“If a government has license to silence its critics,
it has license to commit any kind of atrocity.”
Here an update for October, dear Friends.
It is mostly a time of year with hot weather and winds that make you feel as if a huge hair-dryer is being directed at you. Water and shade offer liveable climate-options as we adjust our daily patterns accordingly. To get things done out in the open, we get up early or wait for some cloud-cover in the afternoon.
All the planning in the world cannot however protect us from storms or lightning strikes. After months of no rain and insufficient herbivores to recycle what grows each wets-season ‘fire danger’ is what keeps us on edge. With ‘dry-season burning’, this year all our neighbours had reduced the danger of fires encroaching on Kachana to zero! Internal ignitions were now the threat. Carbon, after all, is nature's cash! Why burn it if we do not have to? Rather than feeding flames, we aim to feed as much vegetation as possible back into the soil each year. However, until that carbon is actually safely stored in the soil (or cycling through other life-forms), for a few months each year, ‘abundant carbon’ becomes a ‘risk’.
Sure enough, on the night of the 19th we had a lightning strike in the forest next to the camp!
In the middle of a heavy downpour a tree kept burning for ten minutes until the rain eventually extinguished the flames.
What planning can achieve, is to reduce the risks that come with the impacts of wild-fire. Therefore, when it rains on Kachana, we often burn for that very reason. The windows of opportunity change with each season and each down-pour. The land tells us what we can do. – Photos selected this month add a small visual impression to the challenges of strengthening relationships with country.
Warm regards from Kachana
Photos of the Month
News & Views
Why is so much air-time being dedicated to discuss silly open-ended words like “climate change” at a time when (like never before) nature offers us “climate-choices”?
Perched in our high-rainfall rocky watershed country and having flown a ‘green pastoral banner’ for over three decades we also do our best to keep ourselves informed. Fake news, main-stream propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, mal-information, statistics and damned lies continue to make this challenge more formidable than it would be to actually just go ahead and regenerate landscapes. (That would require proactive, community endorsed innovation and bottom-up collaboration.)
Greenwashing now attracts both corporate and political players. It has become hard to ignore that it has all but become an industry in its own right.
Not only in Australia, portions of important environmental discussions are being weaponised for political advantage. Scientifically based ‘carbon discussions’ and biodiversity outcomes suffer as a consequence, as efforts that would otherwise be directed towards achieving demonstrably better ecological outcomes are now directed (at best) towards academic debate.
Despite so much madness and confusion during current times, my now over 35 years of observation and experimentation on Kachana continue to support the notion that as we learn to ‘trim the ecological sails’, nature fills them accordingly and may allow us to navigate towards a future of far greater abundance than we can imagine.
Thank God, many of the processes that built the original wealth, that humans have been tapping into for millennia, still exist!
There exists a growing community of dedicated people around the globe wishing to get better at discerning and enabling such processes to drive healing and regeneration.
Regenerative Grazing for Climate, Ecosystem, and Human Health - COP27 document
It is exciting to be a part of all that!
Memo to all climate-warriors:
Run a quick check on the track-record of your generals!
Do they lack field-experience? Are they perhaps sending people into the wrong battles?
In the ‘link of the month’ (below), hear out the wisdom of an ecological-veteran.
Link of the Month
Some years ago, the world began to hear about Will Harris and ‘White Oak Pastures’ and its literally more than 'One Hundred Thousand Beating Hearts' that contribute to its daily symphony of life.
More recently Will Harris shared some of his wisdom on the Joe Rogan Podcast.
Here is a sample: Will Harris on his regenerative farming practices
(Listen to the full podcast here #1893 - Will Harris - The Joe Rogan Experience | Podcast on Spotify)