest in a medical diagnostics dog training centers so that if manufacturing supplies run low, patients will have other options.” [See the sub-chapter on the incredible accuracy of dogs as diagnosticians.]

Or, “It’s been great having the option of taking pain medication, but I would rather not be dependent on it, because if the manufacturer goes out of business, or there is a flood and the road washes out on the day I was supposed to pick up my prescription, I want to have other tools at my disposal that I can access no matter where I am. So I’m going to take this pain management course, eat foods that reduce inflammation, and go to a support group instead.”

…and here we are. It is April of 2026 (fifteen years after I first researched and wrote this chapter).

We have been through the social disruption and supply-chain failures of COVID-19. We are currently in the middle of multiple wars; disruptions from fires, floods, droughts, and storms; and now are in the early stages of yet another fuel crisis, set off by recent decisions to bomb Iran and oil infrastructure across the Middle East. Health care systems and our public health around the world are being affected by all of this, and it is likely to get worse.

Most governments are highly unlikely to change their current health care systems. The private, for-profit health sector is unlikely to pivot quickly enough. So it’s up to us as citizens and neighbors to figure this out together, and learn to care for ourselves and each other in new ways. Want to discuss this? I’m hosting a workshop on this topic this Thursday, April 9th. Click here for more details, and to sign up to join us live or get access to the recording, chat, and transcript.

Coming soon: How Cuba’s innovative health care and agricultural systems survived a fuel crisis in the 1990s.

The good news? It’s not too late — and it’s more accessible than you might think. In this workshop you will discover how you can design and build in a way that actually makes a neighborhood cooler, healthier, and more alive, as well as more resilient to both fires and floods.

The centerpiece of our discussion will be Village Homes, a 60-acre development in Davis, California, where water directed into integrated landscapes promotes healthy, moist soil that supports dense vegetation and mature trees that cool the air and buildings.

The impact is dramatic and measurable: Village Homes’ microclimate runs 10-15°F cooler than surrounding conventional Davis neighborhoods during summer afternoons. This isn’t a subjective impression but a documented temperature difference, resulting directly from transpiration and shade from mature trees—now nearly fifty years old—growing in deep, moisture-rich soil continuously recharged by captured stormwater.

SAVE YOUR SPOT

Building is the most impactful thing humans do on this earth—and it is inherent to who we are. Every species needs a home, and that need isn’t going away. So if we are to continue living on a planet we love and cherish, we must learn to build differently —not from convenience or ego, but in deep partnership with the living systems that sustain us all.

At the heart of this is water. Specifically, the land’s ability to hold it. Local cooling through plant transpiration—and a multitude of natural climate-regulating processes that follow—depends on healthy, sponge-like, hydrated soil and an abundance of vegetation. The way we build structures and communities either supports those systems or dismantles them. Right now, we dismantle them, almost by default, resulting in intense heat, and increased risk of fire and floods centered around residential areas. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Ready to learn more? Sign up to attend our mini-workshop live on Saturday, March 21st at 3 PM EDT, (or to get the recording.)

REGISTER HERE

About the instructors:

Kathryn Alexander, MA serves as Chief Strategist for SoilSmart-SoilWise.org, one of the first organizations to create a team of regenerative architects and ecological planners. She works as a consultant, author, and educator specializing in ethics, systems thinking, and regenerative change. Her approach centers on learning from nature as the ultimate expert, providing frameworks for effective change and regenerative building that work in harmony with natural systems—the largest, most successful, and complex system of all. Kathryn’s work has been shaped by the discovery of the biotic pump theory and her recognition of the interconnected crises we face today. This understanding led her to focus on educating others about how rain forms and how our planet has maintained its own cooling systems since the beginning of time. She is now focused on the applications of the Earth Principles Framework™ as applied to resilient building and development.

Carl Welty is a California licensed architect with over 30 years at the forefront of green building and sustainable design. Carl’s work focuses on affordable, energy-efficient, and resilient design — leveraging solar orientation, climate-appropriate principles, and light gauge steel construction to double energy performance with little or no added cost. His projects include a 9,000 sq ft Water Conservation Education Center that scored 60% above California’s Title-24 baseline (30% above is considered high performing) and a greenhouse engineered to school seismic standards, at 20% of the cost of greenhouses of the same size, constructed for LAUSD Highschool.

A proponent of regenerative design, Carl believes buildings and communities should generate more resources than they consume while restoring native habitat. His research on Village Homes explores how integrating trees, edible landscapes, and natural water systems into community design can cool our planet — one neighborhood at a time.

He holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and is Principal at CarlWeltyArchitects.com, and Director of Architecture and Planning at Banning Ranch Land Trust.

Didi Pershouse (that’s me!) is known as an innovative international educator both in-person and online. She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative. Her facilitator’s guide Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function is used in over 90 countries. She became deeply involved in the intersection of food systems and health systems while providing rural health care for two decades at The Center for Sustainable Medicine, and wrote The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities.

She has written a field training manual for the UN-FAO Farmer Field School Program and the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Initiative in India, involving over 1,000,000 smallholder farmers. She was a contributing author to The Climate Emergency: How Africa Can Survive and Thrive; Climate Change and Creation Care; and Health in the Anthropocene. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.

She serves on the Planning Commission for her town, is a board supervisor for the White River Natural Resources Conservation District, and is on the board of directors of Regenerate Earth, Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition. While serving on the state appointed Payment for Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group, she helped to reorient the program back to its public roots. She led a successful effort to conserve the Zebedee Headwaters Wetland while serving as a Vermont Conservation Commissioner.

She is on the Vision Council of the Global Earth Repair Convergence, and is a member of the Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. She is a lineage member of the Change Agent Development Community (stewarded by Carol Sanford), and hosts a weekly community of practice in a Wisdom tradition that uses living systems thinking.

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Join me for a mini-workshop (TODAY!) to discuss the ideas in my recent article.

Saturday, March 7th at 4 PM EST.

Click here to See this in your time zone

If you missed it, you can still sign up to watch the recording.

SIGN UP FOR THE WORKSHOP

Read the original article here. It’s about discernment, decision making, evolution, and also about dogs, my dad’s blue jeans, and cake.

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Join me for a mini-workshop to discuss these ideas on Saturday, March 7th at 4 PM EST.

Learn more about the workshop

While giving an interview in 2020, I suddenly saw the whole Earth system working together through the lens of intelligence and discernment, as nested layers. My last article gave an overview of some of these layers, and how we have interfered with them. This post looks at one of the most foundational layers of intelligence: the boundary between cells and their environment. It’s the layer where life began, and it’s also where intelligence, learning, and evolution continually come together.

Forget you have a brain for a few moments. Forget you have eyes. Forget that you have ears. Forget that you can read the nutritional labels on food, talk to your health care provider, ask AI for nutritional advice, or listen to your favorite natural health podcast. Instead, imagine that you are a tiny little blob moving through a liquid world with no arms or legs, and in order to stay alive, you have to sense what you need—what is toxic and what is nourishing—simply by being in contact and communion with the conditions of your inner and outer world.

You have to sense how much sugar you can deal with right now, and how much will overwhelm you. You have to sense how much salt is in the water you are floating in, versus in your body, and whether taking in some of it would be a good idea. You have to sense if today is a day you need some iron, or lithium, or if one of them is accumulating dangerously.

Cell membranes do just this: they sort out what is needed for life versus what’s damaging for life—what to allow in, and what to keep out; and how much, when, and in what order. They do this by reading signals both from the interior environment and the exterior environment.

Given what’s going on now inside me and around me, how much do I need? What should I take wholeheartedly into my life, and what must I let go of to survive?

This form of intelligence, sensing, sifting, and whole-body deciding—let’s call it discernment—is critical, not just at the cellular level, but throughout life on Earth. Many of the other layers of intelligence that I wrote about last week—from grazing to neural pruning during sleep, to collective decision making about how we deal with political developments—are iterations of what happens at the microscopic layer, literally at the edge of life.

Why I need to understand this

I can tell you right now, that my body, my life, my refrigerator, and my email inbox all have dysfunctional “membranes.” Nowhere near enough pairs of my deceased father’s old blue jeans have been allowed to leave my house, even though they don’t fit me. Too few dinner guests have been allowed in.

Three summers ago, during intense flooding, I believed someone who convinced me to accept too many puppies at exactly the wrong time. Yesterday I bought an entire maple cake at a church auction, despite the fact that my ankles are swollen. And I’ve held onto so many jars of sauerkraut that there is no room in my refrigerator for a fresh cabbage.

Membranes are our elders

Cell membranes exist in all life forms on Earth, and existed as the only interface between life and the environment (as single-celled bacteria and archaea) for 2 billion years before more “complex” life came along. In other words, half of the history of life on Earth happened with cell membranes (not brains or nervous systems) making all the decisions about what was needed to sustain life. And they figured it out, over and over and over again, under all kinds of wild conditions.

They figured it out while churning in hot lava, and they figured it out while floating through the sky. They learned to turn air and water into food when there was way too much CO2, and they learned to get together and breathe when things were starting to spontaneously combust from so much oxygen.1

We are descended from single cells that all made wise decisions and created conditions for survival. We should be able to figure this out.

They are our elders. And two billion extra years of successful decision making is a lot of accumulated wisdom.

Cell membranes were the layer of intelligence that defined the beginnings of life. God knows how it really happened, but it goes something like this: at the slimy edge of an ocean, the primordial soup bubbled miraculously into a round, oily thing, sort of like a cell, that eventually organized its structures into phospholipid bilayers studded with proteins2—marvelous boundaries of doubled-up doorways—tiny little intelligent skins, complex edges that created tiny interior spaces for all kinds of alive and intelligent and curious beings to be, and evolve. These were single cells that could learn and pass knowledge down through generations, and grow more life through DNA and RNA.

And eventually, a few billion years later, they got together and decided to become hedgehogs, and weeping willows, and kangaroos, with bazillions of tiny membranes all working together to decide when to hop and where.

(and some became dogs that pretend to be kangaroos, dreaming about hopping, in the tiny little cells in their brains)

They are not just bags

People used to see cell membranes as filtration bags around intelligent life. But that’s not accurate at all. Newer science has shown that the membrane itself (not the nucleus) is the “brain” of the cell, sensing inner and outer conditions, making decisions, and then altering the DNA in response.

In an interview about the research in which he first realized that the membrane’s decisions affect DNA, rather than the other way around,3 Dr. Bruce Lipton says:

Genes are not self-actualizing. They do not make any decisions at all. The control of genes is not due to any inherent activity in the DNA itself. The change of genetic activity is due to the interaction of the cell with environmental signals.

When I put my cells in the tissue culture, the fate of the cells was not determined by the genes. They all had the same genes. The fate of the cell was determined by the information in the environment.

So, what is reading that information? The answer is, “Not the genes directly.” It is the cell membrane through receptors picking up the signals and translating them into biology, which then sends signals into the nucleus, which then controls the genetic activity. This is the essence of what the new science of epigenetics is all about. Genes do not make decisions. So then the question is this: “If they are not making decisions, where are our decisions being made?” That takes us back to the cell membrane, which is the first organelle to evolve in the evolution of cells.

If there was no membrane, of course, there is no cell. As the interface between what is outside the cell and inside the cell, the membrane reads both environments. In this position, the membrane reads the external environment and then adjusts the functions of the internal environment to keep the cell alive. The idea of genes controlling biology is totally false. I understood this in 1964 when I did my first enucleation experiments. If you remove the brain from any living organism, the necessary consequence is death. So, if the nucleus is the brain of the cell, then the process called enucleation, which is removing the nucleus using a micropipette, should lead to the death of the cell.

Guess what? You can enucleate a cell. The cell will survive for months without any genes in it. It is not just sitting there; it’s doing every function it had before. It is moving around. It is ingesting food. It is breathing. It is defecating. It is communicating with other cells. All of this is happening without genes. Well then, obviously something must be coordinating the behavior of the cell and there are no genes in it. Where the heck is the control coming from? The answer is what led me to the cell membrane. The cell membrane is the interface of control. Genes are just responsive elements farther down the line.

Why my own family needs to evolve

If you’ve read my first book you know that my father and his mother were both experimentally irradiated by my great-grandfather, destroying their thyroids and giving them cancer.

If you’ve read my brother Luke Dittrich’s book “Patient HM”, you know that my mother’s mother was tortured in the mental health system of the 1950s. These and many other experiences in earlier generations set me up genetically to fail, physically and emotionally. And then my own life happened, which wasn’t exactly a piece of cake, either. So I’m scared. I’m sensitive. Sometimes I’m a spaced-out wreck.

But your and my genetics are not entirely fixed: they can change in response to new environments, starting at the cellular level, and our healing can get passed down to our future generations as strengths. This is epigenetics. But it only works if we learn to make good decisions.

As a society, we have become incredibly bad at making good decisions.

As we approach the world around us—snacks, ideas, policies, the news, relationships—we need to take a cue from cell membranes and learn to read the subtle signals inside our bodies, and in the world around us. Is this good for me? How much do I need of this? When is just a tiny experience of it useful, when is it too much?

Which jars of sauerkraut should I toss so I can fit this cabbage in the refrigerator? Are the eight pairs of my father’s blue jeans in the cellar (that still smell like him even after multiple washings) making me sad or making me happy? Should I delete emails from my ex, or hold onto them for just a little longer?

And most importantly for the long-term survival of my people: how many puppies can I keep?

We can do this

Our bodies are communities of human cells and non-human cells, forming a supra intelligence that should be able to act in ways that protect the integrity and intelligence of all life. In the same way, the communities in the oceans, forest, and sky work to regulate temperature, cloud formation and rain formation.

The food I eat has to pass by my senses, and through my mouth, before it gets into my inner world and hits the communities of individual cells in my gut microbiome. It has to get past my gut membrane, through my bloodstream, be filtered by my kidneys. I try to make choices about what goes into my mouth. I really do. But the conditions of my past, that have not yet been healed, fool me. So do the conditions created by flavorings, addictions, advertising, and the general thrashings about of those unhealed beings who play the role of the ruling elite.

Unlike my puppies who had travelled by car from the deep south and were riddled with worms, we humans in the global north are starving for strange reasons. We shove food, information, caffeine, and short videos into our senses without stopping to ask is this what I need? Our data centers and agricultural practices that feed these addictions suck so much water from the ancient aquifers and soil sponge that it is changing the global water balance.

You all, as part of my larger community, are trying hard to create better conditions in the world. (I know you are. I see you.) Now we need to work as a community to relearn how to read signals in our inner and outer environments, discern what’s important, and reliably take direction from the deeper realms.

Most of us have become somewhat numb to all this and are utterly unprepared to take this on with our current levels of chaos and addiction. But…fortunately or unfortunately, we are still the best ones suited for the job.

Let’s keep talking about this.

Join me—and the one I kept—for a discussion on Saturday, March 7, at 4 PM Eastern US time. (That’s Sunday morning for those Down Under). Learn more about the workshop, and sign up to join us live or watch the recording.

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Long before I finished writing the Ecology of Care, I wanted to start writing another book called Why We Can’t Think, and What to Do About It. Would I actually call it that? It’s slightly obnoxious. But the two premises seem to be becoming truer almost daily: People in my society really can’t think very well—about each other, about living systems, about governance, capitalism, our addictions, and all sorts of things. We actually can do something about it, and it’s high time we got started.

There are very clear processes that influence how we perceive, understand, know, think, discern, decide, and live. The integrity of these processes determines the intelligence of the individuals and the whole system, and they all influence each other.

Here are some that come to my mind:

• The ability to be alive—to take instructions reliably from the patterns of life, and participate fully in the required exchanges.

• The selective inflow and outflow by semi-permeable cell membranes in single-celled organisms and more complex ones—knowing what to keep, what to let go of, when, how much, and in what order.

• The selective “foraging” and transport of just the right nutrients at just the right time by mycorrhizal fungi (and other workers in the soil food web) back to plants.

• The knowledge of what to eat when, how much, and in what order. The selective grazing of plants (and other animals) by life, including but not limited to animals/humans.1

• The ability to teach and learn these grazing/foraging/hunting behaviors in real time, to know what is important information.

• The selective uptake of compounds by mucosal membranes and microbiomes in guts, lungs, and skin.

• The filtration of blood and other fluids by organs

• The pruning and growth of neurons (and associated memories/learnings), etc. in the brain during sleep.

• The larger and continual discernment of what to keep and what to let go of by humans and all of life—relationships, information, behaviors, possessions—what brings life, and what no longer serves us?

• Epigenetics, or genetic memory passed down through generations, or released when no longer needed.

• Quorum sensing and coordination of collective behaviors to create conditions conducive for life, by bacteria, flocks of birds, herds of animals, trees in a forest, humans in a community, and more than that. And all of those together.

• The ability to be present—to fully inhabit this physical world, to read and respond to the signals around us, to take instructions reliably from larger/higher realms, and participate fully in the required cosmic exchange.2

We have interfered with every one of these.

Humans have created new compounds and conditions that disrupt DNA, confuse cells, and destroy soil life. We cut whole forests and kill off “germs,” “pests,” and other perceived intruders. We disrupt sleep cycles, study life by isolating parts from living wholes, and isolate plants, animals, humans and other living beings from their natural environment. We separate elders from young ones, declare logic and spirit to be incompatible, and educate human children indoors and by age groups rather than letting them learn with and from each other, from community, and from the environment.

And it is iterative. The more we do these things, the harder it is to think about how not to do these things.

Why have we done this? There is a lot to say about this, but one way to think about it is that our poor choices stem from attempts to solidify and guarantee things that are inherently slippery: power and control, esteem and affection, and security and survival.3

And why do we do that? In part, it is because we have forgotten how to heal from upsetting circumstances, and how to source from higher wisdom. (More on both of those soon.)

Now what? We get to redesign our lives, our communities, our health care, agriculture, education, and governance systems in ways that recognize that good choices start in the tiniest cells in the tiniest creatures, and radiate out to influence life’s collective abilities—including the ability to regulate conditions on Earth to sustain life into the future (temperature, air, food, water, habitat, etc.)

Some of what we need to do is personal. Some is related to how we live as communities, and some will need to be addressed at a much more systemic level.

The more we create conditions for all of life to fully express, explore, and continually develop these layers of intelligence, the more we will be able to develop our own potential for clarity of mind, and clear action.

This overview—that there are nested layers of intelligence in the system as a whole—came into focus with an interview that I gave in 2020 to Kylie Flanagan, who was conducting a series of interviews for a book on climate resilience. Kylie asked me about the link between soil health and resilience. As I was talking, I started to image (see in my mind’s eye) the whole Earth system working together through the lens of intelligence and discernment.

I promised myself back in 2015 that I would never again try to write a book without publishing the ideas as a series of articles first. (And as a series of workshops where we can explore and practice and cheer each other on, starting with the one on February 21st.)

So here we go…if I keep feeling risky and generous, then you’ll continue to get my current thinking on how to create conditions in which the world can think more clearly. Or I’ll go silent and brooding, and you will figure it out. OR, better yet, we will walk into the future deep in conversation, and figure it out together.

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Hello Wonderful Friend!

In just a few hours we begin our 5-week international discussion course. From what I can see from those who have submitted case studies, we have people coming from all across North America, as well as Kenya, Suriname, many parts of Australia, France, Scotland, Croatia, and more! Our discussions will be grounded in real case studies drawn from the places and projects that our participants are working within.

If you’ve already signed up, I’m super excited that you will be with us. And if you haven’t yet…I would love to have your voice and experience there.

The course is called The Soil Sponge and Living Climate Workshop: Growing Resilience to Floods, Fire, Heatwaves and Drought

• DATES: We meet on ZOOM for five Tuesdays: February 3rd to March 3rd. (These are Wednesdays if you live Down Under)

• TIME: 2-4:30 PM EST (UTC-5) Check here to see in your time zone.

• All classes are recorded (including the chat and transcripts) for those who need to miss a class or who can’t attend live.

• COST: $300.

• Just for today, paid Substack subscribers get a $100 discount ($200 total).

• We have about 7 spots still open. Sign up here for the regular price. Sign up here if you are a paid subscriber.

“Clear, accessible and paradigm shifting. Didi is the only person I know of worldwide making this foundational science information available to the general public in a palatable format...I strongly recommend you take up this opportunity."

~ Phyllis Tichinin, New Zealand Dairy farmer, Soils consultant, Eco-nutritionist

We will explore the potential for deep systems change through agriculture and urban land management - through growing diverse vegetation and a deep soil sponge - and the enormous opportunity we have to create cool oases, abundant habitat, and resilient communities.

We will spend a full class on measurement and monitoring using low- or no-cost methods and tools so that you can track actual change over time in your projects rather than relying on models and assumptions.

We will also examine the move toward the financialization of nature and how that is playing out for communities around the world. What does this mean for your farm or community? What other options are there (or can we design) for financing change?

We will look at how systems change actually happens, through real life examples including mentorship networks of grazers, and our project in Andhra Pradesh, India where over a million farmers are teaching each other to grow abundant, healthy food (without pesticides or fertilizers) using local seeds, locally made natural bio-stimulants, extremely diverse cropping, agroecological management of insects, and “pre-monsoon dry seeding” techniques that allow them to grow a full crop before the rainy season.

You’ll learn some of the processes and principles behind these practices; how plants, fungi, microbes, animals, and soil life work together to create our weather and climate through the shapeshifting molecules of the water cycle (and carbon cycle) moving through living systems in soils and skies; and how you can create conditions for this to happen in your region and beyond.

“This will be an incredible course. Didi Pershouse is one of the best educators around.”
— Nicole Masters, Integrity Soils

SAVE YOUR SPOT FOR THE 5-WEEK COURSE

• Sign up here for the regular price of $300.

• Sign up here for $200 if you are a paid subscriber. (Or use coupon code SUBSTACK100.)

  Subscribe now

Here’s what people are saying:
“Brilliant. I was absolutely blown away by some of the facts I learned about cloud formation and water cycles. I found it exciting and even though I am too shy to participate live (and watched the recordings) I truly felt part of the group movement and really loved some of the stories shared.” –Melita Coggins

“This was 12.5 hours of rich content: it was granular in content, while covering the gestalt of what healthy landscapes of various types look like and require to thrive. It is experiential, uses a variety of teaching methods, and is illuminating. Participants are from around the world. Each brings relevant experience to the workshop, some shared in the whole group, some in breakout rooms. Didi is a paramount expert, mentor and facilitator of equal participation and teaching by those attending. She exudes patience, calmness, humor, and fierceness.”–Phil Bush, Board Member, Sustainable Lebanon.

“Didi is a great facilitator. I loved the practical aspects, as well as the conversations and the storytelling. Also, finding community. I felt more confident in sharing–with the use of drawings–what it is that I am studying; making the knowledge more accessible. [The course] gets to the base of what life is, giving an understanding of why our planet needs support from individuals like us, in a way that matches with our integrity. Hearing farmers who are participating in this change is life changing.” –Aude Mulliez, Activist

“This workshop would be a fantastic preparatory class for policy makers and global influencers. It should be required for anyone voting on soil or agricultural issues.”–Recent Participant

“An amazing group of people from all backgrounds gathering to share, learn and discuss soil issues.”–Bailey Scott, Farmer, Minnesota USA

"Didi Pershouse is a 'David Attenborough' type - she can take complex concepts around building soil and keeping soil in a landscape, and show how that can slow the water cycle, create rain, and restore weather patterns on an acre or a continent scale. As a keystone to anyone's understanding new to this sector [her teaching] will be profound." ~ Christopher Ramsay, Partner Pelican Ag, Steering Committee Member for Patagonia's 1% for The Planet

“I found like-minded people who want to regenerate soil, and I liked hearing their experience and ideas about modern-day problems in agriculture. I want this workshop to continue!” —Recent Participant, India.

I really hope you will join us.

By the way, in the next few days I will be posting my next (always free) article on “Layers of Intelligence in Living Systems” and announcing the date of our next “think-and-listen” gathering of paid subscribers.
Warmly,
Didi

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Ready to learn more? Check out the course here. Use coupon code SUBSTACK100 if you are a paid subscriber.

We start a new cohort of the Land and Leadership Initiative’s 5-week foundation course in just a few weeks, on February 3rd: Growing Resilience to Floods, Fire, Drought and Heatwaves: The Soil Sponge and Living Climate Workshop. It is essentially a new course each time it is offered, because we use case studies from the unique group that gathers.

Those who sign up by tomorrow not only get a discount, they also get a special opportunity: I’ll ask you for details of what’s going on in the landscape and region around you, and specifically what capabilities you are trying to achieve, so that I can design this season’s course with you and your local issues in mind.

You also get 25% off of the price of $300 if you use the coupon code SUBSTACK in the next 24 hours.

• DATES: We meet on five Tuesdays: February 3 to March 3, 2026

• TIME: 2 pm to 4:30 pm EST (UTC-5), Check here to see in your time zone.

• Many people choose to stay on for additional discussion after.

• All classes are recorded for those who cannot participate live.

You can read more about the course and sign up here.

I would also deeply appreciate it if you would share this and let others know!

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Join us for a very special 2-hour workshop on Friday, December 12th, 10 AM EST (11 AM AST) with international cacao scientist and educator Sarah Bharath, from Trinidad and Tobago. Check here to see this in your time zone

There is a saying that “Cacao loves community. It never does well alone.” What does that mean? What are the right relationships cacao wants to have, and what can it teach us about our own relationships—with plant and microbial communities, climate-regulating ecosystem processes, and each other?

This participatory online workshop will dive into the ecological and social history of cacao and its fermented child: chocolate. Sarah will describe her living-systems multi-sensory approach to cacao education that is being used to regenerate cacao systems and the human communities that steward and partake of them. We will discuss why cacao has become targeted as a climate culprit and why—by its very nature—it can teach us how to create agroecological systems for climate mitigation and resilience. Whether you are a chocolate afficionado, or cacao producer, you will love this workshop!

Too often in the cacao world, growers are easily seduced into focusing solely on the cacao tree. Limited attention is paid to cacao’s dependence on a functional connection to the soil in which it grows, and the companions that want to grow with it. Chocolate consumers are often unaware of the microbial workforce and plant diversity needed to produce subtle flavors, effects, and quality.

In fact, soils and forest understories are multi-dimensional, multifunctional, and highly relational spaces that are critical for both the survival of cacao and cacao’s field companions. These soil-microbial and companion-plant ecosystems hold powerful keys to current challenges in cacao production, and reveal hidden dimensions of cacao plant science and flavors in the cacao treasures we eat and drink.

With a systems approach, cacao ecosystems can be thriving, highly productive, long-lived systems that actively contribute to the farmers’ ability to build a profitable livelihood around it all, while providing abundant habitat for diverse life both above and below ground.

REGISTER HERE

About Sarah Bharath:

Born and schooled in Trinidad, Sarah Bharath is a plant scientist by formal training, who found her roots best anchored alongside cacao trees and their field companions. She has focused her last 24 years on the cacao plant and its growing systems: from the vibrant soil life in which the roots are best embedded, to what the entire plant community needs above and below ground.

She spent 13 years working in formal cacao research in Trinidad specializing in diversity studies to help with conservation, evaluation and utilization efforts (including plant pathology, agronomy, physical & genetic diversity, and postharvest processing) but eventually left academia to work directly with farmers.

She now freelances as a self-proclaimed “soil-to-seed worker” providing technical support services to cacao producers as well as wider industry clients both at home and abroad. She uses soil health and its deep connections to cacao post-harvest processing, combined with on-farm applied sensory science to help explore the many hidden dimensions of cacao systems. She works directly with cacao producers to co-create solutions to field-based and processing challenges, with an intense focus on teaching applied systems-based science in the real world of cacao and natural farming systems.

If you want to hear a bit of Sarah’s marvelous mind at work…here’s a recording of our recent conversation.

But don’t wait, register now to join our workshop live, or get access to the recording.

Register Here!

Do you know others who should be there? Please feel free to share!

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(Banner photo of Sarah Bharath, at top of page by Tan Bun Skrati @tanbunskrati)

We were talking a couple of weeks ago and in the middle of it we both decided it was an exciting enough conversation that we should record it. It’s just recorded from her end, and I’m speaking through my crappy replacement computer, so my voice is very crackly. (Luckily it’s mostly Sarah!)

If you want to learn with Sarah, we have an introductory workshop coming up this Friday, December 12th, 2025 called “Cacao, Chocolate, and Right Relationships within (and with) the Natural World.”

The next Soil Sponge and Living Climate: Growing Resilience to Flooding, Drought, Heatwaves and Fire workshop starts February 3rd. Sign up now for Early Bird Rates.

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(Note: Photo of Sarah Bharath, is by Tan Bun Skrati @tanbunskrati)

Eight years ago, I was invited to the United Nations to speak at World Soil Day 2017. I’ve pulled out and rewritten something I wrote the next day, as my celebration of World Soil Day 2025.

December 6th, 2017: I don’t even know where to start with this post...so I’ll just dive in. Yesterday I had the incredible honor of being one of five panelists at the United Nations for World Soil Day.

I didn’t know I was invited till just a couple days before the event because I was trying to be good and not be checking my email and voicemail during the Bionutrient Food Association conference. There were a pile of frantic voice messages on my answering machine from someone determined that the presentation should be someone from Vermont, and that I was the right person. I actually tried to convince her that she should invite a woman farmer, but to no avail.

So basically, in 48 hours I had to write a speech, make a slide presentation, find an outfit, and finish cooking my turkey broth, and pack up and go. Two nights of very little sleep. I didn’t even have time to tell most of my friends or family where I was going.

I booked a flight on a tiny ancient plane from a miniscule airport behind McDonald’s in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, where they weigh you and the three other passengers, before deciding where you should each sit. My stepmother-in-law, Grace Paley, used to take those planes to NYC all the time, and I had a feeling my life was heading in that direction.

Up at 5:30 AM. A wild and gorgeous flight, with the pilot so close to me that I could smell his hair.

Then a shuttle from the suburbs into Penn Station. From there I ran into Macy’s Department Store to use an eyebrow pencil at the makeup booth, and to use the bathroom and take off my wool socks and long underwear (oh those Vermonters!)

Then I clomped down the cold and dirty street to Staples and struggled with various printers, to print out a copy of my speech, which I was still trying to shorten to 7 minutes—having been warned that they would literally stop me mid sentence, if it was even a few seconds too long.

Finally I got one of the printers working, ran back outside and jumped in a cab to the U.N., where my required escort from the Thai embassy (who were hosting World Soil Day) was waiting outside, as promised, and we rushed through security. My hair was sadly still unbrushed, but I made it just in time, and thank God for those fancy dress pants from Oodles, the $10 shirt from Walmart and the $3 jacket from the Listen Thrift Store.

And there I was.

As I child I had dreams (the sleeping kind) of speaking in front of large groups. As a teenager I had wanted to be a translator at the U.N. because I loved languages. In my 20s I had walked around the outside of the UN on my lunch breaks, when I worked at New York Magazine editing real estate listings for Donald Trump and Leona Helmsley.

But here I actually was, sitting at a round table that really felt quite different than any seating arrangement I had been in in my life. There was no option to drag the chairs into a more normal conference grouping where one person was the teacher/presenter, and no option for a clique of people to sit closer to each other than to anyone else in the room.

I sat down and said some prayers, so that I could notice the sacredness of every person sitting at that beautiful round table and then...I spoke. I was happy and composed because I was right where I should be, speaking with passion about the subject I had committed my life to—four years before—speaking to a group of people equally passionate about the world, and about soils.

My talk went over very well. The people I met were absolutely lovely. The whole thing was very humbling and moving. And before I knew it, it was over, and I was outside again with a different person from the embassy putting me in a cab so I could fly back and have dinner with my teenage son Alden.

Moments after the cab set off, I got an email that my flight was cancelled.

“Okay,” I thought, “I’ll go back to the U.N. for the evening reception that I had said I couldn’t make it to” (hosted by Syngenta—of course). But then I realized I had forgotten to pick up my passport on my way back out. (Security at the UN involves surrendering your passport at the door…perhaps symbolic of becoming a citizen of the world?) My passport and all those lovely people were inside. I had no way of contacting anyone inside, as it had been all prearranged quite formally.

I went back to the gate, but they wouldn’t let me back in without an embassy escort. So there I was, stuck outside, back in the real world.

The only problem is that for me the “real world” of my lifelong imagination is the world in which people from all over the globe sit around a big round table and speak kindly to each other about really important things.

I spent a couple of hours wandering around in the dark, noisy, and rainy city of my wildly unhappy binge-drinking college years, trying to find a bathroom and a place to sleep. (Thank God for the comfortable shoes I had packed, and for nice text messages from friends in Brooklyn and the Bronx who were, unfortunately, awfully far away and not coming home till late.) I desperately needed to pee. I was absolutely exhausted, and the heating grates where lots of other folks were sleeping were looking mighty comfy.

I ended up reaching my old friend Swami Asokananda, who let me sleep on the floor of the Integral Yoga Center on 13th Street—the place that saved my life when I was in my early 20s—a quiet and peaceful community that set me on the path to be healthy enough, sober enough, calm enough, and devoted enough to the world to be able to speak at the UN on two days notice.

Looking back 8 years later, the recording of the event is very interesting in its entirety. My seven minute presentation is about 51 minutes in, and later, I am called on to answer a very very moving question from the Ambassador from Lesotho about corporate influences in agriculture (his question starts at about 1hr 25min.)

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Join us this Saturday December 6th, online from 9:30 AM-11:30 AM PST as we begin our winter series of online gatherings to plan and coordinate interventions that can shift California toward deep rehydration and resilience. SIGN UP HERE to attend live or get access to the recording and transcript. All are welcome.

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By deepening soil structure and capturing and storing water in the entire landscape, we can reduce flooding and drought, provide natural cooling in urban and rural areas, recharge groundwater supplies, bring streams and rivers back to year-round flows, reduce irrigation needs, provide abundant water and food for all life, and very importantly reduce fire risk by:

• Extending the length of seasonal green growth in grasslands and shortening the dry season.

• Reducing drought stress on trees to create healthier forests

• Priming the rain cycle through transpiration, bioprecipitation, and the biotic pump

• Cooling air and surface temperatures through transpiring green vegetation, which can slow the spread of fire

• Reducing fuel loads by creating moist surface conditions for fungi to easily decompose dry plants and wood so they are less flammable.

Last winter and spring, I hosted a series of nine mini workshops and podcasts, bringing together a broad coalition of people and projects. You will find recordings and transcripts in the Rehydrate California section of the Wisdom Underground Substack, and on the RehydrateCalifornia.org website.

In 2018, Walter Jehne and I set off on a “Can We Rehydrate California?” speaking and listening tour. We explained California’s unique role in North America’s water cycles, and showed how the fires, droughts, heat, and floods that California experiences are related to degradation of the natural systems that hold and move water. We showed that we can actually can address these crises right away through a living systems approach. At the time, everyone was focused on carbon cycling, emissions reductions, and drawdown—which are all also important, but will take much longer to bear fruit. Now people are ready to talk and listen about rehydrating California, and so are we.

This upcoming workshop is this Saturday December 6th, 2025. 9:30-11:30 PST. SIGN UP HERE to attend live or get access to the recording and transcript. The suggested minimum donation is $25, but please be generous if you can, to make more workshops possible for more people.

If you would like to make a larger donation to this project, please contact me directly through a Substack message, or at didi@landandleadership.org.

Hope to see you there! And please share this with your networks!!!

Didi

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For some historical context, I’m posting this video of our final gathering on the 2018 tour. Our talks continue around 1 hour 33 minutes—after the round of reflections by participants.

I first met Zach at the Living Soils Symposium in Montreal, Canada, where we both were speaking, in 2018. We sat at a table outside the main hall with several other presenters and compared notes.

I must confess, I was uncomfortable, because I had had an extreme response to his presentation. For most of it, I appreciated how much his description of the water cycle resonated with my own understanding, but then suddenly he switched to what seemed like endless footage of heavy equipment moving massive quantities of soil to dig out ponds in a landscape that looked like my own in Vermont. This was so utterly against my sense of what was needed. My presentation had been about soil as living tissue—the body of the land—and my work was all about creating conditions for the structural and functional integrity of the soil sponge to form, so that it could function as a huge water catchment covering the entire landscape, far beyond what any pond can do.

Inside my head I was screaming NOOOOOO!!!!! as I watched his footage of the living tissue of the land being destroyed.

But the late great Carol Sanford (whose core process was to “disrupt certainty” in those she worked with—including me—in her Change Agent Development Community) always called me out on my unwillingness to work with certain people. So when Zach got in touch this summer about joining my retreat, I jumped at the chance to disrupt my own certainty and see his work in a new light—having seen his project Water Stories grow over the years since we first met, and I invited him into conversation.

I also have been humbled by how challenging it can be to grow the sponge in some circumstances (extreme compaction, extreme drought, or extreme topsoil loss on hillsides as we experienced in Vermont during the sheep craze when all our forests were cut), and I am a lot more open to different interventions being needed in different contexts to jumpstart the water cycle.

I hope you will enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Keep an eye out for a mini-workshop we hope to do when he returns from his trip to India.

(If all my subscribers were paid subscribers, I could offer most of my teaching for free. Imagine that.)

Today is the day! We are having a special gathering online at 3 PM EST (New York USA) (CHECK HERE TO SEE THIS IN YOUR TIMEZONE). It’s a way of showing my gratitude to those of you who are contributing supporters to my Substack project: the Wisdom Underground (and Patreon). We will talk about your aims and how the future trajectory of my teachi…

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Clouds? It seemed a bit frivolous—like getting a hallmark card from my muse when I was expecting a luscious love letter—until I started to think about it. Of course. Clouds.

“I wish people were aware of this invisible world that is working like mad behind the scenes. Plants, microbes, water, air — it’s all one system working in synergy.” —Lisa Y. Stein, climate change microbiologist at the University of Alberta. (Quanta Magazine.)

Somewhere in my piles of video cassettes is a recording of my dear friend Walter Jehne sitting at my kitchen table, his face almost eclipsed behind a large pot, telling me his personal and collective story of clouds, in great detail. That was before the pandemic, when we spent several weeks teaching and travelling together every year, and hosting an annual retreat. I’ve tried to coax him into telling it again in a more public setting, but for now, I’m going to have to tell you the short version from my memory, (though as is often the case, researching it has uncovered some interesting new details.)

When Walter was a young research scientist at CSIRO—the Australian government’s national science labs—he was assigned to a cloud-seeding research project, in which they created conditions for two processes: first condensing water vapor into suspended droplets or ice inside a chamber, and then testing various precipitation nuclei that could condense droplets large enough to fall as rain or sleet or snow.

Early in the project, pilots also flew up into the clouds, and took air samples. But there was a problem: every sample seemed to come back contaminated. They tried different containers, and different methods, but the problem persisted. Finally they realized it wasn’t the methods or the containers, the clouds themselves were full of bacteria, and in particular abundance was one type, which were originally named aerobacter aerogenes.

Who knew? Well, Louis Pasteur knew—for one—that the air in his laboratory was full of something alive and dynamic, that could turn juice into wine or vinegar, and milk into a toxic poison (that killed several of his own children) or into a delicious French cheese. He called these airborne beings “germs.”

Clearly microbes have work to do in our kitchens and our ecosystem, but what were they doing up in the clouds?

Some clever scientist at the lab where Walter worked had the idea of putting the bacteria that the pilots had collected into the experimental chamber in the laboratory. What happened stunned them. The bacteria were far more successful at producing precipitation than anything else they had tried.

On further study, the CSIRO scientists realized that these aerobacter aerogenes bacteria live as endophytes in the tissue of plants, and were found in abundance in the stomata of the leaves of forest trees, from where, presumably, they rise skyward along with the transpired water vapor exiting the stomata. (In researching this article I’ve learned “aerogenes” means gas producing. Which makes me think that perhaps their stunning ability as precipitation nuclei, as well as their ability to rise up in the air, are related in some way to the fact that these particular microbial workers are outstanding producers of hydrogen gas—which is about 14 times lighter than air, and of course, when combined with oxygen, produces H2O, or water. )

In 1960 they were renamed enterobacter aerogenes. In 2016 they were reclassified as klebsiella aerogenes in the enterobacteriacea family—the family that includes e-coli—and they are found not just up in the clouds, in soils, and in plants, but (like their e-coli brethren) also in the human gut.

Walter was delighted by this reclassification. “The question,” said Walter, “is not just how did they get up in the clouds, but how did they get into the human gut?” He let me think for a minute, on my side of the large pot… “Those were our ancestors up there in those trees, the apes, eating leaves…that were covered with aerobacter.”

Walter’s laboratory was not alone in looking at bio-precipitation, though most other scientists in the field have been focused specifically on ice-formation by another bacterium called pseudomonas syringae—in clouds, snow, crops, and insects, and even in snow machines at ski resorts. Cindy Morris and David Sands are often cited in popular articles, but they are just two of hundreds of scientists studying bio-precipitation, and bio-nucleation of ice.

If you want to dig in deeper, this paper (and this part 2) by Vali and Schell tracks much of the history of pseudomonas research. Here on Substack, and have been writing quite a bit on the science of clouds and bioprecipitation recently, and there is a new book by my bedside called Air-Borne, the Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, that is very promising, though I’ve only just dipped into it. My book The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities digs deeper into microbial work in our bodies and ecosystems.

Why don’t we hear more about klebsiella aerogenes, or have papers on this from CSIRO or from Walter? The answers point straight back to two of our most challenging issues: The cloud seeding experiments at CSIRO were top-secret military research, and recent fires in Australia tragically took out a building on Walter’s farm that housed much of his written work.

We now know that the biological workforce of microbes is everywhere, doing pretty much everything. They are in the “deep, hot, biosphere” miles down under the surface of the Earth, under the ocean floor, and inside volcanoes and glaciers. They are working away in our noses and genitalia. Addictively fermenting our chocolate, coffee, tea, and beer.1 Protecting our infants while they are in utero, in the birth canal, and suckling at the breast. Creating our neurotransmitters and turning on brain development. And there they are, way up in the heavens, creating clouds, rain, sleet and snow.

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