Global Gardening

Gray Merriam | Sep 17, 2025

This week we are continuing to discuss a possible pit that could go below the water table. That notion is discussed because it could make some short-term profits for some folks. The idea is dangerous for a local lake but it also needs to be seen as one more impact to a global system that sustains us and must continue for future people and ecosystems. We must react to our local events such as this gravel pit but we need to see it in its perspective as part of a regional landscape and thus part of a provincial and then a national and then a continental and then a global system of environmental system management, Not bureaucratic management and not management according to simplified economic models. No, Integrated processes of management that govern a sustainable system. Let’s go back to the land to start.

If you want more corn from your garden plot, do you simply plant the rows of corn closer together? Those who have tried this know better. You get less corn and poor quality. But we ignore that simple lesson when we try to have too many people on earth. The lesson has been recognized for a long time in the basic principle that every plot of ground has a limit --- “a carrying capacity” --- as many plants or animals as that the area of land can support. Your garden plot and your township and your country and your whole earth all have limits that we need to recognize.

Yet we still say that more people would be good. Perhaps unknowingly, religions, marketers and politicians all together have encouraged more of us even in lands that can’t produce enough food such as Gaza. Our response has been to apply more technology. But it has not worked.

Consider Tuktoyaktuk that little strip of land at the very north end of our territory. As the ocean tears away the tiny land area of Tuktoyaktuk we respond with a million-dollar engineering plan to fight the rising ocean. Why don’t we just move? There are strong but often unstated ties to particular lands.

We have tried moving growing populations to less crowded lands. But mixing of cultural groups can be can be significantly disruptive socially. Political groups are suggesting legal prevention of disruption caused by population shifting. Profiteers support movements toward continuing consumer input to their economic models despite social and cultural disruption.

Shifting growing populations of underfed humans does not increase food production or, in many cases, availability. Not now and not in the following generation. Capacity to support populations depends on the ability of the land to produce food. Canada’s ‘empty’ lands are mainly Precambrian rock, invaluable water or latitudes that receive little seasonal sunlight to drive plant growth. Technology will not engineer great food production from such limitations.

What unthinking technology does do is damage natural processes that historically have the processes that maintain the ecosystems of the lands and waters. Political hurry in response to current short-term budgetary pressures impacts natural processes in future decades. Failure to recognize the ancient truths of over-running the carrying capacity of the land will damage and the people’s vital ties to the land that is their home.

What will today’s excessive profits do to benefit the next seven generations?