Why Permaculture Puts Food First

SUBHEAD: It teaches you to think ecosystemically: no waste; cyclical; nourishing body and soul; steady state.

By Albert Bates on 5 November 2018 for the Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2018/10/why-permaculture-puts-food-first.html)


Image above: There are seven popular food crops in this photograph of The Farm. From original article.

When I teach permaculture, and now having done more than 50 full design courses, I try to de-emphasize gardening.

I do that because I know that most other Permaculture teachers do precisely the opposite; they begin with drawing a chicken and then make mandala gardens and herb spirals. I don’t usually do that because to me Permaculture is much more. It is a regenerative design science.

It teaches you to think ecosystemically: no waste; cyclical; nourishing body and soul; steady state. It applies to every aspect of your life, and of civilization; from how we brush our teeth to how we build our cities and exchange value for value.

But Permaculture is also about looking ahead, over the fence, up to the sky, into the forest, and observing the grander patterns.

Anyone who takes that kind of moment these days will be bound to notice phenological signs and portents, the uptick in unusual weather events, a spreading refugee crisis, and some really nasty resource wars appealing to our ethnic tribalism.

“The switch from growth to decline in oil production will thus almost certainly create economic and political tension.”

 — Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrére, Scientific American (1998)

These times have been long predicted, from Malthus’ and Arhennius’ calculations of population and carbon dioxide, to Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and now decades of reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. All of those, and more, are known knowns.

Kerry Emanuel told us about the hurricanes and superstorms in 1987. I predicted the spread of mosquitoes, ticks, and viruses in 1989.

In that same decade James Lovelock, Tim Lenton, Johan Shellnhuber and others were warning that after diverging 2º Celsius from the pre-industrial maxima the carrying capacity of global agriculture would no longer support more than two billion people, and possibly fewer than one billion.

Healthy humans cannot be decoupled from net photosynthetic productivity and that cannot be decoupled from favorable growing conditions; ie: the Holocene epoch of mild and predictable sunlight and rainfall over vast areas of favorable soil.

Last year, a distinguished group of scientists issued this warning:

… [B]iomass plantations with subsequent carbon immobilization are likely unable to “repair” insufficient emission reduction policies without compromising food production and biosphere functioning due to its space‐consuming properties. 

... the requirements for a strong mitigation scenario staying below the 2°C target would require a combination of high irrigation water input and development of highly effective carbon process chains. Although we find that this strategy of sequestering carbon is not a viable alternative to aggressive emission reductions, it could still support mitigation efforts if sustainably managed.

***

This leaves us with a rather clear, but hardly comforting overall conclusion: Holding the 2°C line seems only feasible if two sets of climate action work hand in hand. On the one hand, greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced as early and as effectively as possible. 

In fact, an even more aggressive strategy than reflected by the [IPCC] RCP2.6 scenario should be pursued, aiming at the “induced implosion” of most fossil fuel‐driven business cases in the next couple of decades. 

On the other hand, CDR [carbon dioxide removal] can significantly contribute as a “supporting actor” of the mitigation protagonist, if it gets started and deployed immediately. This means that the biological extraction of atmospheric CO2 as well as the suppression of CO2 release from biological systems must draw upon all possible measures — whether they are optimal or not, whether they are high‐ or low‐tech. 

We therefore suggest fully exploring the pertinent options available now, which include reforestation of degraded land and the protection of degraded forests to allow them to recover naturally and increase their carbon storage, e.g., within the Bonn Challenge initiative or the New York Declaration on Forests. 

Further options range from up‐scaled agroforestry approaches to the application of biochar and various no‐tillage practices for food production on appropriate soils. 

Also, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that humanity cannot anymore afford to waste up to 50% of its agricultural harvest along various consumption chains or to go on operating ineffective irrigation systems.

All of those techniques —reforestation of degraded land, up‐scaled agroforestry, biochar, organic no-till, eliminating waste, and low-tech, broad dissemination — are the meat and potatoes of Permaculture.

In 2008, James Lovelock wrote:

Whatever we do is likely to lead to death on a scale that makes all previous wars, famines and disasters small. 

To continue business as usual will probably kill most of us during the century. Is there any reason to believe that fully implementing Bali, with sustainable development and the full use of renewable energy, would kill less? \

We have to consider seriously that, as with nineteenth century medicine, the best option is often kind words and pain killers but otherwise do nothing and let Nature take its course.

***

Had we heeded Malthus’s warning and kept the human population to less than one billion, we would not now be facing a torrid future. 

Whether or not we go for Bali or use geoengineering, the planet is likely, massively and cruelly, to cull us, in the same merciless way that we have eliminated so many species by changing their environment into one where survival is difficult.

Permaculture is not willing to go gentle into that good night. And this is why food is so core to its pedagogy.

As a movement it is training as many people as possible, from white-gloved suburbanites to war-ravaged refugees, how to garden.

It is showing, through gardening, not-merely self-sufficiency and survival in daunting times, but regeneration of soils, recapture of carbon, and ingenious means for restoring the natural balance that ultimately will be the way we end the crises we are now committed to experiencing.

And with any luck, we’ll also get to eat.


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Global Warming vs Natural Future

SUBHEAD:  Is it a time of action, resignation, or celebration? Is nature something desirable over the allure of shopping?

By Jan Lundgren on 8 May 2014 for Culture Change -
(http://www.culturechange.org/cms/content/view/910/1/)


Image above: Redwood National Park, northern California. From original article.

Are we the last generation of humans, as claimed by speaker and writer Guy McPherson?

So-called balance is exercised by the some corporate news media, catering mainly to science skeptics, to allow denial of human-generated global-warming. But there is a true balance to be met: while the progressive, science-minded alternative press does not reflect total gloom and doom, critics see this as denial of our near-term extinction.

Balance in coverage must be between predicting near-term extinction from multiple climate forcings versus science-based consideration of separate, known factors in global warming that even together do not indicate runaway greenhouse effects beyond the IPCC's worst case.

This reporter does not subscribe to either view with confidence, due to uncertainties laymen should have, and due to a glimmer of hope that the Earth's complexity may leave more wiggle room than we perhaps deserve. It turns out that a hopeful stance may deserve more weight, according to a solution offered in this report. It is based on application of biology, soil science and collective potential for society.

 In contrast, the rapidly spreading doom & gloom position appears to be devoid of these considerations, and may be less scientific than many assume. However, this does not detract from the fact that there is no time to lose.

How bad is it?
The White House released on May 6 the National Climate Assessment. The scientist team advised,

- If greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to escalate at a rapid pace, the warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century. [This spells no human life - ed.]
- “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”

Despite the increasingly obvious climate reality, the White House supports continued fossil fuels dependency for economic growth-at-any-cost.

With much more global-warming climate forcing "in the pipeline," double meaning intended, hopes for a long-term future for humanity have been fading noticeably in the last couple of years. The almost 1c-degree increase since the Industrial Revolution has been measured based on emissions up to 40 years ago only.

No greenhouse gas emissions have yet kicked in temperature-wise from post-1974 emissions. Few people are aware of, or they forget about, climate-change lag.[1]

A safety valve has served to postpone terrestrial temperatures, largely accounting for the above-mentioned decades' delay: ocean sequestration, whose limit has perhaps been now maximized.

Besides temperature readings, evidence is manifested in rapid, recent CO2-caused acidification of the oceans that prevents organisms' calcium growth at the base of the food chain. Yet, "Ocean acidification leads to release of less dimethyl sulphide (DMS) by plankton. DMS shields Earth from radiation."[2] That the living world is more complex than anyone can grasp should be consensus. Yet much is known that indicates the need for urgent action.

An ice-free Arctic Ocean can be a major tipping point for the global climate, and is expected to hit in perhaps a few short years. Methane spewing out of Arctic regions is just beginning, but the process and meaning are not entirely clear for climate model certainty. Other climate forcings include feedback loops such as sea-level rise on land vegetation and loss of the abledo effect[3] from reflective ice.

All considering, we would appear to have more than a bleak outlook for a benign natural world for humans. If we also consider also the effect from eventual collapse of the fossil-fueled corporate economy now providing ongoing global dimming[4] which when it ceases will up global temperature average suddenly by another 1c, the result would be -- considering the other forcings -- an unimaginable and much less inhabitable Earth. It already is so, for innumerable species, as this period of the planet's history is seeing the sixth major mass extinction.

Humans have never lived during an ice-free Arctic, let alone a 3.5c-degree increase on the way before the end of the century if a turnaround is not somehow brought about. With climate and weather disruption interfering much more in crop production, unprecedented famine is the outlook among those who accept the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yet, many believe the IPCC puts forth misleading optimism for very limited global temperature rise in a longer-than-reasonable time frame.

A two-degree centigrade average increase in several decades as a top-out goal is believed by more and more students of climate change to be too optimistic, derided as part of conservative climate modeling. For it excludes some climate wild-cards disturbing to many scientists.

If climate forcings are in play as much as many fear, it may be eventually be widely acknowledged that our failure to end most industrial emissions in the late 1960s, with its back-to-the-land & consciousness revolution, was our undoing -- when we consider the subsequent added emissions that dwarfed all the previous industrial emissions and deforestation. The Population Bomb went off unheeded and is still exploding -- seldom mentioned in any press.

Albert Bates and Biochar
However -- yes, there's a "however" of quantifiable optimism -- one man's proposal based on calculations offers hope. Albert Bates is an author, Permaculture teacher and veteran of the 1970s appropriate technology movement.

In his 2010 book The Biochar Solution he calculated that if everyone in the world planted one tree per day, in a matter of months the excess CO2 from the atmosphere would be removed and put back into the ground.[5] Bates told Culture Change on May 1, 2014, "If there is a glimmer of hope, it lies in soil and what we can do to assist accelerated photosynthesis."

Before delving further into hopeful and positive solutions for putting the brakes on global warming, featuring alternatives to lethal industrialism, let us consider that reports of our demise by mid century may be subject to bias or confusion. Examples from the climate science community include

"The latest IPCC and NAS (National Academies of Science) assessment reports, in fact, deemed such a [methane bubble] release 'very unlikely' this century. One reason for that is that the Arctic has been this warm or warmer a couple times in the last 200,000 years, yet that methane stayed in the ground."

[6] And, according to Michael Tobis, who holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and whose blog makes clear he is no friend of runaway industrialism nor an apologist of deforestation, "the biosphere as a whole is still a carbon sink, not a source." [6 again]

Worse or Worser
Climate scientists are collectively accused of both alarming the public and holding back on the nitty gritty of near-term gloom. The prospects of predictable, slower warming with devastating consequences, without human extinction, versus out-of-control warming, mass starvation and complete collapse along with our extinction within a few decades, are worth exploring for oneself.

One can seize upon one sudden extreme aberration in weather patterns, confirmed by old timers' memories, as enough evidence to push one over to resignation and the most dire expectations. But however valid any piece of input or collection of news headlines is for our emotions and fearful imagination, personal confirmation about climate change should not blind us to remaining open to a systems approach to anticipating the actual potential global warming in store.

Nor should gut assessments or a series of scary climate-related headlines set in stone an idea of a terminal predicament that would preclude consideration of ameliorating successfully the known climate trends.

Some dedicated, dug-in environmentalists specializing in peak oil and "Transition" don't buy into extinction of the human species. In the Postcarbon Institute's latest newsletter, Senior Fellow and Board officer Richard Heinberg writes in his column The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us,

"[F]uture geologists will be able to spot a fundamental discontinuity in the rock strata that document our little slice of time in Earth’s multi-billion year pageant. This discontinuity will be traceable to the results of human presence. Think climate change, ocean acidification, and mass extinction... the deepest insight of the Anthropocene will probably be a very simple one: we live in a world of millions of interdependent species with which we have co-evolved. We sunder this web of life at our peril."[7]

It's as if we have a future of thousands more years!  

The only denialism
The essential denial today is not about anthropogenic climate change, but rather that life is sacred. For the fossil-fueled death sentence to be carried out requires denial that the Earth is sacred. No amount of information or logic can sway a person or a society in such denial. Addressing mass psychosis driving Western Civilization appears to be the impossible challenge, so that sad events and changes to the Earth, along with a positive alternative vision, will have to be what brings about a culture change.

Then we will no longer be fighting ourselves nor fighting nature, and restoration will prevail at least in terms of effort. To help get there, many believe, we make changes because we see something potentially better for ourselves, not because we are driven from fear.

The hope for geo-engineering our way out of becoming toast is related to the industrial mindset of accepting more global warming without altering course, because adaptation is attractive. The hope there is for continued material wealth generation and the joys of consuming. This is not to say adaptation is wrong; it will be essential, for example as sea levels rise and species try to migrate to the poles.

Letting geo-engineering and adaptation be subjects for future columns and debates is this reporter's policy, because immediate approaches to minimize future warming give more bang for the buck and are the more ethical course.

Past years' Culture Change columns have highlighted tools for sustainability and models of sustainability. Even though we 1990s road-fighters and depavers didn't see our campaigns catch on like wildfire, nor saw our wider network's efforts make great strides with their urban gardening and eco-villages, we were happy to embrace these and other approaches. Why? Doing them made us feel good, but mainly they were essential to establish blueprints or historical examples for post-collapse society.

We could not quite generate society-wide discussion, planning or support for sensible survival strategies that, if applied en masse, would save people money, improve local economic self-reliance, provide solidarity and conviviality, and spread practical skills for living closer to nature, without car-dependence, plastics profusion in the home or reliance on long-distance, corporate food.

Yet, some features of a sustainable society still rose to the surface and are spreading today, such as farmers markets. And there is palpable excitement for sail transport to expand almost infinitely.

Dead end of both technology and cheap petroleum
The Age of Information has astounded and overwhelmed almost everyone who saw the rapid transition to digital technology and telecom networks. The less attractive byproducts -- that may principally stem from competing for diminishing job security -- have hit almost everyone pretty hard: stress, loss of leisure time and electronic screen-addiction.

 A related consequence of unquestioned technology proliferation has been more social control: people with cell phones are in a fashion in a cell, paralleling the rising imprisonment trend in the U.S. Mass surveillance is another consequence.

The more technological manipulation there is, especially when centralized and combined with billions of dollars of capital, undomesticated human freedom is endangered. We have run from Mother Nature, so, as Neil Young sang four and a half decades ago, we have "Mother Nature on the run." The biggest issue with the Age of Information is that no Age of Wisdom can get onto the horizon. We are distracted by clutter, speed and glitz made desirable by advertising for the herd.

The pervasive, complex systems happen to rely on petroleum today, just as the steel and brick industrial monolith of decades ago was built thanks to cheap oil. The growing subsidy to petroleum and unaccounted "externalities" from energy extraction cannot continue for long. Complex systems and corporate hierarchies are not only vulnerable to disruption and chaos from financial meltdown, social unrest or oil-supply crisis; they are inherently suspect and unnatural.

 If you don't believe it, why are they enforced, often brutally, and claimed to be the only way to live and work?

 It is established that mutual cooperation is more efficient than competition, and rested, healthy people work better than sick, stressed people. But the industrial system of technological control over humans and nature, for short-term gain, is sacred to the status quo's business-as-usual "ethic."

There cannot be very rich people without very poor masses of people. Relatedly, there can be no isolated manipulation-of-nature adaptation to global warming and climate change for the long haul, without giving up on nature and human potential. We have to all work together, with nature.

This is why a natural future is inevitable, assuming a few key changes that are as simple as they are challenging. Our preferences for, or alternatively fears of, overdue changes may be consistent with a natural future featuring humanity.

Simplicity and decentralization are countertrends strengthening today, and can appear most attractive and easiest to succeed with. At the rate U.S. society and others failing to thrive are struggling, the anti-nature control-mentality is letting everyone down and appears to be spinning society out of control.

An article in Culture Change in 2011 offered a list of strategies and skills for proactively changing lifestyle and politics at the grassroots: Getting There (Part 2): Bringing to Life a Transformative Culture. Seventeen points are described that are consistent with the 10 steps in our Pledge for Climate Protection circa 2000 [see Further Reading].

Unsurprisingly, these points and steps don't help the GDP. For people to live well without being consumers and contributing to their own demise, instead being in touch with nature through lasting community, is not the corporate agenda.

And precious little is offered by central governments. We can, however, reorganize ourselves if we make the effort to get together and let go of isolation. Walls do not exist in nature, or they did not prior to civilization. We need to tear down the walls before they crumble down on top of us when we are ill prepared.

The only denialism all along, since Western Civilization achieved the ability to annihilate everything, has been the refusal or inability to see life as sacred. To see the sacredness of nature is our only way forward.

Global warming culture versus nature's benign potential
Until I can no longer find the strength to lift my hand, I'll fight global warming culture. I'll do it by presenting alternatives and living them as much as possible. Hardly any people caught in the modern artificial environment call it global warming culture, but by now everyone knows they're surrounded by it to some degree. Global warming culture can only be destroyed by its own operation.

The trouble is how much it is taking down with it. As people face it, whether they be urbanites unaware of nature's totality, or people enjoying pristine nature, they cannot countenance destruction of the whole world. So they are primed for rejecting the increasingly discredited, vile global warming culture. Is it a time of action, resignation, or celebration? Is nature's benign potential something desirable over the allure of going shopping? It's up to us.

Notes
1. Climate lag: skepticalscience.com
2. Nature Climate Change, 25 August 2013: nature.com
3. "The albedo effect": skepticalscience.com "Papers on the albedo of the Earth": agwobserver.wordpress.com
4. Global dimming: realclimate.org
5. From The Biochar Solution, Chapter 27:

"If everyone in the world planted one tree each day, by the end of the 2nd year, the sequestered CO2 would exceed the global emissions. Meanwhile, the trees you first planted are now older and bigger. So by year 3, the sequestered CO2 is more than three times emissions. By year 4, it is five times emissions. By year 5, we sequester seven times the emissions. By the end of year 6, we are annually sequestering more than ten times the 2009 CO2 world emissions...  

"The principal obstacle is not lack of manpower, however; it’s the availability of land. Twenty-three million planters could plant enough trees to offset global CO2 emissions in two months, but they would use up all the fallow arable land in the world. Where do we send the tree planters after all the unused arable land is planted? Deserts cover a third of the Earth’s surface. Climate change is causing deserts to expand at an accelerating pace. Expanding deserts disrupt evaporation and rainfall patterns, desiccate forests, and grow steadily larger, changing regional climate. And yet, what is true about desertification affecting climate is also true about de-desertification. By greening barren lands, the hydrological cycle is restored, ecosystems are re-invigorated, and carbon is steadily removed from the atmosphere..."

6. "How Guy McPherson gets it wrong": Fractal Planet and "McPherson’s Evidence That Doom Doom Doom": Planet3.org "McPherson totally ignores any ameliorating feedbacks... (Mcpherson) demoralizes people who might otherwise have been active, so he’s not doing us any favors. He may have more cultural affinity with environmentalists than with oil oligarchs, but he’s doing them a lot more good than he’s doing us."

7. The Anthropocene: It’s Not All About Us Museletter 264, May 2014

Further reading
Take the Pledge for Climate Protection

National Climate Assessment coverage: The New York Times felt compelled to put it in its ENVIRONMENT category: U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods, by Justin Gillis, May 6, 2014

West Antarctic Ice Sheet's Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning
 
"Devastating" Impacts of Climate Change Increasing, a comprehensive report by Dahr Jamail, Truthout.org

Guy McPherson's April 30, 2014 radio interview on projected human extinction,:, Santa Cruz, California "Tangerine Dream" show

Living free and off the grid: What Choosing Poverty Looks Like - NBC News
Peak Moment Television is a long-running video documentary series on sustainable living: peakmoment.tv
 
The Sail Transport Network offers hope for post-oil, post-global-warming-culture connectivity between bioregional economies.

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Learn biochar for your garden

SOURCE: William Stepchew (billstepchew@gmail.com) SUBHEAD: Workshop at Kauai Nursery, Saturday, December 3rd 9:30am, on making your own biochar.  

By William Stepchew on 21 November 2011 in Island Breath - 
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-to-make-biochar-for-your-garden.html)


Image above: A biochar harvest from system for under $400. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/81339495@N00/sets/72157617279225172/).

Biochar is charcoal; virtually pure carbon made from "pyrolyzed" plant matter; woodchips, sawdust, seed hulls, hay, etc. It is being used to improve soil for gardening and food production. Topics covered will be:

• What is biochar, what does it do, who thought of this, why is it important.
• How to build and use a 1-gallon size biochar maker, a simple device and method for making small quantities of consistent, high-purity and easy-to-use biochar, suitable for home gardeners for use in potting soils and gardens.
• How to use biochar to improve your gardening and potting soil.
• |Other uses for biochar.
• Questions and Answers.

RSVP by November 26 to register. Space is limited. Contact Bill Stepchew, billstepchew@gmail.com or 635-4021 Participants will have the option of building and testing their own char-maker at the workshop for a $10 materials fee, or come watch for free.  

WHEN:
Saturday, December 2, 9:30 - 11:30 am  

WHERE:
at Kauai Nursery and Landscaping,
3-1550 Kaumualii Hwy, Lihue

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The Real Eldorado 3/3/11
Ea O Ka Aina: The Biochar Solution 12/10/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Save the World with Biochar 4/26/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Biochar goes Industrial 10/18/09 
Ea O Ka Aina: Sacres Shrines & Skinny Chickens 8/26/09 
Ea O Ka Aina: Searching for Terra Preta 8/7/09 
Ea O Ka Aina: Soylent Black 1/11/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Black is the New Green 2/28/09 
Island Breath: Rethinking BioChar 10/15/07 .

Biochar - The Real El Dorado

SUBHEAD: We, the fire people, have to make coal and bury it, reversing the past 500 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution.  

By Albert Bates on 3 March 2011 in The Great Change -
  (http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2011/03/real-el-dorado.html)


Image above: Screenshot from the game "The road to El Dorado". From (http://pc.ign.com/dor/objects/14685/gold-and-glory-the-road-to-el-dorado/images/eldorado003.html).

Resiliency demands something quite different than specialization and diligent professionalism. Resiliency calls for an equally amazing and profound rise in competence on the part of citizens, consumers, eccentrics, dissenters, minorities... in other words, the generalist talents of amateurs.

 David Brin, Essences, Orcs and Civilization (2007)

[Author's note: We occasionally write for Terra Nuova, the Italian environmental/alternative living magazine, and we were recently interviewed by one of their writers who lives in Spain. Here is the original interview, conducted February 24, 2011, in English.]

TN: Saludos de Espana, Albert….

AB: Saludos, Simon, and if you have any contact with Spanish publishers I would love to find one to translate and publish The Biochar Solution. Here in México there is great demand for a Spanish edition. Same goes for the Post-Petroleum Cookbook. Terra Nuova arranged a contact for us with EcoHabitar in 2007 but then came the crash of Madrid banks and the publishing loans stopped and the book project aborted. I need a Spanish publisher!

At least Terra Nuova is bringing out The Biochar Solution in Italian, the way they did for the Post-Petroleum Cookbook.

TN: How do you see biochar integrating into small, sustainable farms in countries with heavily industrialized agricultural systems like Italy?

AB: Biochar has application to both small scale and large commercial operations, but I see the future as one of the smallholder coming to predominate. There are many reasons for the shift but the two largest drivers will be Peak Oil and Climate Change. Industrial agriculture will attempt to fight against the onslaught of astronomically high fuel prices and unpredictable and catastrophic weather, using GMO seeds, government subsidies, and hi-tech machines, but Big Agriculture will be at a gradually increasing competitive disadvantage to small farmsteads and backyard growers who can substitute labor in the form of tender loving care and watering.

 Big Ag is stuck with highly-capitalized, hydrocarbon-intensive and wasteful mechanization and a chemical dependency that would make William S. Burroughs blush. With steadily declining returns eating up their profit margins, I don’t know where they will find bankers willing to finance them.

Biochar, as one part of the natural, organic style of farming, is symbolic of the advantage that small growers will have, because it can be produced at any scale, works best if used in combination with compost and compost teas, and produces dramatic results almost immediately. Another competitive advantage is the "Facebook Revolution" that is now toppling dictators in the Middle East.

Small growers can take away the large market advantage held by Big Agriculture by using local food cyber-cooperatives and groceries-by-subscription. Biochar production will probably follow that same path, being small and local in production (on-farm is best) rather than bagged and sold in WalMart or Tesco.

TN: Do we have time, climate-wise, to do in-depth field research and testing on biochar before applying it on a large scale?

AB: Fortunately, plenty of the in-depth field research and testing has already been done — at least all the most critical parts. We know enough to say with confidence that, provided it can go through some kind of quality control, biochar is (a) safe and (b) effective. Remaining research primarily is about optimization, and that will evolve with time. Biochar can be used safely and profitably now, at any scale we can imagine.

The standards being developed by the International Biochar Initiative, in a global, transparent, scientifically-based process, will help bridge the remaining gap to assure commercial product quality, define acceptable feedstocks, and provide uniform chemical and physical properties tests to be applied by governmental and third-party certification agencies. Disclaimer: I am on the board of the US Biochar Initiative so my views of the importance of this work may be somewhat prejudiced.

TN: How does biochar fit into food sovereignty of developing nations? Will its uptake tend to encourage small, diversified farms or large, monocultures in these countries, and why?

AB: One of the great pieces of scientific research undertaken in recent years was the economic analysis of big and global versus small and local in the production and use of biochar.

The results were surprising to many, not the least the university researchers who are mainly funded by Big Ag. What they found by doing sensitivity analysis of the bottom line is something permaculturists have known for a long time. We call it "stacked function."

If a large central facility hauls biomass in from a great distance, using big trucks, big grinders, a drying and curing stage, and then a multi-story pyrolysis kiln, it can produce massive amounts of biochar, which then has to be packaged and transported to distant farms and gardens. All of that is extraordinarily capital, energy and fuels intensive, and the process heat is usually just wasted in the manufacturing, adding to global warming.

Alternatively, a small- to medium-sized farmer (a good example is Thomas Harttung in Denmark) might produce biochar from farm wastes like chicken manure, straw, corn stover, etc. in a kiln inside a greenhouse. None of the heat is wasted. It warms the areas being used to produce vegetables in winter, or to heat the animal barns. In summer it might run a Stirling engine and make electricity, or a heat engine to pump water. All of these energy services represent profits to the farmer that are in addition to the production of biochar. Because it is produced on site, the distances traveled to bring feedstocks and send soil amendments is very short and can even be done with human and animal labor.

The government of Senegal now has an interior Ministry of Ecovillages, with a goal of converting 10,000 traditional rural villages to model African ecovillages within the next decade or so. Two aspects of this work will be energy and soil fertility, the two sides of the biochar coin. One can easily imagine a village that harvests vetiver grass or moringa branches to pelletize into fuel for smokeless stoves of the type being built in village-scale kit micro-factories like WorldStove’s.

The villagers cook their food efficiently, make biochar instead of smoke and ashes, and then put the biochar into their composting toilets. The carbon-rich humanure goes to tree-planters or to areas where more vetiver is being sown. This is a model that exemplifies both full-cycle carbon-negative living and sustainable village development in the best sense intended by the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism.

TN: Taking local and regional ‘resilience’ (in the Transition movements sense of the word) as paramount, where does biochar fit into resilient food and energy systems?

AB: One of the characteristics of the terminal phase of the Anthropocene, which we are now entering, is volatility. Certainly we see that in climate, as we leave the extraordinarily tranquil Holocene, with 10000 years of amazing weather stability (caused at least in part, I would argue, by the ethical land care practices of indigenous peoples) and enter a period of wayward monsoons, super-hurricanes, historic droughts and other calamities.

We see it also in the end of the fossil fuel era, beginning with petroleum but quickly following with depletion of natural gas and coal. That expanding collapse has been responsible for both the reversals in our financial markets and the civil turmoil we are seeing around the world, from Tunisia to Wisconsin, although it is masked by the long-simmering inequalities and repression that set the conditions for the crisis to boil over.

Well, what does 'resilient' mean? It means the ability to buffer the storm; the capacity to take a hit and then stand back up. I am famous for saying that the time to mend sail is not in the heart of the gale. Now, while times are still relatively calm, is the time to be building stores in preparation for what is coming. In the case of biochar, we are building the health and fertility of our soils, which is better than any money in the bank. It will continue to give us food when all around us plants are shrivelling in the heat or waterlogged by flood.

It will supply us carbon-negative heat and energy (soothing Gaia's fever to restore her tranquil nature) and keep our houses moderated and well lit when air conditioning and fuel oil become nearly unaffordable. Carbon farming in the broader sense (including not just biochar but no-till organic, keyline management, holistic grazing, compost teas and agroforestry) will provide us something that no amount of military expenditures can: security.

TN: What can people do to help spread the production and use of biochar?

AB: The best way to begin is by having some char on hand somewhere between your kitchen and your compost pile. In Tennessee I make most of my biochar in the winter, when I am running a woodstove. I have a small metal insert that I fill with wood scraps or bamboo (I grow a lot of bamboo) and I save a pile of that that I can use every time I take out my compostable kitchen scraps. In México I get my “carbon” from the local Mayan tradespeople who make it the traditional way that I describe in my book.

I open a hole in my compost pile, put in the char (if it is already pulverized, otherwise I bag it and pound it with a mallet first), and then put in the fresh kitchen scraps. Then I turn it all into the pile, mixing it well in the process. With a little luck, earthworms will digest both the biochar powder and the compost together, making a wonderful worm-casting that is ideal for the garden.

The next best way is to buy a case of my book, The Biochar Solution, and give one to each of your friends.

TN: How important is biochar to tackling climate change in any significant way?

AB: I am fond of reminding people that carbon is stored in only 4 possible places: Earth -- both the topsoil and the deeper parts, including oil fields and coal mines; Air -- the atmosphere; Water -- oceans, lakes, rivers and ice; and Fire -- us! the living, moving, breathing parts, including all the plants, trees, algae, fish, birds, animals, bacteria and people. The problem of climate change is that Gaia has become unbalanced by human activity, and so too much carbon (and other elements) have been taken out of the Earth and put into the Air.

Air said, "Whoa. I can't handle that" and passed it to Water. Water now has so much it has become poisoned with carbolic acid and the corals are bleaching and the shellfish are dissolving, so it is trying to send it back to Air. Where it belongs is back in Earth.

The way to get it back into Earth is through Fire, much the same way it came out. We, the fire people, have to make coal and bury it, reversing the past 500 years since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The good news is, once we start doing this we discover we actually can make more and better food that way. Our soils grow deeper and darker with each passing year. This was no secret to the makers of terra preta in the Amazon, who grew their food this way for 8000 years, but we are only just rediscovering this ancient wisdom.

The amount of excess carbon being held by the atmosphere each year is 3.2 gigatonnes. This raises the concentration somewhere between one and two parts per million each year. Bill McKibben has said, "Civilization is what grows up in the margins of leisure and security provided by a workable relationship with the natural world. That margin won't exist, at least not for long, as long as we remain on the wrong side of 350."

By that he means we need to get back to 350 parts per million. This year we will cross over 390 parts per million, about the same time we cross over into 7 billion humans, this season’s people. So the problem is certainly to reduce the number of humans, hopefully gracefully, but then to bring down that excess carbon below 3.2 GtC net.

Advocates of carbon farming, such as the switch to organic farming advocated by Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan and others, put the potential at around 1 GtC/yr. IBI scientists say biochar’s potential is 4-10 GtC/yr, because you can incentivize the use beyond the immediate food payback, such as through clean stove programs. However, the really big gorilla, in terms of fast sequestration, is tree planting, which I have estimated to have an 80 GtC/yr potential, once you start re-greening some of the major deserts of the world.

All three of these strategies, working in conjunction, provide a path to restore the carbon balance in both the atmosphere and the ocean, on decadal timeframes, before the worst tipping points can kick in and send us screaming towards the climate of Venus, something none of us wants.

There are those who will naturally oppose this sort of large-scale tampering, calling it "geo-engineering," "the next market bubble," or other epithets. My feeling is that the ship has already sailed; farmers already know about the benefits and will begin using biochar anyway, and whether there is a market bubble or dangerous climate interference it will not be much different, although probably better, than what is happening right now. What we are doing, after all, is re-creating conditions that existed in the New World before the encounters by Zheng He, Columbus and Pizarro. In the case of Europe, we are bringing home, finally, the real gold of El Dorado.

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Cool food, fuel and climate

SUBHEAD: Permaculture seems to be indispensable for anyone trying to bring about broadscale collapse-proofing. By Albert Bates on 8 January 2011 in The Great Change - (http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2011/01/cool-food-cool-fuel-cool-climate.html) Image above:Plenty Belize and Maya Mountain Research Farm workshop on photovoltaic electric-generating systems. From (http://www.plenty.org/pb25_1/belize251.html).

Appropriate technology is all about finding low-impact, small-footprint ways to meet our needs, while supporting the ecological niche we are mere parts of. Whether you are watching TV, vacuuming your house, getting ice cream from the freezer, or riding your electric scooter, you could be removing carbon from air and ocean and replacing it into soil and forest at the same time. How? Appropriate technology.

Here is an example: say your electricity came not from a dirty coal-steam plant but from algae that grew in a wetland cell that treated the effluent from your kitchen and bathroom? Suppose that once you had wrung out the algae mat for its rich gardening nutrients, you separated the oils from the biomass and refined those into fuel for your car. Then you took the leftover biomass and fed it to a pyrolyzing stove, which cooked your meals, heated your house, made your electricity, and left you not with ash but biochar — recalcitrant carbon ready to enrich your garden for the next 1000 years, staying out of the atmosphere all the while. Cool food, cool fuel, cool waste treatment, cool climate. Painting the choice as a harsh dichotomy between your current standard of living and something resembling that of a prisoner on Devil’s Island is a blown meme. Stick a fork in that. Its done. The future will be one of more conscientious design: more food with net carbon and fertility soil gains; warmth, light, mobility and other energy services based on solar income, not distilled dinosaurs. Elegance of multidimensional solution, not cascading fixes requiring greater additional fixes. “Cool food” cooperatives have emerged in Japan to reinvigorate the rural economy and restore the neglected satoyama marginal areas between farm and wilderness. Now satoyama bamboo is being harvested for biochar, the biochar returned to the farms for soil health and carbon credits, and the produce sold as carbon-negative “cool food.” In 2009, the first “cool” cabbage was processed into slaw by a supermarket chain, sold at a premium price and it sold out. Cool Slaw and other carbon negative products may represent a new way to revive rural economies by redeeming ecological services. Cool food is healthy, wholesome, nourishing food that puts more carbon into the soil than is removed in the process of growing it. It thus moves carbon from sky and oceans to soils, plants, animals and people. By making cool food, using biochar, aquaculture, agroforestry and carbon farming, that revolution is now in our grasp. This is the future, and it is one that is both hopeful and delicious. For our lifetime we have been tinkering with what has been called “technology transfer.” Those words have a conflicting meaning in the climate negotiations context, so we prefer “appropriate technology” as a better description, although “sustainable development” also works. Note: “sustainable development” in a business-as-usual economic growth context is an oxymoron. In a degrowth context, sustainable development implies meeting the needs of society in renewable, regenerative and responsible ways. After the Cancún climate talks concluded, we went to work with our Mexican partners who are attempting to graft some of these concepts into existing villages not far from Cancún. While we have been employing the standard Transition Towns methodology, we find that what is often needed as a predicate is a good grasp of permaculture design. Permaculture seems to be indispensable for anyone trying to bring about broadscale collapse-proofing, especially in a limited-finance setting. We are giving a permaculture trainings every weekend in January and February in Spanish, and then a full permaculture design course in English at the Maya Mountain Research Farm in San Pedro Columbia, Belize, March 5-13, 2011. While these courses are going on in México and Belize, Jude Hobbs and Andrew Millison will be back at the Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee, preparing another generation of instructors to provide similar trainings all over the world. They are our “butterflies.” We have come to see permaculture as an essential building block because it brings about a shift in awareness in those who study it. Permaculture is about designing cultivated ecosystems to meet your needs, and about cultivating people to be part of ecosystems instead of their agents of destruction. When we first starting giving these courses two decades ago, we would notice a phenomenon where by about the fourth or fifth day of a 2-week course people starting having emotional breakdowns and we would have to pause the class and rebuild tattered egos. You might call this the chrysalis phase in butterfly morphology. We get that less these days, either because people now are generally emotionally overwrought to begin with, or because we have modified our pedagogy to make the transformation easier to assimilate. One of the things we have learned is to pay more attention to set and setting. We typically typically teach within established ecovillages, but the setting in Belize is difficult to match anywhere else we’ve been. From Punta Gorda, the capital of Toledo District, you ascend toward the pyramid ruin of Lubaantun, near San Pedro Colombia. This was a Late Classic Mayan ceremonial and commerce center where the famous crystal skull was found by the teenage daughter of archaeologist F.A. Mitchell-Hedges in 1926. From San Pedro you go up the Columbia Branch of the Rio Grande in a cedar dug-out poled by a dory man. The site is 2 miles (1 hour) up river at a shallow bend with tall stands of bamboo on the starboard shore. The river’s source is a massive spring that bursts from the ground a quarter mile up from that bamboo bend. The Source emerges from a vast underground river system that drains the 100,000 acre Columbia River Forest Reserve, a uniquely pristine natural area of broadleaf tropical forest, sanctuary to howler monkeys, jaguars, monarch butterflies and birds of paradise. The Reserve continues rising up the slopes of the Maya Mountains until they spill over into Guatemala. The landscape is strongly karsified, riddled with caves and some of the largest cenotes in the country (one is 800 feet deep and 1/4 mile wide). Shallow caverns of quartz-rich rocks provide breeding habitats for many animal populations. Christopher Nesbitt decided to buy a piece of land on the river back in 1988. After leaving Antioch College at 19 he took a job in Belize as a caretaker then worked for Green & Blacks at Toledo Cacao Growers Association. His job was to manage an extension program that would help smallholders develop strategies of agroforestry that would favor both biodiversity and cacao production. During this period he also worked for Plenty Belize doing solar power installations and as a trainer for Peace Corps volunteers in the region. Everything Chris learned about cacao, agroforestry, solar power, and self-finance he put into his farm. On one occasion as we walked the farm, he paused in the shade of a large avocado he planted in 1989. “More avocados than can be eaten by one family,” he said, pointing upwards. The same is true of his mangoes. He plans to start a piggery and goat shed and feed the pigs and goats the surplus fruit. He wants to use their manure to make methane for his kitchen. He has built a tank and pond aquaculture system, although most of the fish in his kitchen still come from the river or the Caribbean Sea. After taking a Permaculture Design Course in 1991, Chris dug swales across his hillsides and added a number of ground hugging plants and vines to keep the soils shaded and protected from erosion. For him, cacao was the keystone plant in the system, and there was good reason that the Maya placed a high social value on it, beyond its health and nutritional qualities. The scientific name Theobroma means “food of the gods.” This is where we choose to teach permaculture. The place is its own best instructor. You could live quite comfortably on the breadnuts, avocados, corn, bananas, coffee, fish, beans and all the rest. You could drink from the river, although Chris harvests water for the kitchen from a spring farther uphill. If you glance around his open-air kitchen, you’ll see purchased cans and jars containing items like powered milk, granulated sugar, olive oil, foreign teas, iodized salt and baking soda. These are all part of a Western diet but not indispensable here. Successive civilizations did just fine without them. Most of the rain in Southern Belize falls in July and August — hurricane season — and tapers off to December. They get 100 to 160 inches in that period, although climate change is making it less predictable. The Research Farm has been known to get abrupt heavy rains in late February or June, so Chris has learned to hold the design course in March, when the dry season has established itself, the river is lower and tamer for dory traffic, and the trails are more easily negotiated. We are hosting introductory permaculture trainings outside Cancún through January, in Spanish, but for those interested in getting the whole design methodology at one location, in English, we direct you to our course in Belize. If you want to eat local organic food, sleep in dorms powered entirely by renewable energy, and bathe in a sparkling pure river, please contact Chris or visit his web site. The transition work we are doing in México is especially urgent because, in our humble opinion, it will not be China or Al Quada that brings down the Death Star, but México. It was just four years ago that the president of México’s state owned oil company, Pemex, told a press conference that México would exhaust its oil reserves in six years. Since then, its largest field, Cantarell, has plummeted from 2.9 million barrels per day to just 464,000. It had been providing 40% of the Mexican government’s revenues and México had been the second largest source of oil flowing into the United States. Now Pemex is $40 billion in debt and México’s export spigot is squeeking shut. What will happen when México can no longer afford to buy expensive gasoline from Houston’s refinery row because it cannot send any more crude oil North? To quote Colin Campbell, describing peak oil generally,

“Initially it will be denied. There will be much lying and obfuscation. Then prices will rise and demand will fall. The rich will outbid the poor for available supplies. The system will initially appear to rebalance. The dash for gas will become more frenzied. People will realize nuclear power stations take up to ten years to build. People will also realize wind, waves, solar and other renewables are all pretty marginal and take a lot of energy to construct. There will be a dash for more fuel-efficient vehicles and equipment. The poor will not be able to afford the investment or the fuel. Exploration and exploitation of oil and gas will become completely frenzied. More and more countries will decide to reserve oil and later gas supplies for their own people. Air quality will be ignored as coal production and consumption expand once more. Once the decline really gets under way, liquids production will fall relentlessly by five percent per year. Energy prices will rise remorselessly. Inflation will become endemic. Resource conflicts will break out.”

To that we can add trade union and tax protests, student riots, food shortages, government debt defaults, currency devaluations, market crashes, local service terminations, and wide unemployment, homelessness and civil chaos. If this is beginning to sound familiar, it is not coincidental. We are not talking about México. This is what is happening to the United States. But there is another way and it involves butterflies.

The Cancún Butterfly

SUBHEAD: A human-Gaian umbilical is far more reciprocating than imagined. By Albert Bates on 7 January 2011 in The Great Change - (http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2011/01/cancun-butterfly.html) Image above: Prismatic patterns swirl on the surface of a soap bubble. From (http://www.flickr.com/photos/knol/2947795925/#/).

Combating climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, and we don’t yet know whether tipping points have already been passed that will make it impossible to reverse its trajectory. Regardless of whether the challenge has now become insurmountable — that it has become a dilemma rather than a problem — we can say for certain that the choice of inaction is still suicidal. If there is a glimmering of hope that we might pull out of our descent towards catastrophe and extinction, we are compelled by our survival instinct to act. Critics, ourselves included, like to sneer at changing light-bulbs, but when light-bulb-changing reaches millions of homes and businesses, that strategy takes giant coal plants off line. What became clear in our years of research into The Biochar Solution, it is that each one of us has a much larger effect on global climate than most of us imagine. One day in the winter of 1961, exactly 50 years ago, Edward Lorenz was working on an ancient 8-bit computer at MIT trying to understand weather patterns. When he arrived at work that morning, he decided to take a shortcut on his simulation and rather than start from the beginning of the run, he typed in the numbers from a previous point. He walked down the hall for his morning coffee and left the dot matrix printer to re-plot the graph. As he sipped his coffee, a new branch of mathematics, chaos theory, was born. When Lorenz walked back to his office and looked at the printout, what he saw was something odd. Instead of the same weather pattern as before, the computer had created something new. The repeat pattern started at the same point and followed the previous pattern closely for a short time, but then began to diverge. It continued to diverge until all resemblance to the original sequence disappeared. Lorenz could have assumed something was wrong with his computer, or his program, but he guessed, correctly, that he had stumbled upon something more profound.

Lorenz’s diverging pattern was caused by the significant difference between the six-decimal numbers used by his computer (ie.:.506127) and the rounded-off three-decimal numbers appearing on the printout from which he had re-keyed (ie.:.506). When he typed in the shorter number, he could assume that one part in ten thousand, or a million, would be inconsequential. After all, in numbers referring to windspeed, one part in ten thousand represents only an imperceptible puff of wind, not an entire weather system. But as the difference propagated itself in equation after equation, the entire weather of the earth changed. Lorenz named the phenomenon the “butterfly effect” — because it now seemed that a butterfly stirring the springtime air in Peking could transform the course of summer storms in New York. Lorenz reasoned that sensitivity to initial conditions was no accident, but is necessary to all natural systems. The influence of small perturbations is what endows larger patterns with such rich variety. It is what gives weather its unpredictability. There are four parts of the carbon cycle (or the N cycle or the K cycle, whatever you want to look at). Earth (both living topsoil and deep geological reservoirs, including fossil sunlight), Air (the atmosphere), Fire (life in all its forms), and Water (especially the oceans). Labile carbon cycles through these four reservoirs on periods as short as 12 to 15 years on average, but longer for deep earth and oceans. Recalcitrant carbon (biochar or terra preta) cycles through on millennial time scales. Any labile carbon that can be diverted to the recalcitrant cycle can starve the atmosphere and oceans of carbon in the near term -- decades to centuries.

We sometimes wonder why the fungi and bacteria we evolved from wanted us to be here. We can assume that when they made a decision to branch off into plant forms, they needed the stable photosynthetic process to further their exchanges and increase their scope and diversity -- anaerobic vs aerobic, for instance. Likewise, animals gave them a greater range, by pollinating and transporting easily over greater distances, and by complex guts and manures that refined their cuisine with inordinate elegance. So why humans? As we ponder this, what we've come to appreciate is that we provide disturbance. Disturbance in ecosystems increases biodiversity. That is our gift to our bacterial forebears, who still course through our bloodstreams and organs and make up some tiny fraction of our weight. We give them disturbance. Perhaps they did not anticipate just how much disturbance we two-leggeds are capable of. Or maybe they did. We took 500 million years of sunlight stored in carbon form and moved it from the Earth to the Air. The Air said, whoa, wait, too much for me, and passed it to Water. Every time a plow cut a field in Sumer, or a Ming dynasty farmer stuck a stick in the ground and diverted water for irrigation, carbon went from dirt to sky to ocean. Agriculture is 40% of greenhouse emissions, but that reckoning is flawed, because it mostly just accounts for the tractors, rice paddies and cow flatulence, not the off-gassing of bared soils. Land disturbance; that is what the two-leggeds do best. There was a very excellent paper just recently published: Dull, Robert A. , Nevle, Richard J. , Woods, William I. , Bird, Dennis K. , Avnery, Shiri and Denevan, William M. 'The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 01 September 2010. The implications are really important. Dull, et al, argue that the re-growth of Neotropical forests following the Columbian encounter led to terrestrial biospheric carbon sequestration on the order of 2 to 5 GtC, thereby contributing to the well-documented decrease in atmospheric C recorded in Antarctic ice cores from about 1500 through 1750 AD (or CE for Buddhists and pagans) previously ascribed to the Columbian encounter by William Ruddiman. Decoding that: When European disease and slavery swept the Americas, so much land was released, much of it with millennial build-up of fertile terra preta, that the trees and vines and rainforests that covered everything took so much carbon away from the cycle that atmospheric C plummeted and Europe literally froze. The Swedes invaded Denmark. Louis XIV put down parquet in the palace at Versailles. Hans Brinker won his silver skates on the frozen canals. While the paper does not extend to the Medieval Maximum, from charcoal in lake bed studies it documents increased biomass burning and deforestation during agricultural and population expansion in the Neotropics from 2500 to 500 years BP, which would correspond with atmospheric carbon loading and global warming 1100 to 650 years BP. Decoding that: During the rise of the Classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Great White Cities witnessed by Orellana in the first transit of the Amazon, the vast palisade cities along the Mississippi encountered by DeSoto, and trade centers like Cahokia and Teotihuacan, so much carbon was released from forest and field that the atmosphere loaded and the northern hemisphere heated. At the same time there was desertification in N. Africa, driving the Moors into Spain. Besides hinting at a human-Gaian umbilical far more reciprocating than imagined, what this shows is that the potential exists to return us to pre-Anthrocene concentrations of atmospheric C by reforestation and terrestrial carbon loading, assuming we are not thwarted by Jevon's Paradox and political inertia but also bring down emissions that currently exceed biospheric sequestration by 3.2 GtC/y (although to save the coral reefs, we need to also decarbonize the oceans and that means much more than 3.2 GtC/yr). In The Biochar Solution we describe the various approaches and compare them in terms of potential for gigaton sequestration on decadal time scales. Jim Bruges does this in his book, The Biochar Debate, also. The main carbon farming advocates (Lal, Ingham, Yeomans) put the organic/holistic farming potential at 1 GtC/y. Biochar advocates (Lehmann, Larson) give a best guess of 4-10 GtC/y for biochar in all its forms. After delving into the Pioneer/Alford Forest model for mixed age/mixed species management, optimizing for ecosystem services and biodiversity but employing step harvest patch disturbance, we put the forestry component at perhaps 40 GtC/y, clearly the dominant wedge. Recently DemocracyNow! profiled a boy from South Africa who started planting trees at age 9 and organized his classmates to plant a million trees. In our book that is the strategy we talked about: youth tree-planting competitions. But the catch is that long before we get to 40 GtC/y, we run out of available land. And this, also, is where the versatility of biochar comes into play. We have a chapter about how we can re-green the deserts, much in the way Geoff Lawton is working in Jordan and the Middle East. The Sahara Forest. The Gobi Forest. The Sonoran Forest. The lifestyles of the pre-Conquest Americans, during the centuries they were clearing land for their cities, likely contributed to pushing the Moors out of North Africa and into the Iberian Peninsula. It was ironic that to expel the invaders the medieval Spanish developed the tools and tactics (such as naval ships, the Andalusian horse and the cavalry charge) that then allowed them to conquer the vastly larger armies of the Americas. How finely tuned is the human relationship to the climate? What hand might social convention among Paleolithic societies have had in creating Holocene stability? These are large questions we are only just beginning to know enough to ask. Perhaps we will be around long enough to answer them. .

The Biochar Solution

SUBHEAD: Ethically seeding a large portion of the Earth's soils with biochar may actually become politically feasible. By Kurt Cobb on 12 December 2010 in Resource Insights - (http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2010/12/why-you-should-read-biochar-solution.html) Image above: Tractor plowing charred plants into the soil. From (http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/news/viewdetail/biochar_farm_soil.html).

First, you should know that I have an allergy to anything that smacks of geoengineering. And the use of biochar--charred organic matter that can improve soil fertility--to address climate change by interring carbon in farmland on a mass scale strikes me as one of the largest geoengineering projects ever conceived. I always ask, "What will the unintended consequences be? Can we be sure that those consequences won't simply present a new set of problems, possibly catastrophic ones?" Fortunately, Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution, takes these questions seriously and offers a measured endorsement of biochar as one of an array of strategies for responding to climate change. Even in the forward Vandana Shiva warns that "[b]y shifting our concern from growing the green mantle of the earth to making charcoal, biochar solutions risk repeating the mistakes of industrial agriculture." With this kind of qualified endorsement, why should we read further? The answer is straightforward: Because intelligently and broadly applied and ethically managed, the production of biochar and its incorporation in the soil has the potential to lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, not on a millennial time line, but within a few decades. We have the possibility of reversing climate change. It's worth exploring this possibility because some of the most prominent climate scientists in the world believe we have already passed beyond the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that will, if not reduced, move the world into new and much warmer climate. So, what might one of those unintended and possibly catastrophic consequences be? Bates summarizes an unexpected answer from a prominent soil scientist as follows:

Biochar is too powerful, she told me. Once the industrial complex with its credit markets, government incentives, and subsidies to farmers gets up and running, biochar could become a juggernaut, pushing the soil-atmosphere carbon balance into an overcorrection and ushering in a rapid-onset ice age.

When was the last time you heard someone who is firmly convinced that climate change is a critical issue say that a proposed solution would not simply fail, but could push us into an ice age? If biochar was that potent, I wanted to know more. And, this leads to a second reason why you should read The Biochar Solution. The book begins with the engaging story of how biochar was discovered but not really understood (by Europeans, that is), forgotten, rediscovered, and finally understood by scientists. The story reads like a combined action/adventure tale and detective novel and shows Bates to be an accomplished storyteller. We are treated to a trip down the Amazon at the time of the conquistadors; to visits to plantations run by expatriate Confederate plantation owners who emigrated to Brazil after The Civil War; and finally to the findings of modern archeologists who uncover the truth about seemingly fantastical historical descriptions of great cities on the Amazon at the dawn of Spanish settlement in the New World. The remainder of book is something of a handbook on biochar and carbon farming, showing how it might be done and who might do it. Bates introduces us to innovators who think broadly and creatively about how the soil might again become the rich, dense, living provider of fertility it once was. Readers will learn that the side effects may actually turn out to be side benefits: revitalized soils, verdant cities, higher long-term agricultural productivity, increased biodiversity and the reclaiming of desert landscapes. The author also discusses the prospects for agroforestry, an approach to forests that could make them both sustainable and productive for human purposes. Along the way Bates relates several astounding claims that will keep you reading. Two such claims are as follows: 1) The Amazon rainforest is actually the product of human actions, and 2) the world's cooking stoves--the kind that burn wood and other biomass in most poor countries and currently add to global climate change woes--could be transformed into tools for climate recovery. Could little pieces of charred organic matter really do all that Bates suggests? He recommends that we give biochar a widespread trial, but in conjunction with deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. These cuts, he says, are absolutely essential. While such cuts seem by far the more difficult task, biochar will involve its own difficulties. First, as Bates admits, the production of biochar will have to be regulated to ensure that it is done ethically and sustainably. He gives an example in the book of unregulated production and its potential to do much harm. But, in a world now gripped by the laissez-faire model of economics, it's hard to see how broad-reaching international regulation of biochar production could be achieved. And yet, if the unfolding climate catastrophe produces a vivid and pivotal moment--say, a sudden collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet--the will to do something as dramatic as seeding a large portion of the Earth's soils with biochar and doing it in an ethical way may actually become politically feasible.

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Indigenous Farming Methods

SUBHEAD: Mitigating the effects of climate change while boosting food production.

By Mel Landers on 5 October 2010 in Nourishing The Planet - 
(http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/indigenous-farming-methods-mitigating-the-effects-of-climate-change-while-boosting-food-production)


Image above: Diorama of Iroquois practicing the "Three Sisters" technique of growing squash, beans and corn in mounds. From (http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/IroquoisVillage/sistersone.html).  

Hydraulic Engineering
Spanish conquistadors had great respect for the crops developed by the indigenous farmers of the Americas. A full 60 percent of the food these foreigners ate every day originated in the region. But the conquistadors failed to appreciate the importance of the production methods used by those innovative local farmers.

Indigenous American crops were introduced in colonies around the world. But the farmers’ innovative production methods were shunned and, for the most part, lost to the world for 500 years. Serious efforts to rediscover these methods have only begun during the last few decades.
Sophisticated hydraulic engineering projects can be found, on a massive scale, in the Andes Mountains and along the Pacific Coast of South America, developed by people who had no metal tools. Using only simple devices and their own manual labor, these farmers built thousands of hectares of terraces in the mountains and thousands of giant water-trapping depressions (Qochas) in the high plateaus.

In Bolivia’s Altiplano, hundreds of square kilometers are covered by raised farming platforms (Waru Waru), causeways, canals, and manmade islands in an area that resembles a lake for half the year and is completely dry for the rest of the year. All this, as well, was built by hand.

Much of ancient Mexico City was built over a lake, on which the Aztecs built thousands of floating platforms (Chinampas) on which to grow their crops. Other farmers directed rainfall into spiraling holes that led to underground storage chambers. And many indigenous cultures constructed irrigation canals.

Land Improvement
The practice shared by all these farming societies was their use of raised beds, covered with thick layers of organic matter, or mulch. It appears that indigenous populations built such systems throughout the Americas. It was arguably their most important method of coping with the climate variability caused by the El Niño/La Niña cycle. The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia has proven the value of this type of system by creating a lush raised-bed garden in the Jordanian desert.

Raised beds, when tied together with ridges every few meters, can retain 100 percent of the rain that falls on the field, compared with less than 10 percent infiltration in a flat, ploughed field. During a drought, it is important to maintain the highest soil moisture content possible.

During periods of excess rain, the beds hold part of the root system up in well-oxygenated soil, above the level of the standing water. This prevents anaerobic decomposition of roots and helps guarantee at least some production. Unlike today, there was no “food aid” available to ancient indigenous peoples.

The raised structures were of variable lengths, but most were about a meter wide. If not formed on elevated platforms or terraces, they were commonly built on the contour to hold water and prevent erosion. When built in depressions, however, they radiated to the center. Crops were planted on the beds as the retained water receded.

The organic mulch shaded the soil, keeping it cool and moist. It also prevented raindrops from eroding the soil surface. As the organic matter decomposed, it provided food for earthworms and myriad other beneficial micro-organisms. Earthworms help aerate and fertilize the soil. A permanent mulch also created the proper environment for mycorrhizal fungi, which help ensure that plants receive nutrients and pest protection.

Soil Improvement
Heavy rains in the Amazon River Basin severely leach nutrients from the soil, leaving the native soils useless for agricultural production soon after forest is removed. Yet the first conquistadors to enter the Amazon Basin described their encounters with great agricultural societies, living in large cities that endured until European diseases devastated their populations.

These cities were made possible by soil improvement techniques that have only partially survived in a few remote communities of indigenous farmers. For 2,000 years, famers in the rivers of the Amazon Basin were producing fertile soil on which to grow their crops, where no such soil had existed before.

These soils, known as “black earth,” are still fertile 500 years after they were last made. They contain high concentrations of humus, powdered charcoal, and pieces of broken pottery. Although they are located high above the river levels, they contain aquatic plant remains and sand. The sand indicates that the people scooped up the river muck in the dry season and spread it over their beds.

The pottery chards provide soil structure where no natural rock exists. The charcoal (potentially stable for thousands of years) provides a long-term depository for nutrients, buffers the pH of the soil, and mitigates the toxic effects of aluminum in the soil. The humus (potentially stable for hundreds of years) is like a sponge for nutrients and moisture.

These soils cannot be reproduced simply by adding charred material. The humus is vitally important to the functioning of these soils. Fortunately, there are ways to produce large amounts of humus to recreate these super-fertile soils. Developing these soils today would contribute greatly to efforts to feed a world full of hungry people.

Putting These Methods into Perspective
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its 2007 assessment, suggests the use of ancient indigenous technologies from the Americas as a means of mitigating the effects of climate change. Evidence indicates that global warming is increasing the frequency and severity of both droughts and inundations.

These ancient agricultural technologies hold promise for increasing food production worldwide. With nearly a billion people suffering from chronic hunger, the time is overdue for another agricultural revolution. The introduction of indigenous American crops 500 years ago started one. The introduction of their innovative production methods could start another.

Mel Landers is an agronomist working with farmers in Nicaragua.

See also:
Hawaii Agriculture Notes - Biochar

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Grazing Climate Helpers

SUBHEAD: A smarter way of raising herd animals, known as holistic management, may be a catalyst to helping the soil reclaim its role as a global carbon sponge.

Image above: Millions of buffalo once roamed the great plains of North America. From (http://www.artsales.com/ARTistory/History_of_the_Buffalo/index.html). By Judith D. Schwartz on 14 September 2010 in Miller-McCune - (http://www.miller-mccune.com/environment/roving-herds-of-grazing-climate-helpers-22521/)

In reports of rising CO2 levels, there’s an impression that the carbon-and-oxygen molecule is some kind of toxin, an alien vapor coughed up by a century-plus of heedless industrialism that’s come back to haunt us. On closer inspection, it seems the problem isn’t carbon dioxide’s presence, but that there’s too much in the air and not enough in the ground where it lends fertility to agricultural soil.

How do we get that carbon back in the soil? Some suggest placing calcium carbonate or charcoal (aka “biochar”) directly into agricultural soil, as Miller-McCune examined last year.

But according to some who study how agricultural practices affect the environment, the catalyst for reducing atmospheric CO2 and restoring soil fertility is by bringing back the roving, grazing animals that used to wander the world’s grasslands. Not to diminish saving the rain forest or setting emissions caps, but what takes place in the digestive system and under the hooves of ruminants might be the crucible of climate change. In other words, a climate-friendly future might look less like a geo-engineered landscape with faux parasols than like, well, “Home On the Range.”

While the automobile and the fruits of industry are often the focus in bemoaning our CO2 predicament, a greater culprit has been agriculture: Since about 1850, significantly more atmospheric CO2 has come from poor farming practices as from the burning of fossil fuels. It’s not, says Christine Jones, a soil ecologist in Australia, because of exhaust-spewing tractors but rather from the depletion soil quality. Jones estimates that between 50 to 80 percent of organic carbon in the topsoil has vanished into the air in the last 150 years due to mismanagement, with about 7 tons of topsoil lost for every ton of grain produced.

According to the agricultural model known as “holistic management,” developed by biologist and environmental advocate Allan Savory, global soil depletion and excess atmospheric CO2 are flip sides of the same problem, and both can be resolved by the same solution: livestock — not cattle crammed into feedlots, but rather “planned grazing,” with herds of well-managed grazing animals nibbling on native grasses and roaming from place to place to elude predators and seek fresh pasture. Savory, based in Southern Africa, was awarded the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge for his program Operation Hope, which trains African communities in holistic management.

Holistic management of rangeland has been on the academic radar for at least a decade and a half and, for example, has been credited with increasing biodiversity. But rangelands’ role in ever more far-reaching ecological benefits (as opposed to its harms) is less well studied outside of Savory’s work and those in his orbit, even as more ranchers use it. Still, the idea that agricultural land-use decisions impact broader ecosystems and even climate change is better understood.

Savory has “observed the beneficial relationship between grazing wildlife and cattle and the grass,” says Steven Apfelbaum, founder/chairman of Applied Ecological Services, Inc., a landscape restoration company based in Brodhead, Wis. The strategy, he says, builds on “the wonderful long-standing relationship between wildlife that eat grasses — their teeth, the ruminant system and digestive system — and the plants that develop their growth system to be eaten and continue growing. In nature, animals walk around the landscape. They chew down an area, move to another, maybe return in a month or two. It’s really simple: The grazing of elk, deer, buffalo or antelope stimulates more growth in the plant.”

Time now for a quick biochemistry refresher course: The carbon cycle is essential to all life forms. Through photosynthesis, plants take sunlight and CO2 from the air and create sugars and other carbon compounds. Plants are eaten or die and decompose, which enriches the soil by adding organic carbon.

“Over the eons, it’s the carbon cycle that’s built the soil, through photosynthesis, which generates sugars and soil biological decay that drives the cycling of nutrients,” says Abe Collins, whose new firm, New Soil Security, Inc. advises on soil-building and is developing software tools to support accelerated topsoil formation. “Atmospheric carbon is a basic building block of life.”

The problem, he says, is when carbon is not taken up by plants and entered into the soil system or when too much of it in the soil is oxidized — exposed to oxygen. The upshot is that the carbon goes into the atmosphere as CO2 rather than doing its work in the ground. And right now, the carbon cycle is out of whack.

The main offender, it seems, is bare ground. “For soil to form, it needs to be living, and to be living, soil needs to be covered” with plants in various stages of growth and decomposition, Jones says. Uncovered soil not only is biologically stagnant, it is more prone to erosion and does not hold water the way it does when carpeted with plant life.

“When the surface is bare, photosynthesis isn’t happening, soil biodiversity is compromised, carbon is oxidizing and water is evaporating or running off,” says Collins. “With bare ground, you can have a drought even when it rains.” The result is lowered productivity, wildfires, water shortages and desertification, which now threatens the livelihoods of people, particularly in poorer nations, around the world. By looking at the workings of the biosphere through the lens of holistic management, says Collins, one sees that climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification are really the same thing. “All we’re saying is that the carbon cycle is broken,” he says.

Now for the hopeful part: Biological processes can bring carbon into balance. Think of the dreary climate predictions you read in the news and compare that with what Ian Mitchell-Innes, a South African rancher and trainer in holistic management, has to say: “If we improve 50 percent of the world’s agricultural land we could sequester enough carbon in the soil to bring atmospheric CO2 back to pre-industrial levels in five years.”

According to Collins, a 1 percent increase in soil carbon on 5 billion acres of agricultural land would not only relieve our atmosphere of some 200 billion tons of CO2 — the equivalent of 100 parts per million — but also enhance food production, and, because its covered, carbon-rich soil infiltrates and holds significantly more water than its dried-out counterpart, aids stream and river flow, and protects against flooding and drought.

The role that grazing mammals play in this transformation, says Collins, is as “biological accelerators.” They enrich the soil in numerous ways: When they trample around, their hoofs break up the soil and aerate it; they eat grassland plants and stimulate their growth; they cycle dead plants back to the surface, which allows sunlight to low-growing parts of grasses; their waste provides fertilizer. And because they bunch together and move as a herd, all the plants get nibbled but none are overgrazed, which would leave the ground bare. (On the debit side, grazing animals’ flatulence is a source of greenhouse gases, but studies routinely find that livestock grazing on native grasses are less gassy than those munching on non-grass foodstuffs like corn.)

“Accelerated topsoil formation [is] the great work of our time – the centerpiece for addressing the environmental security and economic development issues of our time in one fell swoop,” says Collins. “It won’t happen magically or instantly, or if it’s just placed on the shoulders of farmers and graziers. Country folks and city folks are going to have to work very closely together on this.”

Does rapid soil-building through biological processes work? Scroll around websites about holistic management and you’ll see “before-and-after” shots that would put a Park Avenue plastic surgeon to shame. Mitchell-Innes says that after three to four years, dormant springs began to run again, and streams that flowed only during the summer were flowing year-round. Depending on the area, conventional farming requires 6 acres to sustain one animal for a year; holistic management methods can cut that to 1.5 acres per head, which, Mitchell-Innes notes, “lowers capital costs dramatically.”

At Dimbangombe, the Savory Institute ranch in Zimbabwe, poor, mostly bare ground after five years was turned into perennial grassland with springs and stream flow re-established. In the United States, Tony and Jerrie Tipton have restored abandoned gold mining tailings in Nevada’s high desert with a single dose of animal impact and hay — something that seeding, irrigation and other technological treatments had repeatedly failed to “fix.”

Though managed livestock grazing is the core strategy, there are many ways to bolster land health. For example, by simply using a device called a “Keyline” subsoil plow, which loosens dirt without turning it over, neglected farmland on the Whirlwind ranch in southwestern New Mexico — with its 7 inches of rain a year — went from nearly totally caked earth to 80 percent perennial grass coverage in one year. (The Keyline system, which aerates deep soil in combination with planned grazing, was developed by Australian P.A. Yeomans in the 1950s.)

“When I travel, I see bare fields, and I despair,” says Ridge Shinn, a Massachusetts cattle rancher and breeder trained in holistic management. He then thinks of what bringing in cattle could do for such land: “A few years isn’t a long time to go from desolation to thriving.”

Resolving the CO2 and soil fertility crises at the same time? Sounds too good to be true. Why hasn’t the environmental movement grabbed onto this?

“People have been distracted by mantras like ‘plant trees and save the rain forest,’” Apfelbaum says, adding that it’s easy to “get lost in nuances. You need to understand the whole system.”

Awareness of agriculture’s potential in addressing climate change is growing among environmentalists, says Collins, noting that even dropping fossil fuel emissions to zero would not be enough without bringing much of the carbon already in the air back into the soil.

See also:

The Savory Institute, (http://www.savoryinstitute.com/?gclid=CK7D5drHmqQCFQIEbAodykPnEQ)