Ecovillages and organic farming could reverse global warming

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1:03Subscribe at KevinMD.com slash podcast. Today we welcome back David Kundiff, physician and health reform advocate. Today's KevinMD article is Echo Villages and Organic Agriculture, a scenario for global climate restoration. David, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much, Kevin. All right. So what prompted you to write this article about Echo Villages and Organic Agriculture on KevinMD? Okay. Well, I have six grandchildren. They range in age from three to 12. And for the last several years, five or six years, I've been concerned about them in researching climate change. I went to the intergovernmental panel on climate change. They're a agency of the UN and they're tasked with coming up with all the dreary data about what's happening to our climate biodiversity.

2:06I think they may also look at global pollution and the poly crises that go along with life now and that we're trying to change. But we haven't really made a dent in the rise of greenhouse gases. So in this intergovernmental panel on climate change document, I found five scenarios. The current scenario is human extinction by the end of the century. And the best case scenario is called climate smart agriculture. So I looked into exactly what that is. It doesn't have a legal definition. But in fact, it includes or can include chemical fertilizers, glyphosate, roundup, the

3:06notorious herbicide, GMO seeds, fungicides, and so I was astounded that they didn't model global organic agriculture, which would to me be the best case scenario. So I modeled it. And my article appeared in the journal Curious in 2023, it's titled Connecting Climate Change Mitigation, the Global Land Regeneration, Doubling Worldwide Livestock, and Reduction of Early Deaths from Non-Communicable Diseases. So that this analysis that I had published showed that switching from our current chemical agriculture, which is over 90% of the world's agriculture, uses these chemicals and pesticides.

4:07So switching from them to organic would be going from our current situation of putting about 12 gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from agriculture, the agriculture that depletes the soil, as well as puts all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, goes from that to decreasing a net withdrawal of carbon dioxide of 24 gigatons a year. So this totals a difference of 35 gigatons a year of greenhouse gases coming out of the atmosphere and into the soil. So this led me to see, well, how would we be able to actually move toward this better

5:10scenario? That just for a reference, the amount of gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent that we put in, humans put into the atmosphere each year is about 57. So if you take away 35, you're reducing the human cause to greenhouse gases by more than half. And the additional benefit is that we don't eat food that's made from all these chemicals like pesticides and seeds. So that's what I model. And then to look how are we going to be able to do that with the agriculture, it would be a lot more work to have global organic agriculture, but if that's what we need to survive.

6:10You suggested that switching to bio-intensive organic farming can sequester nearly 98% of projected greenhouse gas emissions. Is that number correct? That's right. That was even before I published that pre-print only with organic. Now bio-intensive takes it further. Organic regenerative, you could say, is now used a lot. It's kind of on top of organic. Organic is just what you're not doing. You're not putting fertilized chemical fertilizers, pesticides and so on. Regenerative is to have cover crops, to rotate the crops, to not till the soil, which releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And several other things beyond organic.

7:10Now, bio-intensive agriculture, I first found out about when I spent about two and a half months at the farm in Tennessee, which is one of the original eco-villages dating back from the 70s, and I had wanted to actually retire there because I liked what they did so much, ecologically and otherwise. And I learned to do bio-intensive agriculture. It's promoted by John Jubbins, who's in Willett's, California. He's done much more work in the developing world than he has been able to in the United States. He's taught bio-intensive agriculture in 150 or more than that, countries in the world. So the difference, bio-intensive agriculture uses no fossil fuels.

8:12It's hand tools. No tractors or any of that heavy equipment that compacts the soil when it goes over the soil. It's not good for the soil. So it uses hand tools. The garden beds are double dug, which means that you get a broad fork of about five feet with about five prongs in between. It's very hard work. I was sweating heavily. So if bio-intensive organic agriculture decreases emissions, why did the IPCC fail to model a global transition to exclusively organic agriculture? I tried to get that from them. I was in email correspondence with one of their leading scientists who came from New Zealand. And I couldn't get a straight answer of why they didn't model global organic agriculture.

9:19Maybe we can find out now if somebody responds from there tells us. So I hope this gets to the IPCC so that they come up with a response. So you talk about the grow bio-intensive method previously in terms of how that can reduce emissions. You also propose replacing cattle ranch evictions with pilot echel villages, right? So what exactly is an echel village and what would that look like when scaled up? OK, well, the echel village, well, I was looking for a way to implement what's needed. You know, I first found out what's needed is the organic agriculture and then, you know, how to start that. And we need a lot of people in those eco villages. So I modeled having about 1,000 people in each eco village.

10:21And those eco villages would do regenerative energy. So solar and maybe wind and hydro and water energy and any other regenerative energy. And they'd grow food bio-intensively, organically regeneratively for themselves and for the neighboring communities. And when I modeled doing that with half of the human population, 4 billion people in these eco villages, which would be wonderful places to live, by the way. I, in fact, I wanted to live in one and I will if I get an opportunity. So that then that would drop the amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere a year, 98 percent. I mean, you get half the people into eco villages that aren't using cars or other fossil fuels

11:29getting down to, you know, adding bio-intensive, you can actually draw a net amount of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and into the soil per year. Are there any parts of the country or the world of that matter that has a scaled up vision of what you talk about, a collective of eco villages? Any places where we can see that in action? There, there's an eco village network globally started, I believe in the 80s and it's still still going, adding eco villages. However, they're, they're not to the size that, you know, we need to scale it up to actually reverse climate change. There's, I've seen a number, maybe 20,000 of them. I, I lived in the farm in Tennessee, one of the, one of the, you know, first and it was,

12:36it was great at the beginning, it was a commune and they grew their own food, they, they built their own homes and so on. Now the eco villages are have many fewer people in them and it, so it needs to scale up more than, than ever, needs to be a new scale. So that a thousand people in an eco village, you can really have a community that is a wonderful place for young climate scientists and or activists to thrive and to take care of other societal problems, like bring in the homeless and deformally incarcerated and maybe major mental illness and, you know, put them all to work because there's a lot of work to do bio intensive agriculture and, and that's a good way to, to reverse our, our current epidemic in obesity type two diabetes,

13:41heart disease, all the chronic diseases would, would benefit from hard physical labor on a regular basis. That's the way humans evolve. They didn't evolve sitting in, inside and screens like we're doing now, although, you know, there's an all we do, but, you know, we've got very dire projections from the institute of health metrics and evaluation about where humanity is going. In physical wellness, we need to move to metabolic health or, or increase metabolic health and that, that's mainly diet and exercise and, you know, what I'm modeling would be good for both. We're talking to David Cundiff, physician and health reform advocate. Today's Kevin M. Diarticle is echo villages and organic agriculture, a scenario for global climate restoration. David let's

14:46end as always with take-home messages they want to leave with the Kevin M. Diadins. Okay, well, there's hope. There's hope for humanity, but it will, it will take some major changes. I would like to see, there are three, well, there's 17,000 acres of national park service land in West Marin, I live in Marin County, and the nature conservancy has bought that land or is in the process, it's not a done deal, but they, they're getting that land on, on the understanding that animals in their production of methane, that that's bad for the climate. Well, it's not, you know, my article showed that and the modeling shows that, and so I'd like to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stop the the takeover of this land by the nature conservancy and make model eco villages there.

15:54Three eco villages, 17,000 acres, and to have a demonstration of how you can model reversing climate change, and that can be copied by eco villages all over the world. David, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show. Thank you for listening to the podcast by Kevin M. Di, to share your story and appear on the show, visit KevinM.D.com.