These books describe various parts of the problem. PRIORITY ONE by
Allan Yeomans is the only book I've seen that describes effective
solutions. It is recently published in the US and UK. See www.biospheremedia.org
Global warming's invisible solution
Suppose we cut fossil fuel emissions to zero by dawn tomorrow. Could
we stop global warming?
Nope. Yet reducing emissions seems to be the only prescription
available. We argue about dosage and timing, whether it's bitter or
sweet, whether x or y is a better approach. No wonder most of us
aren't very motivated, and progress has been slight. Try as we might,
we will only delay the inevitable planetary wreck.
Unless we also reclaim the extra carbon--the extra greenhouse blanket--
from the atmosphere. This takes energy. It's combustion in reverse.
Where do we get the energy, and how do we dispose of all the resulting
carbon dioxide? As long as we favor rocket-science approaches, this is
tough if not impossible.
The elemental and sobering reality is that technology is not the
answer to this problem. But the good news is that there is a huge
opportunity to pull the excess carbon out of the air--using abundant,
cheap, current solar energy. Not techno-green, but chlorophyll-green.
Grass.
In wet places, trees extract more carbon from the atmosphere than
grass. But even trees don't hold this carbon very long before
returning it to the air via decay or fire. Oceanic plankton fix a lot
of carbon, but can't hold much of it out of circulation either. To fix
the other half of our climate problem, we need a large, long-term
reservoir of carbon, supplied at a good rate by green plants, and over
which we have lots of influence.
When we're in the pasture, the field, or the garden, we're standing on
it. Even in its presently depleted state, the soil holds more carbon
than the atmosphere plus all the world's vegetation combined. Soil
organic matter (which is mostly carbon) can last for centuries-barring
exposure to the elements, tillage, harsh chemical applications, or
significant warming. Unlike carbon dioxide burial, organic carbon in
the soil enhances every aspect of our life-support system: water-
holding capacity and drought resistance, water quality, biodiversity
including underground and marine, human health, true fertility, viable
rural communities, and the stability of the soil itself. In temperate
climates under intense but observant management, perennial grasses can
grow a huge underground crop of soil carbon as they periodically shed
their roots.
Colin Seis, an innovative grain and sheep farmer near Gulgong in
Australia, has doubled the organic carbon in his soil in little more
than a decade. He didn't set out to do this. In order to make his
operation profitable, and to regenerate the fertility lost by a
century of misguided farming practices, he began sowing cereal crops
directly into perennial pasture, thus combining farming and intensive
grazing while reducing herbicides and tillage. Profits increased
because inputs decreased. Another thousand Australian farmers are
following his lead, and the system is spreading to North America and
Europe. "The hardest thing to change is your head. Once you've done
that, the rest is easy," he says. "Don't spend a cent," he advises
farmers. "Throw away your disc plow. Put your animals into large mobs
and start moving them around."
Seis's pasture cropping is only one of many branches of a growing
rebellion against the input/output, monocultural, confined livestock,
soil-wasting, and life-denying travesties of industrial farming. What
these various branches have in common is a decreasing reliance on
fossil fuels and chemicals, synergy between animals and grass, and the
habit of enhancing natural processes such as water and carbon cycling,
biodiversity, and solar energy in order to cut costs and enjoy a
better life. In countless cases the result is a rising spiral that is
totally at odds with the scarcity-based, zero-sum beliefs and
behaviors of both industrial agriculture and protectionist
environmentalism.
Were we to wean ourselves from fossil fuels and manage soils for
rising spirals of organic matter, as Colin Seis and many others have
already demonstrated, the ongoing destabilization of the world's
climate could be stopped. We could reverse the desertification and
land degradation that drive the Dust Bowls and the Darfurs.
This marvelous opportunity is all but invisible. Why?
1. Basic knowledge and awareness of soil processes and potentials is
not widespread. With cheap fossil energy and chemical farming, it
hasn't seemed all that important.
2. Our special interests--which influence our media, our government,
and the research priorities of universities--aren't fond of cheap low-
tech solutions. They benefit, in both money and power, from things
staying the way they are.
Most of the academic research on soil carbon looks only at industrial
agriculture, and what happens when you stop tillage, chemicals, or
idle the land. The resulting modest gains suggest that soil might be
able to mitigate or offset further fossil fuel burning, so as to
extend business as usual a little longer.
We citizens can opt out of this madness in lots of ways. First is
simply recognizing the huge opportunity we have to solve the problem
if we stop fossil fuel burning and store the atmospheric excess carbon
as beneficial soil organic matter while revitalizing agriculture, soil
stability, drought resistance, and human health worldwide. With enough
grass-roots recognition, the ongoing racket of prescribing partial or
ineffective solutions will ebb, along with the backlash it produces.
Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming by Allan Yeomans
simply describes this opportunity in detail, as well as the forces
that oppose it. [Links to Amazon.com on www.biospheremedia.org]
Second, support the growing number of farmers, ranchers, and land
managers who are enhancing soil with passion and skill. These people
are engaged in transformational change, to a new postindustrial
agriculture. They are not polished executives or experts from the
centers of power. They are from the edge, and they are ahead of us
all, already doing what needs to be done. Let's buy our food from
them, and learn from them. Our current farm policies abet the
continued release of soil carbon into the atmosphere, along with
rising obesity and disconnect from our life-support system. Soil
carbon could connect farm policy with what we all want.
Global warming requires us to transform our energy policy and
technology. But solving it also requires us to keep our soils covered
with plants, which feed the complex underground foodwebs that form
soil organic matter. We could not ask for better opportunities.
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