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Physician and health care reform advocate David K. Cundiff discusses his article “Ecovillages and organic agriculture: a scenario for global climate restoration.” David challenges the IPCC’s failure to model a fully organic global agricultural transition, presenting a scenario where converting 5 billion hectares to biointensive organic farming could sequester nearly 98 percent of projected greenhouse gas emissions. The conversation details how “GROW BIOINTENSIVE” methods, using hand tools, natural fertilizers, and closed nutrient loops, can outperform industrial agriculture in yield and carbon capture. David also proposes a radical alternative for Point Reyes National Seashore: replacing cattle ranch evictions with pilot ecovillages that solve housing needs while restoring the climate. Discover how a shift to community-based, chemical-free living might be humanity’s only path between extinction and survival.
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Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back David K. Cundiff, physician and health care reform advocate. Today’s KevinMD article is Ecovillages and organic agriculture: a scenario for global climate restoration. David, welcome back to the show.
David K. Cundiff: Thank you very much, Kevin.
Kevin Pho: All right, so what prompted you to write this article about ecovillages and organic agriculture on KevinMD?
David K. Cundiff: OK, well I have six grandchildren. They range in age from 3 to 12. For the last five or six years, I have been concerned about them and researching climate change. I went to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They are an agency of the U.N. and they are tasked with coming up with all the dreary data about what is happening to our climate and biodiversity. I think they may also look at global pollution.
We have the polycrises that go along with life now that we are trying to change, but we haven’t really made a dent in the rise of greenhouse gases. In this Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change document, I found five scenarios. The current scenario is human extinction by the end of the century. The best-case scenario was called climate-smart agriculture. I looked into exactly what that is. It doesn’t have a legal definition. In fact, it includes or can include chemical fertilizers, glyphosate, Roundup, the notorious herbicide, GMO seeds, and fungicides.
I was astounded that they didn’t model global organic agriculture, which would to me be the best-case scenario. So I modeled it, and my article appeared in the journal Cureus in 2023. It is titled Connecting climate change mitigation to global land regeneration, doubling worldwide livestock and reduction of early deaths from non-communicable diseases.
This analysis that I published showed something important. Over 90 percent of the world’s agriculture uses these chemicals and pesticides. Switching from our current chemical agriculture to organic would change our current situation of putting about 12 gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere from agriculture. The agriculture that depletes the soil and puts all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would go from that to a net withdrawal of carbon dioxide of 24 gigatons a year. This totals a difference of over 35 gigatons a year of greenhouse gases coming out of the atmosphere and into the soil.
This led me to see how we would be able to actually move toward this better scenario. Just for reference, the amount of gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent that humans put into the atmosphere each year is about 57. If you take away 35, you are reducing the human-caused greenhouse gases by more than half. The additional benefit is that we don’t eat food that is made from all these chemicals, glyphosate, pesticides, and GMO seeds. That is what I modeled. Then I looked at how we are going to be able to do that with agriculture. It would be a lot more work to have global organic agriculture, but that is what we need to survive.
Kevin Pho: You suggested that switching to biointensive organic farming can sequester nearly 98 percent of projected greenhouse gas emissions. Is that number correct?
David K. Cundiff: That is right. That was even before I published that preprint only with organic. Now biointensive takes it further. Organic regenerative is now used a lot. It is kind of on top of organic. Organic is just what you are not doing. You are not putting chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and so on into the soil. Regenerative is having cover crops and rotating the crops to not till the soil, which releases a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, along with several other things beyond organic.
Now there is biointensive agriculture. I first found out about this when I spent about two and a half months at The Farm in Tennessee. This is one of the original ecovillages dating back to the seventies. I had wanted to actually retire there because I liked what they did so much ecologically and otherwise. I learned to do biointensive agriculture. It is promoted by John Jeavons, who is in Willits, California. He has done much more work in the developing world than he has been able to do in the United States. He has taught biointensive agriculture in 150 or more countries in the world.
The difference is biointensive agriculture uses no fossil fuels. It uses hand tools and no tractors or any of that heavy equipment that compacts the soil. When heavy equipment goes over the soil, it is not good for the soil. So it uses hand tools. The garden beds are double-dug, which means that you get a broadfork of about five feet with about five prongs in between. It is very hard work. I was sweating heavily.
Kevin Pho: So if biointensive organic agriculture decreases emissions, why did the IPCC fail to model a global transition to exclusively organic agriculture?
David K. Cundiff: I tried to get that from them. I was in email correspondence with one of their leading scientists who came from New Zealand, and I couldn’t get a straight answer on why they didn’t model global organic agriculture. Maybe we can find out now if somebody from there responds and tells us. I hope this gets to the IPCC so that they come up with a response.
Kevin Pho: So you talked about the grow biointensive method previously in terms of how that can reduce emissions. You also propose replacing cattle ranch evictions with pilot ecovillages. What exactly is an ecovillage and what would that look like when scaled up?
David K. Cundiff: OK, well, I was looking for a way to implement what is needed. I first found out what is needed is organic agriculture, and then we need to figure out how to start that. We need a lot of people in those ecovillages. I modeled having about a thousand people in each ecovillage. Those ecovillages would use regenerative energy like solar, wind, and hydro energy. They would grow food biointensively, organically, and regeneratively for themselves and for the neighboring communities.
When I model doing that with half of the human population, 4 billion people would live in these ecovillages, which would be wonderful places to live. I wanted to live in one, and I will if I get an opportunity. Doing that would drop the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere a year by 98 percent. If you get half the people into ecovillages that aren’t using cars or other fossil fuels and add biointensive farming, you can actually draw a net amount of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and into the soil per year.
Kevin Pho: Are there any parts of the country or the world for that matter that have a scaled-up vision of what you talk about? Is there a collective of ecovillages or any places where we can see that in action?
David K. Cundiff: There is an ecovillage network globally. It started I believe in the eighties, and it is still going and adding ecovillages. However, they are not to the size that we need to scale it up to actually reverse climate change. I have seen a number of them, maybe 20,000 of them. I lived at The Farm in Tennessee, which was one of the first ones. It was great at the beginning. It was a commune and they grew their own food and built their own homes. Now the ecovillages have many fewer people in them.
It needs to scale up more than ever to a new scale so that with a thousand people in an ecovillage, you can really have a community. That is a wonderful place for young climate scientists and activists to thrive and to take care of other societal problems. They could bring in the homeless, the formerly incarcerated, and people with major mental illness and put them all to work. There is a lot of work to do in biointensive agriculture. That is a good way to reverse our current epidemic in obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and all the chronic diseases. These conditions would benefit from hard physical labor on a regular basis. That is the way humans evolved. They didn’t evolve sitting inside looking at screens like we are doing now.
We have got very dire projections from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation about where humanity is going in physical wellness. We need to increase metabolic health, and that is mainly diet and exercise. What I am modeling would be good for both.
Kevin Pho: We are talking to David K. Cundiff, physician and health care reform advocate. Today’s KevinMD article is Ecovillages and organic agriculture: a scenario for global climate restoration. David, let’s end as always with take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.
David K. Cundiff: OK, well, there is hope for humanity. But it will take some major changes. There are 17,000 acres of National Park Service land in West Marin. I live in Marin County. The Nature Conservancy has bought that land or is in the process of doing so, although it is not a done deal. They are getting that land on the understanding that animals and their production of methane are bad for the climate. Well, they are not. My article and the modeling show that. I would like to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. stop the takeover of this land by the Nature Conservancy. They should make model ecovillages there. Three ecovillages on 17,000 acres would provide a demonstration of how you can model reversing climate change. That can be copied by ecovillages all over the world.
Kevin Pho: David, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight. Thanks again for coming back on the show.