According to Webster’s dictionary, abundance means – ample, plentifulness, profusion, wealth. I’ve put these words in a sequence that seems to go from sufficient to more than enough. But I suspect that the expansion we attribute to these words is a fantasy, and I will  explore that notion with you for the next several posts.
 
I want to go back to an old story, one told for centuries ad so deeply imbedded into our western culture that we believe it, even though we don’t talk about it, and maybe even haven’t heard the story directly. It’s a story told in Genesis of the Christian bible[i]. It’s about the Garden of Eden. The Garden is seen a perfect place, where everything available and there is only happiness. It is often characterized and being in harmony with God. When we look back into history and learn about the kinds of animals that roamed the Earth, we see periods where the animals were both huge and plentiful. In order for that to occur, there has to be lots of available food, and comfortable temperatures. How does that happen? Where is God? I think it is important that we understand this because that idea of plenty is not a myth, it is a part of the truth in that story, one that gives it the substance and credibility to last thousands of years.

Titanosaur sauropod during the Jurassic period. (Credit: Catmando/Shutterstock)

I’m going to focus on the age of the dinosaurs, the Mesozoic period, which covered millions of years. What science proves, is that there were a huge number of VERY large animals that all lived at the same time, and for a very LONG time. That means that there was abundant food for abundant animals and for a long time – millions of years, when no one was in charge.[i]
 
How was the world so abundant? To better understand how this happened we need new science. We need to see how a world composed of millions of life forms, a world that had evolved from single celled life forms to multicelled life forms – all by itself, could be so abundant. The Gaia hypothesis, posited by James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in their 1974 paper[ii] suggests that “… Earth and its biological systems function as a single entity with self-regulatory feedback loops to maintain conditions favorable for life.”[iii] Who is in control? There is no one else, so the idea that all the life forms that exist on Gaia, must interact in a way that provides benefit for all may not be so farfetched. In fact, Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance, suggests that abundance is a result of reciprocity, one of Earth’s Values, that I talk about in my values work. Here we have three very different people, two scientists (in very different areas, Lovelock in chemistry and medicine, and Margulies in evolutionary biology), and Kimmerer an indigenous biologist, all saying the same thing, in their own way. The Earth exists in her richness because all the members of the community, all the parts of the whole, contribute in service to the whole, to use systems language.
 
This understanding is being borne out by current science in many, many ways. Let me share just a few examples. Soil. Soil is a living thing composted of billions of live entities that fall into four general categories: protozoa, bacteria, nematodes and fungi.[iv] Some decompose, some share nutrients, some create a mucus like substance that allows for aggregation in a way that leaves air holes for both oxygen and water, and others move the soil, keeping it open and spongy. Each form of life contributes. Each is needed. It is the togetherness that creates abundance. It is the harmony that is achieved though interdependence that makes soil healthy. Too much of any one life form (bacteria?) create dissonance, something we often call dis-ease. It is the harmonic balance that characterizes a healthy ecosystem.
 
So, abundance is an emerging property (systems speak) that happens when all parts of the system contribute through reciprocity, thus strengthening interdependence. Now, I want you to check your life. How interdependent are you? Where and how do you experience reciprocity? Is your life abundant? You don’t have to share these answers, but as we progress, I want you to keep coming back to them. According to the story we were kicked out of the garden, but is that true, I wonder? More on that later.

[i] The King James Bible, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version
 
[i] The Discovery Magazine, A Complete Dinosaur Timeline to Extinction: How Long Did They Roam Earth?, Sean Mowbray, Jun 21, 2023

[ii] Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis, James E. Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, 1974, https://www.jameslovelock.org/atmospheric-homeostasis-by-and-for-the-biosphere-the-gaia-hypothesis/

 
[iii] The Gaia Hypothesis, https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis
 

[iv] Understanding Soil Health and Biota for Farms and Gardens, Shikha Singh, Linda Brewer and Scott Lukas, 2023, https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/pub/em-9409-understanding-soil-health-biota-farms-gardens

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We all love trees. Forests are wonderful in the abstract, but messy and difficult to engage with or walk in. What, you say, that’s not true, I enjoy walking in the forests around me. I’ll bet you do, but here’s the kicker, those are not forests. What most of us know as forests are really mono cropped tree farms. They were planted to replace the real forest that was there and cut down to build the house you live in. Most of us have never seen an old growth forest. That said, some of those semi-forests have been around for 50–100 years. They are not something we really want to lose. No, they don’t make porous soil as well as old growth, and no they don’t make rain as well as old growth, but still they do something and that something is needed. They just need to be managed into diversity.
 
In the paper today was a long article about the devastating cuts to the Forest Service. Any fool can cut, but few can prune for growth. It’s the same with budget cuts. Easy to eliminate, but to eliminate for growth take time and deep knowledge of what’s needed and what’s currently present. The skill and decades of learned information are going out the window, and these will take decades to bring back. The article even mentioned pack animals that need years of training to be really skillful in bearing heavy packs over rough and unknown territory. Helpers who removed 850 trees last year worked with rangers who knew the forest and who could tell them what to do and which trees to take out. All that is gone.
 
The Forest Service does yeoman’s work. But there are few who would not say it could be improved. For decades, the Forest Service has been underfunded. In our Western world, work happens if you pay for it. As more and more of us are born and live in cities, the hard work of forest management is not understood or attractive, so people can be hard to find. That and relatively poor pay make the job unattractive to many.
 
There’s been a resurgence, lately, of interest in indigenous ways of living and being on the land. Indigenous people are raised to know they are part of the whole system of life and to recognize the reverence and gratitude that comes with that understanding. They are taught to live their lives in ways that are interconnected and interdependent with the rest of the life around them. They understand to leave things and not take it all. They understand how to take in such a way that nature is stronger for the loss. How can you pay to make this happen?
 
Since it takes money to manage the forests, even with the imperfect knowledge we have, we aren’t willing to do even that. “Since 1854, Menominee Tribal Enterprises has harvested more than 2.5 billion board feet of lumber from our sacred land. We have completely cut standing timber over the entire reservation twice. Yet, today we have more than a half billion board feet additional standing timber than when we started. A drive through or fly over our forest would show the results of a forest that looked like it had never been cut.” Adrian Miller, Menominee Tribal member.
 
The truth is that people learn and work harder for love than they do for money. We all know this from our own life experience, yet we designed our society around money and not around love. Love makes the world go round, yet we go around being alive every chance we get. The Earth is calling us, she wants us here, but if we are not doing what brings life and increases love, maybe not.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about a forest near you.