“The Earthshot concept is simple: Urgency + Optimism = Action. We have ten years to turn the tide on the environmental crisis, but we need the world’s best solutions and one shared goal – to save our planet.”
“It’s not too late, but we need collective action now. The Earthshots are unifying, ambitious goals for our planet which, if achieved by 2030, will improve life for all of us, for the rest of life on Earth, and for generations to come. They are to:
• Protect and restore mature
• Clean our air
• Revive our oceans
• Build a waste-free world
• Fix our climate”
Sometimes, we get a message from the Universe to do something phenomenal, something that will change the world and something simple that can be scaled across the globe.
This wonderful initiative led by HRH Prince William and supported by 200 organizations will award winners of the best ideas to turn the tide and save the planet in the next ten years.
I started to think; ten years? Yes, most of us will still be around and we should really give this initiative a chance to really change the world. And even if you do not make it as a winner, what have you thought about to do in your own home, in your own company or school, to change things for the better?
We are in talks with a company who wants to plant 10 million trees and has put their money where their mouth is. Now, all we need to do is to sow the seedlings to get to at least a million coffee trees. But if we could do that for coffee trees and others would make seedlings for cacao, narra, dao, banaybanay, yakal and other forest trees, that would be 10 million trees capturing carbon for many years to come.
That is a simple idea worth a shot, an Earthshot. Check out the website of Earthshot Prize -https://earthshotprize.org and jog your mind after you read the past winners’ ideas.
We cannot always blame climate change for the recent floods and unprecedented landslides. Much of these are due to deforestation. Much of the damage has been caused by man. From denuded forests to improper waste disposal, we see rivers, streams and other waterways clogged and unable to let the waters flow. So what shall we do to correct these wrongs besides looking for the culprits? We need simple ideas we can scale, that we can do countrywide and globally.
In our humble little farm, we also had ponding of water due to the heavy rains brought by Paeng. But in two hours, the water drained and, like a golf course with proper drainage, our garden was good again. But did it need some kind of high technology like for keeping golf courses dry soon after a heavy downpour? No, it did not. Our secret? We regenerated the soil, causing earthworms to thrive around the property. Regeneration simply means bringing back life to the soil by adding mulch, brown material like natural used cartons, old leaves and farm discards, etc.
After a few months, we started to see fruits on trees we never saw before. I did not know we had more citrus trees, rambutan, guyabano and balimbing because I never saw their fruits in the past few years before our regeneration project. Though the farm has never used chemicals, pesticides and we stuck to natural farming, the soil became alive again, like magic! Our papaya started to bear more fruits, as well as our dwarf coconut and our chico tree. You may come to the farm to check out the magic that happened.
What was the idea? Build an environment to get Nature’s best workers to work – these are the earthworms. They are not the African Night Crawlers many vermicompost producers swear by. These earthworms are your garden variety local wigglers that can dive deeper into the Earth than the African ones. Our biodynamic consultant says they dig deeper and they make little holes in the rich soil all over the farm. They know no boundaries or property lines so they can very well go next door and enrich even your neighbor’s garden.
This is a simple idea that anyone can do in their backyard or in their whole farm. Create that environment for earthworms to thrive. They will know how to feed themselves with your discards, proper waste disposal and some used cartons for good measure. Then you can observe the magic they make. And like I said earlier, they have no limits or known land boundaries or mujons as we say in the vernacular. They just eat away and work their way to help create natural drainage systems, the way Nature intended it to be.
This is my Earthshot idea: Regenerative agriculture rather than chemical-based, weed-killer kind of agriculture. But this will mean multinationals changing their concoctions of pesticides and weedicides. This will mean stopping the use of agro chemicals for higher yields, but using more earth-friendly solutions.
I hope to see the spread of this idea, whether we make it to the Earthshot prize or not. This will mean less floods, more trees planted and more fruit-bearing trees, too. I am a witness to this natural blessing and this is why I am now slowly expanding it to our coffee farm. As soon as we started the regeneration, you will see, almost in time lapse style, the new sprouts of trees you thought were barren. The flowers have started to bloom for the insects to feed on, and the camote tops are there for the taking. This farm project may as well be a microcosm of the bigger Earth we know.
We can regenerate the planet and I am hopeful it can happen in the next ten years.
Let’s give it a shot. An Earthshot.