Cooling the Planet with Food Forests and the Biotic Pump – A Webinar with Michael Pilarski

Recently, Soil Smart Soil Wise of Spokane County had our convener Michael Pilarski on for a presentation on these important subjects to regenerative agriculture, ecosystem restoration, climate regulation and of course, earth repair. Michael is a farmer, wildcrafter, educator and friend to all living things, and is responsible for founding the Friends of the Trees society in the 1970s, as well as convening the Global Earth Repair Conference in 2019 as well as the virtual Global Earth Repair Summit in 2022. Soil Smart Soil Wise is a volunteer-run nonprofit organization working to cool the globe by spreading and supporting regenerative land management practices. We are all working together to support life in its prime directive of creating conditions that support more life. Here is the YouTube video for that webinar:

Food forests are multi-layered, dynamic planted ecosystems following principles gathered from natural forests themselves. It’s important to note that the largest food forest in the world is also the largest forest in the world – the Amazon rainforest – which shows evidence of intentional propagation of useful species going back thousands of years. These systems combine fruit trees, medicinal plants, berry bushes – all together creating a canopy and an layered understory of shrubs, herbs, forbs and so on. They are designed to self-perpetuate and even accelerate their growth with time, even as humans make sustainable use of what it has to offer, as the biomass accumulates and the vegetation works together to secure moisture and even bring more precipitation in. Which brings us to the biotic pump…

The biotic pump is still a theory, but it is accumulating more adherents with time – people like Anastassia Makarieva, Zuzana Mulkerin, Mikhal Kravcic and others have embraced this view. Basically it explains how forests generate wind and attract rain by manipulating pressure systems and even providing aerosols for nucleation of rain droplets. They transpire water vapor, increasing the moisture in the atmosphere, while also releasing spores, pollen and aromatic chemicals that increase the rate of precipitation – this in turn lowers pressure and leads to even more precipitation. The stomata (tiny breathing cells) under broad leaves also may be able to collectively control pressure as well.

All of this can also pull moist ocean air inland and helps mediate the moisture exchange between the forest and the atmosphere in general. When this exchange is unmediated, storm clouds may come in but they soar at high altitude above the land and only drop their rains when they get to the high mountains, causing flash floods on barren lands that worsen the problem overall with each passing year. Food forests as well as land stabilization techniques are but a couple of arrows we (as communities, landowners, ecosystem builders and just concerned individuals) have in our quiver of climate change solutions.

When all these techniques, food forests included but not alone, are implemented at scale, we strongly feel that we can reverse the urban heat island effect, cool the landscape, retain rainwater and change weather patterns altogether. If this is scaled out globally, it’s game-changing for the climate as well as quality-of-life for humans and all other living things.

To learn more about Soil Smart Soil Wise, you can check out their website here.