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The Earth Will Teach Us
Rev. Lilli Nye
April 22, 2007

The American poet Walt Whitman exclaimed in one passage,

I know nothing else but miracles…
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with miracles,
every foot of the interior swarms with miracles…

Hopefully, each of us has something that lights up our feelings of awe and amazement, our sense that the miraculous abounds or resides with us in life. Some of us may feel it when listening to certain music, or in watching our children learn and grow, or in appreciating human genius, resilience, imagination, artistry or athleticism, or in experiencing the beauty or grandeur of nature, or in understanding the amazing physiology of body and mind, or through the discoveries of science about the earth and cosmos. We all have something that makes us dizzy with delight and wonder.

I have to admit that for me, right now, the special something that takes my breath away is…dirt. Or maybe I should say, soil, or earth. Like Wendell Barry in the passage we heard earlier, (see reading below) I find soil to be the most miraculous of substances, especially because it is a living material that emerges from a matrix of other living things and processes. You can’t really comprehend the miraculous character of soil without recognizing everything that goes into it and comes out of it—microbes, worms, fungi, and the dazzling interplay of plants and creatures whose life cycles build and maintain the soil. They are all of one whole.

When I first read Peter Tomkins and Christopher Bird’s book, Secrets of the Soil, I truly got it—how “every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with miracles, and every foot of the interior swarms with miracles…” I have shared with the congregation before how their praises to the magnificent earthworm and microbe knocked my socks off and awakened in me a new love for things that we might consider icky or creepy-crawly, but which actually form the foundations of life on earth.

Nature is infinitely wise, dazzlingly smarter than we are, and it already knows everything that we need to know about how to live, survive, and thrive.

There is a passage in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, Genesis 1:29-30, where the Divine Creator, upon finishing the whole earthly creation, proclaims to the newly formed humans that everything that lives and swims and crawls on the earth now has everything it needs to flourish. Studying the interconnections and mutualities that nature instinctively utilizes, I have come to trust that this passage of biblical scripture, and the sacred scripture of Nature itself, declare the same truth: Life on earth is complete; it is one whole; it is a perfect self-contained system, and everything we need to live, to heal, and to solve our problems is already here.

But human beings have increasingly lost the capacity to see wholeness and think in terms of interconnection. We have gradually acquired one set of extraordinary intelligences, while losing other essential and primordial ones. We have forgotten how to function within the laws of interdependence. And so now, as we know all too well, we are in trouble, and we are causing trouble for the larger network of life on an unprecedented scale.

But those with eyes to see and ears to hear are realizing that we have the greatest of teachers all around us at every moment. For not only does Life already know how to survive and flourish, it also knows how to solve problems.

Jenine Benyus, the author of a primer on biomimicry (which means “the imitation of natural life”) points out in her introduction that Nature has already figured out how to solve many of the problems we are grappling with. Through 3.8 billion years of evolution, life on earth has been engaged in a continuous process of research and development. Those experiments that ultimately failed now appear only in the fossil record. But the living beings and communities of beings that currently surround us are nature’s testimony to what works, to what survives, to what lasts. If we can learn to think as Nature “thinks,” we will have access to new dimensions of wisdom and intelligence. She writes:

“Like the Viceroy Butterfly imitating the Monarch, we humans are imitating the best and brightest organisms in our habitat. We are learning…how to harness energy like a leaf, grow food like a prairie, build ceramics like an abalone [mollusk], compute like a cell, self-medicate like a chimp, and run a business like a hickory forest. The conscious emulation of life's genius is a survival strategy for the human race, a path to a sustainable future. The more our world looks and functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”

I want to share a few examples of how researchers and inventors are learning how to both imitate and harness what nature already does so well, engaging nature’s expertise to address the extremely serious problems we must now grapple with—before the entire web of life starts unraveling. These folks are today’s bioneers. If we follow them while they follow nature, I believe they can take human civilization safely into the future.

One person who is really paying attention is Paul Stamets, perhaps the world’s foremost mycologist—meaning he studies fungi. Stamets is like the prophet of the virtually unknown and unexplored Fungus Kingdom, come to awaken humanity to the gospel of decay, regeneration, and the truth of soil.

Covering most all landmasses on the planet are enormous mats made of infinitesimally fine filaments. One cubic inch of soil can contain more than 8 miles of these cells, called mycelia. That’s a lot of surface area for the chemical exchanges of digestion and excretion. These fungal mats are now recognized as the largest biological entities on the planet. They are not colonies of cells, but unified, organized individual beings, with some individuals covering more than 20,000 acres. And I thought earthworms were amazing!

They spread outwards like an expanding pancake as rapidly as two inches per day, affecting an interlocking network of biological systems and generating the conditions for life. As they mature and die, a host of other fungi spring up in their wake. Waves of diverse fungal networks intersect and permeate one another, creating the foundation of soils worldwide. Fungi are soil-making machines.

We may find topsoil annoying when our kids traipse it into the house in the treads of their sneakers. But the rapid global loss of topsoil to erosion into waterways and ultimately into the ocean is one of the most alarming crises to never make the front page of the news! Learning to understand and harness the action of fungi for the regeneration of soil has become urgent.

Another way in which fungi are being utilized is for bioremediation—the restoration of environments to viability after contamination. Mycelial mats can gobble up and remove all kinds of disgusting things that we can’t figure out what to do with—such as e coli bacteria that have infected the soil around hog farms or sewage spills.

In one experiment, a vehicle storage site in Washington State had been contaminated with heavy oil. The soil was soaked black with it. Four different stations were set up to study the efficacy of different remediation methods, three of them using micro-organisms or chemical agents, the fourth using oyster mushroom spores, which show a particular capacity to digest petroleum compounds. The various agents were applied to the four sites, then covered with tarps and left to do their thing.

After four weeks, when they pulled back the tarps, the other three test sites were virtually unchanged. But under one tarp, a forest of oyster mushrooms had erupted into life, many as large as a foot in diameter. When they tested the soil, 95% of the petroleum compounds had disappeared. The mushrooms had not simply absorbed the pollution, because the mushrooms themselves contained no traces of the compounds. Rather, the petrochemicals had been thoroughly digested and broken down into harmless elements.

But the story doesn’t end there. A cascade of other biological processes followed over time: The decaying mushrooms attracted gnats, the gnats attracted larger insects, the insects attracted birds, which expelled seeds in their droppings, and over a period of weeks and months, that patch of ground which had once been lifeless with oil sludge became a little a green oasis, a garden, in the midst of a barren Superfund site. The naysayers were forced to admit, with chagrin, that Paul Stamets was on to something.

In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus documents a fantastic variety of investigations into the intelligence of nature as it applies to human dilemmas. Biomimetics are addressing how we make things, how we will feed ourselves for the long term, how we will harness energy, how we will create industries in which there are no waste products, because in nature, nothing whatsoever is wasted. This is “cradle-to-cradle” thinking, in which every death becomes the foundation for another wave of life.

In the heartland of America, the prairies have been largely replaced with industrial farms raising grain in vast monocultures. Since the naturally self-sustaining infrastructure of the prairie grasses and soil has been destroyed, the fields of wheat must be irrigated with water from wells and rivers and fertilized with petrochemicals. Yet, still production diminishes, while labor, erosion, and the cost of resources escalate.

A few forward-thinking farmers are saying, now, wait a minute…for millennia, the prairies produced an abundance of perennial grain grasses, did not need to be tilled, were not choked out by weeds, and needed only as much water as the sky released in rain, because the healthy, spongy soil was so water-retentive. Why can’t our agriculture imitate the prairie’s naturally self-regulating, self-sustaining processes?

They are now experimenting, with slow but hopeful results, with finding a middle ground between the prairie ecosystem and the production demands of intentional agriculture.

Meanwhile, “do-nothing-no-till farming” is making headlines in Japan, while in Costa Rica, bioneers are mimicking the integrated, multi-storied growth processes of the rainforest for human food production. They are learning that by leaving the forest intact, they can utilize its ancient tried-and-true intelligence rather than cutting it down to make pastures or conventional farms—a tactic that has caused disastrous soil erosion and environmental unraveling.

In all of these experiments, the essential questions of biomimicry come into play:
Does this process fit seamlessly into the larger whole?
Will it last?
Is there a precedent for this in nature?

If the answers to these questions are yes, then the answer will also be yes to the following questions, all of which refer to the rules of natural systems:

Does it run on sunlight?
Does it use only the energy it needs?
Does it fit form to function?
Does it recycle everything?
Does it reward cooperation?
Does it bank on diversity?
Does it utilize local expertise?
Does it curb excess from within?
Does it tap the power of limits?
Is it beautiful?

One of the early bioneers was John Todd, who created what he called Living Machines for treating contaminated water and sewage. In a recent interview with CNN, Todd said:

I really began my career as what we call a "doom watch scientist," discovering how pesticides were harming our environments. At one point I became so discouraged by what I was finding that I said, can we not take this knowledge and flip it on its head? Can we not learn what a forest or a lake knows, and convert it into technologies that in the future would feed us, provide our energy, transform our waste and even repair our damaged environments? I knew that there are efficiencies, ingenuity and symbiotic relationships in nature that are so powerful—if we could just decode its language we could change the way we do things.

With this curiosity to guide him, he began working to discover how plants filter and utilize wastes. The Living Machines he has developed use multi-tiered pools containing a succession of plant varieties, from algae to tall tropical fronds, which gradually absorb and filter out the waste materials. The water enters as a thick, frothy soup at one end and comes out clear drinking water at the other. The only fuel that the entire process needs is sunlight for the plants’ photosynthesis. The green things do the rest.

To return to the concerns of biomimicry, yes, the Living Machine…

fits into the whole,
can self-sustain,
runs on sunlight,
uses only the energy it needs,
fits form to function,
recycles everything,
utilizes species diversity, and
is indeed beautiful!

Todd concludes his interview with this hopeful but demanding call:

“If we redesigned our infrastructures in the broadest sense through ecological design we could reduce the negative human footprint on the planet by about 90% and still have thriving civilizations. We know we can do it, it's just getting from here to there. That's going to be the greatest challenge of the 21st century.”

These innovations may seem like Utopian fantasies. They are so elegant and take so much time to develop, while environmental crises of every sort bear down on us with terrifying urgency. The future hangs in the balance.

I find hope in the fact that 30 years ago, the environmental movement was a plaintive voice “crying in the wilderness” with no one listening. Now, many powerful corporations are scrambling to jump on the bandwagon of environmental ethics and green innovation because they sense the sea change in public sentiment. If we, as citizens and consumers, are informed about viable solutions to environmental problems, we do have the power to shape demand and to influence trends in agriculture, industry and culture.

May we seek that knowledge, and seize that power, for the sake of all life.

* The reading comes from Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? Berry is a poet, essayist, farmer, and advocate of bioregionalism and responsible small-scale farming.

For many years, my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather's farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth.

The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two.

This slow work of growth and death , gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land-surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.