Those of us who have taken Lovelock’s Gaia fully on board have long realised that the climate we experience on Earth is an emergent property of life’s interaction with the Earth’s physical and chemical make-up. That interaction, as life has evolved over the aeons, has transformed the atmosphere into an extraordinary mix of molecular nitrogen and oxygen, with a smattering of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and not least water vapour. As Lynn Margulis made absolutely clear, all those gases are a consequence of a global metabolism, in the main, bacterial in origin. Life, too, has generated the soils, with their abundant fertility and, in ways which are less well understood, has helped regulate the salinity of seas such as to maintain the richness and abundance of life that thrives there. Hence, the salt-evaporite basins, encompassed within a calcareous fabric (carbonate), laid down over millions of years by minute planktonic organisms.

John Feldman’s film is a masterpiece in which he puts life, in terms of healthy ecosystems, centre-stage as the Earth’s extraordinary global-temperature regulator. Through a succession of fascinating encounters with a wide spectrum of people, including activists, scientists and inspired thinkers, like Satish Kumar, biodiversity campaigner Adam Sacks and Vandana Shiva, he makes the case that the now, almost obsessive, concern over carbon dioxide emissions and fossil fuels, however valid as adding to global temperature, is taking us away from the prime cause of the climate crisis, which is none other than the horrendous destruction of entire ecosystems, in particular through the capitalisation and industrialisation of agriculture in which soil becomes little more than a medium to hold a crop-monoculture that has been made genetically-resistant to the weed-killing poisons, like glyphosate (Round- Up), which are routinely applied. Just last year, pristine rainforest, covering an area the size of Switzerland, was cleared for cattle ranching, agriculture and mining.

As Feldman’s film makes vividly clear, we have inflicted such terrible damage to the living fabric of our planet that we have put at stake our own survival as a species, let alone of countless other species. But he offers hope, showing, on the one hand, landscapes that have been shorn of trees, of bare, lifeless soils which for years have been ravaged by industrialised farming, and on the other, in sharp contrast, farms and gardens where the practitioners have regenerated living, healthy soils, capable of supporting a rich diversity of plants and animals. And, importantly, these regenerated lands, managed sustainably, provide a living for the associated families and communities.

The film, in many senses, reflects the journey which John Feldman has undertaken to understand better what underpins the climate and ecological crisis. In the first part of the film, he focusses on water, and the way Life helps to manage the hydrological cycle. That management, particularly of the ‘small-water cycle’ in which the surface vegetation, through transpiring, forms the clouds which then provide the rainfall, is key to understanding how the Regenerating Life helps to soothe global temperatures. As Walter Jehne points out, “water cools the planet!” and we see the forest transpiring water vapour which then transforms on condensation into swirling clouds. That is followed by a brief, but telling interview with Anastassia Makarieva, who with Victor Gorshkov, in 2007, had elaborated their ‘biotic pump theory’. As she succinctly put it, the intense evapotranspiration from the closed-canopy rainforest, in generating clouds, with the concomitant pressure change, draws in the humid air from the ocean. That way, across the 3,000 kilometres, from the Brazilian coast to the Andes, the rainfall remains undiminished, at an average 2,250 millimetres per year.

Over the rainforest, as much as 40 per cent of the incoming sunlight which, at the surface, amounts to some 240 watts, gets absorbed in the form of latent heat, more than 2,200 joules for each gram of water as it transforms from liquid to vapour. The water vapour rises in the column of air until, at an altitude where it is cold enough to condense, clouds can form. Aerosols, including isoprenes and Pseudonomas bacteria, are discharged via the leaf stomata and, at cloud-forming altitudes, these help the fine microscopic-sized droplets to coalesce into proportionately-massive raindrops. Meanwhile, in the forming of rain, the quantity transpired (for the Amazon Basin, some 1,370 millimetres per year on average) gets added to by the flow of humid air from the ocean and the combined latent heat released on condensation is equivalent to 70 per cent of the sunlight received at the surface. At least half of the latent heat energy, in the form of electromagnetic radiation, can now escape out to Space, leading to a significant cooling of the Earth’s surface. And the thick, dense clouds formed from the evapotranspired water vapour, also reflect sunlight, all of which adds to the cooling effect of the rainforest.

When the forest is eradicated for palm oil monoculture, for soya, for cattle or is ripped apart for mining, that act of destruction kills the small-water cycle and the vital cooling which goes with it. Without the closed-canopy, sunlight can now bake the earth, thus drying the soil until it becomes lifeless and powdery, as happened during the dust-bowl years of the Midwest. The heat, generated by the sunlight on bare ground is now absorbed by the greenhouse gases, which are at their most dense at the surface, all of which adds to the surface temperature.

As John Feldman tells us, reductionist thinking, currently practised by climatologists who place the blame for the extreme weather events and for the climate crisis on anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, is diverting us from putting our human resources to the regeneration of life and to a community-based lifestyle which works with nature rather than being pitched against it. As Stephan Harding aptly remarks, the mechanistic world-view, which dates back to Descartes, has separated us from the natural world such that we believe we can live without consequence by plundering nature for all its capital. Again, John Feldman points out that the idea of carbon credits and the deployment of renewable energies to replace fossil fuel combustion, is wholly reductionistic and embedded in the concept of ‘business-as-usual’ at all costs.

The depressing message of where we stand in relation to the horrifying and ever-continuing destruction of nature is tempered by some inspiring stories of regeneration, for instance wonderfully-diverse gardens created out of wastelands, or man-made deserts again made to bloom. In conclusion, Regenerating Life, 2-hours long of absorbing images, is a wake-up call for action to save the planet and ourselves from needless destruction.

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©Peter Bunyard, 2023

Peter Bunyard, FLS, is author of Extreme Weather: The Cataclysmic Effects of Climate Change, MJF Books, New York, 2006. He is founding editor of The Ecologist magazine and a Fellow of the Linnean Society.