I’m supposed to be writing a paper but yesterday my friend Ray Cooper sent me lots of snippets which he thought might be useful which I can’t use for my paper because they’re more to do with his interests. My interests lie in changing how we see the world and our place in it. What is a human? What is life? What can we do to live in a way that best reflects sensitive consideration of these questions?
Ray’s interested in showing how regenerative agriculture can turn depleted soils into fertile sources that are carbon sinks which we can grow food on and in. He’s worked with Baker Creek Seeds on projects, and investigated how to produce compost that knits the soil together. He’s also built labyrinths, cleaned rivers and planted thousands of trees. He’s a good guy.
We talked about what he does — regenerative agriculture — and what I do — explore how we tell our story — and how these intersect and he recommended I look at Bill Gates talking about how he loves fertiliser. He was talking about artificial fertiliser, because he was sitting on a bag of it, and he was talking in the context of Africa, which is a potentially huge market for agri-business, which is what the production of fertiliser is. Artificial fertiliser is produced from and by the oil industry. You may have come across recent stories about the eye-watering…