An article in The Times tells the story of a Canadian farmer who lives on the coast and started to feed his dairy herd seaweed. He believed it improved the taste of his milk and so began to sell seaweed feed for cattle. When testing his product it emerged that the seaweed cut methane production by a third. As methane production from livestock is such a big part of the greenhouse emission complex, scientists got interested. They found that adding just half a per cent of red seaweed to cattle’s feed cut methane emissions by nearly seventy per cent.
This story illustrates not only how important our creativity is in saving the planet, but also points us in the right direction. It is our top-down thinking, our head rules philosophy, that has sent us careering into the ecological catastrophe we now face. We farm like we think. We consume like we think. We believe we’re separate from the planet and that nature can be dominated.
Nature is the ultimate creative intelligence we know and we are nature in action. When we think we’re separate entities, apart from nature, we disown our full creative heritage, which is unfortunate given the mess we’ve got ourselves into.
Over-farming and over-consuming are tell-tale signs of an intellect that is incapable of seeing the bigger picture. We ignore the bigger picture because we don’t see ourselves as part of the whole, despite the obvious truth that every living thing in nature, apart from us, lives in harmony with nature.
If we started using our intellect in harmony with our bodies, our hearts and our guts, we would have a far better chance of finding the solutions we need to reverse the damage we’ve done to our precious planet. The wisdom in our hearts and guts does not consider itself separate, it engages with the world as part of the whole, so the solutions it comes up with, like the red seaweed, are solutions for the whole. And those are the solutions we need right now.
Like dock leaves that grow next to nettles that, when rubbed on the skin, relieve the pain of any sting, red seaweed shows us that nature has within it the remedy to any problem we face.
Working with the innate intelligence of the body I find, without exception, that whatever it is we carry within our psyche the body has the remedy. Like the Canadian farmer who unlocked the potential of seaweed that was on his doorstep, all we need to do is learn how to tap into what lies within us all. But to do that we need to stop our top-down view of the world and connect to all that nature has to offer. The good news is that we carry that wisdom around with us every day in our bodies.
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