The Woman Who Knew What Dirt Was
"After four hundred million years of farming…" It was during the Devonian Era, roughly 400 million years ago, that plants evolved the ability to produce the hard, lignin-rich tissues that form the trunks of trees. And so in the Devonian Era, plants invented trees. Trees then invented coal. They got buried underground and led to, you know, coal deposits for the first time. And that coal, that carbon removal, pulled huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and lowered global temperatures. So that’s how we think of this (biochar)—it’s a million-year-old sort of geological technology for regulating the CO2 in the atmosphere. —Alan Ransil, CEO, Devonian Systems We live in a civilization that has mastered the impressive trick of feeding eight billion people while systematically destroying the very thing that makes that possible. We have separated the farmer from the soil, the soil from its biology, and the biology from the planet’s future, and then called this progr...
