Grains are a ubiquitous part of our global diet, with countless varieties grown and consumed worldwide. Among these, wheat is a predominant player, and its importance cannot be overstated. It serves as a dietary staple for millions, if not billions, of people around the globe. However, not all wheat is created equal. There are significant nutritional differences between the wheat grown in Europe and that grown in America. This comprehensive article aims to delve deeper into these differences, delving into the nutritional battle being waged between European and American wheat.

Understanding Wheat: A Historical Perspective

Before diving into the nutritional differences, it’s crucial to understand what wheat is and why it’s such an integral part of our diet. Wheat is a type of grain that’s been grown and consumed by humans for thousands of years. Historical records tell us that wheat cultivation dates back to as early as 9600 BC in the fertile crescent, an area corresponding to present-day Middle East. It’s rich in carbohydrates that provide us with energy and a good source of fiber that aids in digestion. Moreover, it also provides protein, an essential building block for our bodies, and several essential vitamins and minerals, which perform various functions in our bodies, from supporting immune health to aiding in energy production.

European Wheat: A Nutritional Powerhouse?

European wheat, particularly the varieties grown in countries like France, Italy, and Germany, is often hailed for its superior nutritional profile. It’s typically high in protein, dietary fiber, and essential vitamins and minerals like B vitamins and iron. The nutrient-rich soil in which it’s grown plays a significant role in its nutritional composition. European farming practices often emphasize organic and sustainable farming methods, and the wheat varieties chosen for cultivation are often those with robust nutritional profiles. This focus on nutrition and quality often gives European wheat an edge in the nutritional battle.

American Wheat: The Modern Grain

American wheat, on the other hand, is often criticized for being less nutritious. This criticism is largely due to the modern agricultural practices employed in the U.S., such as the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can affect the nutritional content and quality of the wheat. Additionally, the focus on high-yield varieties and genetically modified crops that may lack in nutritional content is another factor contributing to this perceived shortcoming. However, it’s crucial to note that not all American wheat fits this description. There are certainly nutrient-rich varieties grown in the U.S., especially in certain regions with rich soil and farmers dedicated to organic and sustainable farming practices.

The Battle: Which Wheat Wins?

So, which wheat comes out on top in this nutritional battle? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. While European wheat often has a more robust nutritional profile, this doesn’t mean American wheat isn’t nutritious. The nutritional content of wheat can vary significantly based on the variety, the soil in which it’s grown, and how it’s processed post-harvest. Furthermore, even wheat with a lower nutritional profile can still provide substantial nutritional benefits when consumed as part of a balanced diet.

The Impact of Processing on Nutritional Content

Another important aspect to consider in this nutritional battle is the impact of processing. Both European and American wheat undergo various levels of processing before they reach our plates. This processing can significantly affect the nutritional content of the final product. For instance, whole grain wheat, which includes all parts of the grain—bran, germ, and endosperm—is generally more nutritious than refined wheat, which includes only the endosperm.

Conclusion

In the end, the nutritional battle of the grains is not about crowning a winner. It’s about understanding the nuances of these staple foods and making informed choices about what we put on our plates. Each type of wheat has its own unique nutritional profile and set of benefits. So, whether you choose European wheat or American, remember that it’s just one part of a balanced and varied diet. The key is to combine it with a variety of other nutrient-rich foods for a balanced, nutritious diet.

The post The Nutritional Battle of the Grains: European Wheat vs. American appeared first on The Urban Monk.

But the weather is starting to change for those of us in areas of the country where our seasons are markedly different.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the winter is marked by the “fear” emotion – this year’s extenuating circumstances notwithstanding – and the water element, which makes sense, evolutionarily. 

We didn’t always know that we’d have enough to make it through the winter… And the way human gene encoding gets passed down through generations, it tracks that as the weather gets colder, we feel heavier and more inclined to close ourselves off and conserve our resources (both external and internal.)

So if you’ve made it through the winter in one piece, congratulate yourself! Fear is natural and necessary, and if we can learn to metabolize it rather than avoid it, we build our resilience much more efficiently.

Moving into spring… you may be surprised to learn that the dominant emotion associated with this season is the “anger” emotion.

Stay with me here…

Up and Out, Wood and Frustration

Springtime brings up certain cultural rituals that we often take for granted.

Why do we reorganize our closets? Deep clean our homes? Rejoin the gym and revitalize our workout routines? 

It’s because we want to cull ourselves from the dormant energy we’ve guarded so closely during the winter, when we might’ve hoarded feelings, objects, habits, and other ideas that no longer serve us. It’s time to reassess what resources we no longer need, and start the process of getting rid of them.

To do that we utilize the vibrational resonance of spring

Like fear, anger is a useful emotion, when applied responsibly and with intention. 

In TCM, anger has a very specific range of motion – Up and Out.

Think about what flower buds and blades of grass do… What you’re doing when you deep clean or set up a yard sale… What farmyard animals and other critters are doing when they have their spring babies…

It’s all the same “anger” energy – the up and out – to push through barriers and into new worlds. 

And what happens when you aren’t able to decongest, to cleanse, to break through the membrane we spent the winter creating?

Frustration, resentment, anger. 

Organ-izing Our Feelings

Anger is associated with the liver and gallbladder the most. The liver is a yin organ. Its responsibilities include regulating both blood and emotional flow. 

The gallbladder is a yang organ, and its responsibilities include storing and then removing bile.

The liver is associated with planning – think of it as the overarching goal. The gallbladder is what you use to get you from point A to point B –  overseeing decision making, idea generating, articulating dreams, and setting them into motion. 

That means that one of the best ways to proactively support yourself is to support these two organs.

When those two organs are healthy and in balance (along with the other officials), you’ll feel forgiveness and empathy, steadfast assertiveness, fulfillment, joy, passion, evenness of temper, inspiration…

Conversely, you’ll feel stagnant, angry, depressed, irritated, and unable to make decisions when you haven’t cleared those organs.

Luckily, nature provides.

5 Edible Plants You Can Forage in Spring

Dandelions: Weeds? Maybe. Delicious? Definitely. You can eat the greens in salads, use the roots to make a pseudo-coffee, or munch on the greens as a snack. And their polysaccharides are excellent for supporting the liver and helping it to produce bile and filter out toxins.

Garlic Mustard: This weed, often found along roadsides and near creeks, is bitter-tasting, which means that it also supports gallbladder function and the production of bile! 

Wild Violets: Using the upper part of the plant, people have been using wild violets to treat respiratory ills for ages, but they’re also known to be antiinflammatory, antioxidant, and a blood cleanser – great for both liver and gallbladder!

Chickweed: This plant with pointy, oval-shaped leaves is usually heralded for its soothing effect on rheumatoid disorders and skin conditions, but it also can help decongest chests, blocked kidneys, and gallbladders. Try it as a spinach replacement!

Milkweed: The long and tender shoots of this plant have long been cooked and eaten to treat gallstones, as well as being brewed into a tea to help soothe asthma, arthritis, bladder infections, and several other common ailments.

The Earth gives us what we need to support our bodies as they transition through the seasons…

Do a little bit of research about your local edible flora and fauna, and use the powerful energy of spring to get yourself going!

The post Spring Time in TCM – Plus, 5 Plants You Can Forage appeared first on The Urban Monk.

You see, one thing that ecologists, biodiversity experts, climate scientists, and conservationists can agree on is that nature in its purest, least molested form has incredible carbon sequestration capabilities. After all, carbon doesn’t only come from fossil fuels, Nature has had its own way of regulating climate since the dawn of time.

That method depends heavily on intricately connected ecosystems.

And bit by bit, man has teased those ecosystems apart for one reason or another. 

We did away with apex predators like wolves and lynxes because they were threats to our livestock, which we needed in order to sell animal products and support our families.

We deforested trees to clear paths for homesteads, and used the lumber to build our shelters.

We’ve disrupted the migratory patterns of birds with our pesticides, destroyed biodiversity in favor of cash crop monoculture, robbed the world of valuable carbon sinks, and threatened our pollinators with extinction.

And when we think of all that we’ve changed about nature’s complete design, “planting trees” feels like it doesn’t quite cover all manner of sins.

Although “rewilding” contains a multitude of meanings depending on the listener (more on that further down), simply planting trees isn’t going far enough towards restoring ecosystems, sequestering carbon, or preventing extinction.

Here’s why.

Planting Trees is Only the First Step

When the World Economic Forum announced in January of this year that they were launching a global initiative to plant one trillion trees within the coming decade, activists and civilians alike rejoiced.

That’s a big number – the planet will surely benefit enormously from one trillion more trees, won’t it?

Possibly… but there are caveats.

For starters, tree planting has the strongest effect when it’s done in urban areas, and that’s because urban centers are carbon hotspots without the possibility of being “rewilded”. Vacant lots behind movie theaters don’t have the potential to be returned to their original states as thriving wetlands or grasslands or whatever they were before we paved them…

But a perimeter of trees where there was previously only concrete can have a more powerful effect than zero trees. And we need to plant them there, otherwise they won’t grow because there aren’t natural seed sources nearby to carry seeds on the wind or through animal excrement.

However, planting trees doesn’t often result in full forest regrowth. We’re only planting a handful of species, and usually without consideration of what’s native to the area. 

That means that the trees grown where humans have planted them might not restore the original ecosystem at best, and at worst may actually harm the species still living there.

Plus, tree diversity encourages animal and insect species diversity, which welcomes more life.

There are several different ways to bring about the return of trees where we’ve previously decimated them. 

Afforestation, for example, is a method of planting trees where a forest had not existed in the past. It’s laying the foundations for nature to create a new ecosystem.

Reforestation is planting trees where a forest did exist, up until relatively recently.

Natural forest regrowth, however, is simply removing obstacles to trees, such as invasive species, grazing animals, or pesticides, which involves less up-front cost than a massive tree-planting campaign.

Rewilding, of course, is its own beast.

The Nature of Rewilding

Rewilding became an expression in the 1990s, coined by American environmentalist Dave Froman. It’s garnered criticism for a few reasons.

For one, some of its critics take issue with its emphasis on low-human involvement, interpreting the movement as one that excludes the inevitability of human contact.

Proponents of rewilding insist that their aims are to rewild ecosystems in such a way that humans can interact with it in harmony. As discussed, those living in the countryside or who have livestock feel trepidation about the reintroduction of predator species. But when wolves returned to Yellowstone in the ‘90s, for instance, several things became possible:

• Elk population decreased, which meant plant diversity flourished.
• When plant diversity flourished, beavers and other natural environment reshapers returned and built dams and other structures.
• Ponds and other new features increased diversity for the species that thrive in those conditions. 

Rewilding has been used to mean “productive land abandonment”, as in literally just letting nature take over and recreate its own systems, “releasing captive-bred animals into the wild”, as with predators and carnivores that can control things like deer population so that plant species don’t go extinct from their grazing, and many more.

David Attenborough himself is a huge supporter of rewilding.

The best way to go about it, according to prominent researchers, is a threefold approach, all hinging on balance. 

1. Build redundancy into the ecosystem by making sure that there are enough different species throughout each level of the food chain. Predators, pollinators, decomposers, herbivores, etc. This ensures that all roles will be fulfilled.

2. There need to be enough interlocking species that can connect ecosystems, such that every plant, animal, and insect is relevant to more than one cascade of effects.

3. We must remove ourselves as stewards regarding natural occurrences like floods and fires, as those occurrences strengthen natural resiliency and preserve the balance of species against each other.

Rewilded grasslands, forests, marshes, wetlands, and other biomes have such a high potential to sequester carbon, save species, and restore biodiversity that it belongs at the top of an any ecological strategy to fight climate change. 

As Attenborough says, “we must rewild the world.”

The post Controversy Trails in the Wake of “Rewilding”: Explore the Nuance appeared first on The Urban Monk.

But in some cases… we really would benefit from believing in the stories and lived experiences of our predecessors.

Now, there are myriad compoundable factors that have contributed to the rise of chronic diseases, mental illness, and lowered immunity. When we remember that our agrarian ancestors faced very few documented cases of diseases we’ve now come to expect as simply a product of our corporeal wear-and-tear…

It becomes pretty simple to connect the dots.

The food we grow today just doesn’t pack the same nutritional punch as it used to.

An apple, it turns out, is not always an apple.

Not only that, but our lifestyles have changed so quickly and on such a drastic scale that our ability to absorb nutrients is much lower than it used to be. Practices that help you absorb nutrients include eating healthy fats, maintaining robust gut health so that the small intestine can take in what’s been broken down, moderating alcohol consumption, ensuring present and active digestive enzymes, and diversifying gut bacteria. 

And we tend to struggle in those areas.

However, staying on our best behavior will only go so far if the food we’re eating contains less nutrition than it should.

Let’s step back and look at the bigger picture.

The Maelstrom of Nutritional Depletion

According to a study that tracked the nutritional value of 43 crops from 1950 to 1999, at least six nutrients showed marked, consistent declines in presence at up to 38%. The other seven nutrients they tested for also showed declines, but with less continuous results.

Those six were protein, Ca, P, Fe, riboflavin and ascorbic acid. 

Some other important things have happened since 1950 – the industrialization of agriculture, the shift to monoculture farming, and production on a timeline inconceivable to human beings even 100 years ago.

Yes, you can get a carrot any time, and it’ll be resistant to pesticides, a bigger size, and quickly grown.

But in the categories of calcium, iron, phosphorus, protein, B12, and ascorbic acid, it falls short of its grandpa carrot.

The study suggests that the reason for this change is that all of the advancements made to the carrot (or any of the other 42 crops) happened at so great a rate that its nutritional abilities couldn’t catch up to it.

Activists have other theories as well, namely soil depletion. Through erosion, poison, and anti-regenerative farming – whereby we don’t replenish the soil’s health after each harvest by planting crops that supply the nutrients the soil had just lost through the last crop’s roots – we have made our soil largely unable to meet its former standards.

There are certainly scientists who disagree, citing errors in study findings regarding duplicating the conditions of the 1950 and 1999 test subjects. 

However, it’s not the only study of its kind. The Kushi Institute produced similar results, as did the British Food Journal, and several other publicans.

And given what we know about soil depletion… it doesn’t stretch the limits of our imagination to believe that our food simply isn’t as nutritious.

So what can we do about it?

We Don’t Need Nutrients Any Less

In fact, we probably need them more.

And just because vegetables and fruits are less nutritious than they once were doesn’t mean you needn’t bother eating them.

You just need to eat more of them.

We can’t all harvest and grow our own food – although creative solutions like square foot gardening, soil testing, and roto-tilling power tools to make better use of your lawn certainly make it easier – but that solution is certainly elegant.

In fact, experts often recommend alternating plots to give freshly-used soil a chance to regenerate its microbes while you feed it manure and other organic fertilizers. 

Otherwise, you’ve got a few options:

• Knowing that you’re not getting the same nutritional value from your fruits and vegetables as you should be, get lab work done and test to find out where your deficiencies are! That way, you can target your vitamin supplementation specifically instead of eating a bunch in the form of a multivitamin and hoping they all stick.

• Simply eat more fruits and vegetables. Puree them in soups, roast them in huge batches, make vegetable and fruit smoothies, forego a traditional starch side at dinner for double-veggies, include fruits in your dessert craving repertoire more often, etc.

• Petition the USDA relentlessly, your senators, the federal government, and any other legislative bodies you can move (it’s always best if you can start locally) to move towards regenerative farming. Start a CSA in your neighborhood! Rail against pesticides and soil erosion to everyone who will listen. 

Although our vitamin and nutrient intake is surely declining, we have the agency and the resources to take matters from the soil and into our own hands. 

The post Your Grandma’s Not Crazy – Food DID Used to Be Better for You appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Although plenty of us have benefited from deliverable groceries and meals, easy access to bodegas and grocery stores, and robust internet connections…

We’ve also worn the floors out of our apartments and homes. Apocalypse preppers finally started to seem reasonable, and the boost in people learning survival skills (that really, we should already know) has been immeasurable – gardening, sewing, knitting, woodworking, etc.

If you’ve fantasized about homesteading – a life of semi-isolated self-sufficiency – it’s safe to assume you weren’t the only one.

Some people, however, have been doing it for so long they could write the book on it. In fact, some of those people have written the book on it.

Ron and Johanna Melchiore, last week’s guests on the The Urban Monk Podcast, have written several – Off Grid and Free, which is NOT a how-to guide, and The Self-Sufficient Backyard for the Independent Homesteader, which is. 

I’ve lived my life in a few different ways – growing up entrenched in metropolis in Los Angeles, as an ascetic in the Himalayas, deep in the woods where I live now.

Surrounded by nature, where all I have to do is step outside to remember I’m part of this Earth, has exactly the moving effect I thought it would. But… everything I need can be sent to my doorstep.

For Ron and Johanna, the last 40 years have been spent using the skills they already had, plus learning an unbelievable amount more, homesteading in a trial by fire.

How They Started

Ron told me he hadn’t grown up dreaming he’d live a life of self-reliance and isolation – he was trained in industrial electronics in Pennsylvania, and he hated it about as much as most people hate their 9-to-5s that yoke them to society.

When he heard of homesteading for the first time, it was actually from his supervisor, who responded to his complaints about working his life away with a suggestion that changed his life.

So he did it.

Pause, rewind, freeze: it’s not that easy.

Throughout our talk, Ron and Johanna talk about a lot of their hardest-learned lessons. 

They reflect on the practical things they would’ve never really known until they tried them – like why growing wheat and rye doesn’t yield enough return for two people to justify all the work – and the things they hadn’t even considered because they were so in love with their journey – like how much money Ron really needed to live after he’d bought his land, tools, equipment, and set up his garden.

By the time they met, Ron already had his first homestead totally set up in Maine. Johanna had the skills she’d learned in her childhood in Maryland – sewing, knitting, gardening, spinning yarn on a wheel, canning, freezing, fruit preservation, etc.

And she’d had the same genetic itch to carve a home out of wilderness that Ron had. 

All that was left to do was figure it out for the next 40 years.

Figuring It Out

They’ve lived now in three different homesteads, each time starting from scratch, and they say this is their last. 

From Maine, to the Saskatchewan territory in the Canadian Bush (100 miles from civilization and only accessible through floatplane, by the way), to their current homestead in Nova Scotia, they’re about as experienced at building something out of nothing as you can be.

Of course, that’s not how they see it. What they built wasn’t out of nothing – it was out of everything around them, everything that really matters.

And when I asked them what their highs and lows were of all the adventures they’d had, they had plenty of highs – adventure, independence, confidence, knowledge, the space and freedom to do what they truly loved doing.

Regarding the lows, I thought they were going to mention the freezing nights in an expedition tent while they built the solar panels and frame for their home in Canada. Or maybe, what happened when they got sick or when bears attacked. Even the inconvenience of rancid flour and spotty satellite TV.

To my surprise, they said…

Nothing. 

There were no lows.

You’ll have to check out the whole podcast. Ron and Johanna learned most of what they know by doing, messing up, realizing how, and doing again. But they love to encourage others to find their own way. 

They write pretty extensively on www.inthewilderness.net, have published two books, and can be reached easily through Facebook. 

The Melchiores imparted so much wisdom to me in the almost-hour we spoke that I’d never heard before, like…

• How many board feet of wood, and how many cords, it takes to build a cabin – so you know how many deadwood trees you’d have to pull down, skid, and saw to build a home…
• What they decided to grow instead of wheat and rye to make their own grain…
• What was on their shopping list every six months into town, and how they stored it all…
• The moment they knew they’d found home flying above the Saskatchewan territory…
• The sweet spot square footage they’ve figured out that works perfectly for two…
• When to dig your own well and when to have one excavated…
• What they garden in order to eat fresh all year round… 
• How they keep busy through long winters in the wilderness…
• What to do to make sure you’re prepared for every emergency…
• And so much more.

Click here to listen to the podcast. And if you think you might be ready to stake out on your own and live a homesteading life, drop them a line!

The post How Many Times Have You Thought About Hoofing It in the Mountains During 2020? appeared first on The Urban Monk.

When we figured out we didn’t have to hope we find vegetation, we could just learn the secrets of the soil and grow it ourselves wherever we wanted to, we built societies, civilizations, governments, townships, municipalities…

But there are some problems with that model.

One, we’ve talked about pretty extensively – we’re not ruminants. We don’t have the teeth or the digestive systems to process grasses (wheat, barley, oats, rye, corn, sugar cane) like ruminants can. 

That doesn’t mean you have to stop eating those things – it’s just that they don’t contribute to our systems running optimally. But a lot of what we’re growing are grasses, and so that’s what we’re eating. 

More importantly, however, agriculture led to the hubris of monoculture and cash crops, which is how soil depletion even entered into our vocabulary. 

And it’s causing major problems.

Soil Depletion 

This is what happens when the nutrients and components in soil that make it fertile and allow for healthy, consistent crops is used and not replaced. When that happens, crop yields are lower and less robust. Excessive cultivation, monoculture, and less-than-attentive soil management are at the root cause of soil depletion.

This isn’t a new concept – even during the early days of plantation farming in the United States, farms frequently went bankrupt or changed locations because of the constant tobacco farming and growing trade demands. 

Practices that affect soil fertility can be:

• Allowing herd animals to graze freely, which can lead to soil compaction (reduction of pore space in soil) and close-cropping 
• Not using manure to feed nutrients back to the soil
• Industrial logging on a large scale
• Slash-and-burn agriculture
• Monocropping
• And more.

The problem we’re facing is two-fold: our soil isn’t healthy and so isn’t producing healthy crops, and the soil is eroding, which is not great for climate change. 

Why? 

Because when soil erodes, it takes the carbon that was trapped inside of it along with it, and that carbon gets released back into the atmosphere.

When you combine the carbon-releasing effects of soil erosion with the carbon-releasing effects of our current agricultural and land use practices, the EPA estimates that around 24% of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from the agricultural sector.

That’s where regenerative agriculture can help.

Repairing the Carbon Sink Beneath Our Feet

According the Rodale Institute’s latest white paper, Regenerative Agriculture and the Soil Carbon Solution, we can use regenerative agriculture as a means to “sequester carbon, improve soil health, and feed the world.”

That’s a tall order.

Let’s start with what exactly regenerative agriculture is…

You can think of it as the opposite of our current system. Rather than resulting in soil depletion, regenerative agriculture assigns equal focus to restoring nutrients to the soil as it does to drawing them out of the soil to bring into crops. 

And because soil isn’t being damaged during high-yield crop harvests and monoculture, it stops eroding and continues to store carbon.

Farming practices that are considered regenerative include:

• Composting
• Cover cropping and green manure use
• Seasonal crop rotations
• Integrated livestock practices (like having ruminants strategically graze pastures in order to build up soil)
• Less tilling of the soil (which releases carbon)
• Complete absence of chemical fertilizers (which kills microbes, bacteria, and fungi in the soil that help to trap carbon)

By turning to these practices, we accomplish a few goals. 

We lock more and more carbon into the soil. You see, when plants pull sugar from the carbon in the atmosphere during photosynthesis, they do it to feed the microbes in the soil surrounding their roots. The microbes eat the carbon, and convert it to more easily storable materials. 

We also increase the nutritional value of the food we’re eating (which has been declining, as some studies have found), and by diversifying the crops planted in our massive fields, we reintroduce some of the original ecosystem to the land. 

And, as is an increasing concern in the age of extreme weather events and climate change,  regenerative agriculture strengthens the soil and prevents it from eroding, which preserves habitats, ecosystems, carbon sequestration, and helps to protect against powerful storms. 

If you’re attempting to vote with your dollar here, look for these labels:

• REGENERATIVE ORGANIC CERTIFIED
• REAL ORGANIC PROJECT
• USDA CERTIFIED ORGANIC
• LAND TO MARKET
• SOIL CARBON INITIATIVE

These labels account for various initiatives – the second two focus less on the “organic” outcome of the harvest, and more on the practices used in animal, soil, and water infiltration care. The first three focus on both regenerative practices and organic outcome, with the first certification being considered the gold standard of regenerative farming.

In so many words, regenerative farming is the practice of spiritually concerning yourself with the land. It’s common sense – do not take without giving, do not be careless, do not poison. 

And it’s probably our best hope for transforming our industrial agriculture system. 

The post Fixing our Food and the Climate: Regenerative Farming 101 appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Were they too uncivilized to recognize it? Did we consider it simply part of the muddy cocktail of the human condition? Had local village alchemists discovered SSRIs but we simply term them differently today?

Most people are probably aware that homeopathic knowledge – ancestral, indigenous, generational, or any other variety – is often overlooked in medical science.

In fact, because the traditions tend to be passed down orally, or in languages other than common lingua francas, some consider this knowledge to be “forgotten.”

Especially as monoculture threatens to permanently alter ecosystems, and those in power are ignorant as to the uses of the plants they’re harming, it’s essential to encourage those who can to keep the knowledge alive.

That’s what drives Evan Cohen, an herbalist who just happens to live in one of the most biodiverse regions of the country – Madison County, North Carolina. She even studied at the nationally heralded Terra Sylva Herb School. 

Right inside the Blue Ridge Mountains lurks land that’s been untouched by industrial hands – mostly, anyway. It’s hard to say exactly what it looked like 500 years ago, but as of right now, it’s an amazing place to study botanicals, herbology, and anything else that involves using the natural world to care for the inner human world.

In fact, my Grandmaster used to say “within 15 feet of where you’re standing, there’s a remedy to whatever you’re suffering from.”

I’d say that’s certainly true in Madison County.

Last week, I got to chat with Evan, who does so much with nature it’s hard to fully quantify it.

She’s an herbalist, and sometimes a wildcrafter – which means she grows and harvests plants to use for medicinal purposes, sometimes plucking them right where they’re found in nature, and enhances their useability for the average layperson – and she’s in the perfect place to do it.

However, herbalism isn’t where her connection with improving the conditions of nature and man ends. 

The Many Functions of Evan

Some of her favorite parts about the work that she does include making flower essences, botanicals, tinctures, and – not as different as you’d think – being a doula.

Evan’s focus is always on how best to nurture. 

Sometimes she does that by educating her clients and followers about how to use yarrow, the origins of distilling flower essences, and sometimes by shepherding people through the arduous emotional task of being pregnant, whether or not they choose to become a parent. 

Throughout the podcast, Evan discusses some of the more surprising parts about the life she’s decided to live…

When she first began her herbalism journey many years ago, one of the principles that helped guide her was that plants often look like what they’re designed to do (the doctrine of energetic signatures)…

It seems obvious once you know it. Societies without alphabets and common languages and written history had to figure out what kinds of plants protect and what kinds hurt, right?

While Evan can trust in the botanical world that things are what they seem…

She can’t say the same about being a doula.

Pregnant People Look Like Everyone

People who choose to get abortions often don’t look anything like the people society thinks choose to get abortions…

And people who choose to create families look every way you could possibly imagine. 

The best part, for her, of being a doula is getting to support families on their journey to becoming whatever kind of family they want to be, whatever that looks like.

For Evan’s part, she loves to be a non-judgmental participant, to observe things not as she wants them to be, but as they are. It’s an important and hard-won lesson for all people to learn, really. 

Just as our ancestors noticed that repeatedly using one plant’s essence tended to elicit similar physical and spiritual responses, the order of the world around is already decided. Our only role is to encourage it in its path, and seek its uses without causing harm.

That’s the central tenet of her doula work (she gets deeper into it during the podcast). 

Check out our conversation. You’ll hear us talking about:

• The flower essence everyone’s been asking for since the pandemic hit.
• How learning about plant purposes is like learning a different language.
• The specific alcohol she uses to lock in the energy of an essence.
• How she decides the method of adaptogen ingestion.
• The myriad ways a doula can support a pregnant person.
• How to connect modern safety and personal empowerment during pregnancy.
• And so much more.

Check it out here, guys!
And if you want to learn more about what Evan does, follow her on Instagram @bigcatbirthandbotanicals, or parse through her website, https://www.bigcatbirthbotanicals.com/.

The post “Plants Tell You What They’re For,” Says Evan Cohen appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Since enormous acres of tamed landscape don’t exist in the wild, curious minds have asked the question – Just how much work does it take to maintain what doesn’t make natural sense, and at what cost to the surrounding ecosystems?

More than a million acres of land on Earth are being split between around 35,000 golf courses all over the world, about half of which are in the United States.

Out of about 37 billion acres of land available on the planet, golf courses make up less than 1%. 

Maybe that doesn’t seem like much – but the effect golf courses have on the environment can be pretty profound.

And in more ways than one…

Golf courses take an enormous amount of water to keep the rolling fields a luscious green. 

In order to keep the lawns free of undesirable plant life and weeds at bay in huge swathes of land, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are used in enormous quantities, poisoning not only the soil, but the groundwater and the life forms in direct proximity to the golf courses themselves.

All of this modification is done in an effort to standardize and “beautify” areas that don’t support well-fed grass hills and treeless expanses. 

The desert regions of America, for example, can’t supply golf courses with the water they need to stay attractive through natural rain. Desperately needed water sources get diverted from communities in need to instead prolong the existence of an unnatural habitat disruption.

Typically, environmentalists can break down their assessment of golf’s effect on the world around us into three categories: lack of biodiversity, use of chemicals, and irresponsible water use. 

Let’s take a look at each…

Lack of Biodiversity

Now, golf courses represent more promise from a development standpoint than, say, an industrial park or a new shopping mall. 

But as it stands currently, the allotment of land for golf course creation tends to have adverse effects on the existing wildlife. 

Where once was forest and now exists a golf course, the plants and animals who lived in that forest no longer have a home. Since the average size of a golf course is about 150 acres, any golf course anywhere was once a vast and complex ecosystem that is now stripped of its parts.

However, in some areas, particularly desserts, the heavy water requirement actually encourages animals to thrive where they otherwise wouldn’t. Snakes, for example, thrive in golf courses out in arid land because water is more available to their prey than in the rest of their natural space. The same goes for certain amphibious breeds who are able to access water when they normally couldn’t.

The difference between a biodiverse golf course and a biologically stifling one seems to be how the edges of the course, the area between fairways, and seasonal ponds are treated. If allowed to thrive, they can support the natural organisms that are native to that environment. 

Use of Chemicals

Up until the high profile cases of golf course superintendents developing cancer in the 1990s, pesticide and herbicide use on golf courses was rampant and relatively uncontrolled. 

Several organizations, including the Golf Course Superintendent Association, partnered with an environmental group called Beyond Pesticides to address the problem.

And although great strides in regulation have been made, as recently as 2019 Beyond Pesticides have said their “efforts to eliminate a reliance on pesticides still lag behind other environmental action.”

Constant mowing on gas-powered motors doesn’t lessen the chemical consumption necessitated by golf courses as they’re currently run, either.

Water Use

Obviously, golf courses require a tremendous amount of water in order to stay green and healthy. 

Per course, you can expect to see nearly 130,000 gallons of water used each day. In a world where access to water isn’t even guaranteed for every citizen, that astronomical number feels pretty irresponsible, even considering that a portion of that water is recycled or grey (wastewater without fecal contamination.)

However, the effects on surrounding bodies of water can also be detrimental. Because of the changes made to the natural shape and features of land, soil erosion and gullying can be pretty safely predicted. 

When that happens, sediment runoff into nearby waterways is highly likely, and leads to problems for marine plants and animals.

The answer to all of these problems may not be the abolition of golf courses.

The Audobon International, an organization that advises business on sustainability practices, has laid out a series of suggestions and improvements for existing and future golf courses. 

In the list, advice is given to owners and investors about how to increase biodiversity, sustainable measures, rehabilitate landscapes, provide green spaces within urban areas, and cut down on drinkable water usage. 

If you’re considering going golfing, check the environmental score of the course you’re going to! Vote with your dollar. 
Support those with practices you respect, and let the ones you don’t want to go to exactly why you don’t want to support them!

The post Golf Courses Transform our Natural Landscapes and… What Else?! appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Some feel the intensity of these wildfires is another confirming sign of the real presence of the climate crisis. Some feel that the wildfires are a direct response to capitalist farming practices and the prohibition of ancient Native American agricultural methods. Some claim they’re a result of “not cleaning your floors”, or allowing leaves and other flammable organic material to pile up in forests.

While there’s not much truth to the final theory, the real answer can be found in combining all three explanations, and understanding the way unconscious capitalism has created big problems in the natural world. 

(You can think of unconscious capitalism as the opposite of one of our favorite modern ideas – conscious capitalism. Unconscious capitalism values profit and societal advancement at the expense of the natural world and ethical considerations.)

You see, before the government stepped in, there existed a practice for preventing wildfires and controlling the environment through communion with nature as it is, not as we want it to be.

Native Americans arranged for controlled burns – just like in the indigenous peoples of Amazon rainforest do – for the purposes of land management, usually in order to:

• Reduce flammable organic matter
• Restore ecosystem balance and health
• Recycle nutrients
• Prepare an area for agriculture
• And more.

But about 100 years ago, the U.S. government forbade indigenous tribes in California from using this land management tool to prevent wildfires, and focused instead on developing technologies to put raging fires out.

It’s important to take note of the way the landscapes of our world, both physical and political, are changing, and to understand what it all means.

How Did Controlled Burning Come About?

In a place like California, or the Amazon, land management is a much bigger deal. California is nearly 33% covered by forests, or one third of the whole state. (By contrast, Brazil is about 62% covered in forest – two thirds.)

For many centuries, native populations experienced a spiritual and symbiotic relationship with the forests here. They understood that fire was a tool that could foster growth just as well as it could cause damage, but European settlers couldn’t get past fire as an evil tool for destruction.

There’s a pervasive idea among those who don’t know that before settling America, the land simply existed without human intervention. 

But that’s not true – and certainly, not all human intervention has the same impact. 

Controlled burns were well-timed, occurring in dry winter periods where heat and wind wouldn’t encourage the fires to spread, and lightning storms were less likely. 

And the burns were ceremonial as well as practical, with deep respect for the plant life affected in order to create a more targeted result. They were also consistent. Since burns occurred regularly, usually once a year, vegetation and roots were accustomed to the heat of the fires and the root stock remained intact, able to resprout once the fires stopped. 

Plus, there are some plants, like cones, that specifically open their cones to dispense seeds in response to great heat.

Burning away underbrush, dead grass and vegetation, or leaf litter and dry branch overflow can not only reduce the amount of flammable material that could contribute to bigger naturally occurring or human-error fires…

It also brings soil mineral layers to the forest floor surface to encourage soil health and makes seedlings grow more easily, layers that get buried under years of dead and unhealthy plant matter, clogging up the works.

And finally, the U.S. government is coming around to the benefits of controlled burning and foregoing their former policies.

The Big Change

Around the turn of the 20th century, American legislation prohibited religious and spiritual practices by native populations in California, and plenty of other states.

And by 1935, the U.S. Forest Service had instituted its “10 a.m. policy.” This ensured that any fires set the day before would have to be put out by 10 the next morning – not ideal for clearing away all of the brush and preventing future fires.

As the U.S. became more dependent on a small rotation of cash crops and more focused on monoculture in our growing practices, the need for controlled fires which kept the ecosystem in balance and encouraged the growth of plants that had no obvious monetary value lessened…

At least according to the government. 

It wasn’t until 1995 that the government started to realize it should have been using fire to prevent fire rather than draining resources in the face of fire emergencies.

And now, thanks to California’s wildfires, the state is no longer policing the practice of spiritual and cultural vegetation fire cleansing.

In fact, they’re partnering with the local, indigenous tribes who can draw on their generational wisdom to effectively manage the forest lands as well as clear what is, effectively, kindling for giant wildfires.

That’s what we like to see – our national programs working with ancient cultures to promote profitable and safe, regenerative use of our collective lands. 

But remember not to try controlled burns yourself! Obviously, it can get out of hand pretty quickly. Leave that up to tribal elders and make sure your local representatives know that you support returning to ancient practices if controlled burns are still prohibited in your state!

The post Controlled Burns, Indigenous Practices, and the California Wildfires appeared first on The Urban Monk.

Well, there are plenty of things more heartbreaking than that, actually. But feeling powerless and impotent against the crawling, vining, strangling red-headed step children of nature isn’t ideal.

And though modern science has brought us tons of industrial-strength chemical weed killers, we’ve learned in time not to trust them. 

Those weed killers can often imbalance the pollinators, bad-bug eaters, plant protectors, and bacteria in your garden. It’s a whole ecosystem, see, even if it looks like you’ve tamed nature. (You haven’t. You never will. Nature finds a way.)

Plus, the more “tame” your garden looks, the more likely it is that certain weeds will love to grow there. Crabgrass, dandelion, and other seeded weeds find manicured lawns and freshly clipped grass ideal for their purposes – total domination. (As good a reason as any to let your lawns grow a little more – homogenized front yards are out!)

If you’re experiencing problems with weeds overtaking your yard and garden, start there: just a little bit more length to your grass to give those weeds a tough time.

And if you’ve got the energy, crawling around your yard with a bucket and gloves pulling weeds where you see them is a fantastic way to get…

1. Vitamin D
2. Exercise on little-used muscles
3. Exposure to dirt microbes.

Don’t forget newspapers are great for preventing a flare-up as well – simply lay them down after you weed whack and cover them with mulch. No sunlight, no weeds!

But let’s say you’ve already got a major weed problem and preventive or soft measures simply won’t cut it.

You don’t want those weeds snatching water, sunlight, and soil space from your flowers and vegetables. And you definitely don’t want them choking the life out of your thriving garden!

Try a few of these natural, organic, home-made weed repellent recipes to free your garden from the treacherous grasp of unwanted plant pests!

Vinegar Blend

Grab a spray bottle, a cup of coarse salt, a gallon of vinegar, and tablespoon of dish soap.

You can also use Borax in place of the salt. However, even though it’s a naturally occuring substance, it’s a bit harsher and can have negative effects on the quality of the soil long after it’s been sprayed.

Mix it up, pour into the spray bottle, and give it a good shake. Wait for a good and hot day, and spray as directly onto the weeds as you can. This mixture kills greenery, so avoid your vegetables and flowers. 

The acid in the vinegar burns the plant matter, and the salt helps it to shrivel by the end of the day.

Boiling Hot Water

This won’t work for all situations, like creeping weeds or hugely infested areas, but for minor situations like weeds growing up through cracks in pavements or at the edges of cement or stone gardens, it works like a charm.

Boil water and pour it directly onto the weeds as close as you can.

It won’t prevent them from returning – but it will kill them right then and there!

Lemon Juice

Lemon juice has a similar effect on weeds as vinegar – it’s the acid contained in both.

For a quick fix on weaker weeds, a spray bottle full of lemon juice will help kill weeds in a day or two, as long as you really douse the guys.

Rubbing Alcohol

Two tablespoons of rubbing alcohol mixed with a quart of water can help disquiet leafy weeds. 

Mix it up and pour it into a spray bottle to spray on the leaves of weeds, so that the leaves die off and so does the rest of the plant.

There are a million and one ways to prevent weeds or to stop them once they’ve started – there are even decent organic weed killers on the market, with high iron content to overfeed and thus kill weeds. Or organic weed killers that only kill weeds and don’t mess with the rest of your plant life.

But there’s never a good reason to use chemicals that are harmful to the environment, to your skin, to children, to pets, and ultimately, the food we eat when we’ve got so many other options!

The post Natural Weed Repellents You Can Make at Home appeared first on The Urban Monk.