Agraria Journal Winter 2021

12 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 On Agraria, as in agricultural and “developed” land across the planet, farmers for decades pushed and prodded soil and water into straight lines. They felled trees, planted crops in rows, drained wetlands, and straightened streams to create more room for farming and building, turning a kaleidoscopic torrent of color, shape, and connection into a binary, monocultured and flattened grid. The channels gave water a straight shot from field to Jacoby Creek to river to sea, carrying along herbicides, fertilizers, and topsoil to a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Our signature work with The Nature Conservancy to remeander Jacoby Creek will regenerate natural shapes and forces and return the water to its fractal nature as it courses across land to hydrate it and nurture new life. With the planting of a native biodiverse streambank, the restoration will also prevent stream erosion, build new root systems, and enhance habitat. These multi-faceted benefits are characteristics of regenerative work that mimics natural systems. Mechanistic approaches interrupt the synergistic dance between roots and soil, trees and sky with resultant damage to entire ecosystems. In contrast, regenerative practices can result in surprisingly rapid recovery, especially when they are structured like fractals or spirals, creating systems that are interconnected and allow for healing and evolution. This article explores the principles that inform such practices here at Agraria. In 1975, IBM mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot discovered that the chaotic roughness that is shown in the static along electric lines—and also mirrored in coastlines and mountain ranges—can be described mathematically. While needing the power of computers to model, these self-similar and repeating patterns across scale and time are so ubiquitous as to be fundamental to how natural and other growth patterns express themselves. Mandelbrot coined the term fractals, and several years later wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature to explain his evolving thought. We now recognize fractals not just in the way trees and rivers branch but also in the way that lightning and clouds spread. Animators use fractal geometry to create realistic landscapes for films. And anatomists know that blood runs through fractal vein systems, and that our lungs and other organs are also fractals. Our brain has fractal characteristics, and our behaviors and perceptions display fractal patterns. The movements of investments and the market, population shifts, and community structures have fractal dynamics, and African indigenous knowledge systems, religion, architecture and The Shape of Things To Come BY SUSAN JENNINGS Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe. –Daniel Pinchbeck