Emergent by Miriam Kate McDonald

 Emergent

by Miriam Kate McDonald published by John Hunt Publishing is an amazing, interesting british book. I start to tell you that, when I can grab, buy, a british book on farms, nature, garden, I don't never hesitate because they treat these topics with profound love: same is here. This book analyzes the relationship between man and eco-system where he lives in, considering that we are nature but that this nature has been destroyed, severely, critically altered: it's important to understand writes the author that climate, biodiversity and health crises is an IDENTITY CRISIS. 

The biggest problem has been the psychological alteration created by man, someone "superior", who could interact with environment as he wanted to do, without to feel it, but thinking that he possessed it. Wrong. Nature is more strong than us and we are seriously risking to do the same end of our predecessorts, ahem, the dinosauruses. 

Our attitude should change. If we would start to consider that we are just a little creature living in a planet of 8 billion of people more or less, located in a solar system, and the solar system in a galaxy, and a galaxy in an Universe  in continuous expansion and much more big, with white holes and black holes (the white ones re-put out matter, the black ones eat matter for being concises)  maybe we would reconsider our own essence and our relationship with nature, in a healthiest way.

Because, simply we are made by stardust and we are part of the whole of this Planet but as participants and pilgrims, not as owners.

Divided in three part, in the first there is a look at that past; the second focuses on the present and the third in the future.

I admit that anyway every section are enchating and extremely clear for every reader.

In the first section there is a reconstruction of our happy and cheerful arrival in the world: it is analyzed the discovery of fire and what it meant to men; wild foods and foraging, hunting: the development of the human brain more or less 70.000 years ago, the discovery of a good place where to stay and live, the birth of farm, arrivals of first animals like pigs, but also the discovery of scythe from Romans, important for storing rich amount of food for animals. New breed of sheep meant great wool. But it was only with the First World War that Britain accepted, without a lot of skepticism chemical fertilizers, necessary because during the war there was lack of food and import was no possible. There was a lot the amount of food imported by the UK: meat, cereals, eggs...

Justus von Liebig a german chemist introduced this new chemical way of cultivating. 

Tractors, chemicals would have been great companions and friends also during the Second World War maybe with the difference that in this case there was a different sensation: that every inch of soil had to be cultivated and had to give the maximum. Interesting the chapter on cereals but also the one on livestock and what became our system, after all we live in a globalized world, where industrial food became predominant, and where nature lost any kind of consideration.

Not everyone anyway wanted to eat in that way and Sir Albert Howard was an example in this sense: if as we said Justus von Liebeg thought that soil was a simplicistic "thing" Howard thought the oppositve. There is a rich complexity and it is better, he thought, to return to nature, composting, for an organic soil and as soon as possible.

The limit of Howard and other inspired Americans was just...looking within agricultural systems but "how farms sat in the wider, and wilder landscape was not their concern" writes Miriam Kate. 

At the end of 1800 appeared clear that nature became fragile, broke, and vulnerable. George Perkin Marsh was the first one in 1860s to write of the impact that he had seen on the natural world asking for measure to protect it.

If America opened a lot of Natural Parks fighting for their conservation, in England people slept a lot and when they created them, it was late and no one thought to preserve wild nature but just a cultural heritage.

No one understood how these animals interacted with the environment, other spieces, and so how to protect the whole system.

The second part is a picture of the current situation and I loved reading on the importance of trees: it starts to be a trend to prefer sometimes to plant trees like walnuts, or nuts or hazels instead of cereals. A tree has a different and more strong impact with soil. 

Trees are solid allied with mychorizzal fungi, redistribuiting in this way mechanisms for water and nutrients, recognizing pathogens and pests gone from years, bulding solid interactions with the deepest soil, capturing wagons of light energy later redistributed into both food production and soil fertility. A tree is life.

The final part is absolutely interesting. For example I didn't know how important was to grow sheep.

It's a story of keeping cleaned the environment also thanks to the many parasites, little animals enjoying to live close, into the sheep, or in their dung and that  will create a circle of animals, little and biggest, the biggest ones are birds that will help to keep clean the environment thanks to what they will find and eat.

It appears clear that it is this circle that musn't never be altered,  because from the littlest creature, to the biggest ones will assure a healthy world.

Great book.

Anna Maria Polidori