Sacred Shrines and Skinny Chickens

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" — Marcel Proust

In the world of climate policy, the argument has been shifting. It used to be between a few global warming Cassandras and hoards of global warming deniers, and that arguing got, well, pretty heated. The deniers long ago lost their argument to the hard science of the matter, so the debate has boiled down to the preventionists versus the mitigators.

Measurements of Surface Temperature and Sun’s Energy

The sunlight reaching the Earth has followed an 11-year solar cycle of small ups and downs, but there has been no increase. Over the past 30 years, global temperature has risen markedly, but still is only little more than 1 degree above normal. Each added degree will produce dramatically more effects.

Preventionists are looking for either very painful emission reductions, like zero, yesterday, or else some technical fix — nuclear fusion, or orbiting mirrors, say — a silver bullet that would let us go on spending more of Earth’s capital than one generation has any right to.

Mitigators have given up any hope that we can arrest or reverse climate change now, but have some hope we can either slow it down or, if not, be able to get out of its way.

Susan Solomon, one of the United States’ top climate scientists, pointed out at a recent conference that the driest parts of the USA can expect to get still drier as the Earth warms. We already have about 15% less rain in the Southeast than normal (this year aside), and we know that the last time it was this dry, about 15 to 18% below normal, we had the Dust Bowl. Solomon thinks we could reach more than 20% drier than average in the very near future. The Southeast now gets 29% less spring rain most years than it did in 1970.

Number of Days per year with Peak Temperature over 90°F

By the end of the century, Middle Tennessee will have more than 120 days of temperatures above 90, up from 15 twenty years ago, and 30-60 now. Texas will have more than 100 days above 100°F.

Observed and Projected Temperature Rise

By the end of the century, mid-continental temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 13 degrees, on average, depending to a large extent on what happens in Copenhagen at the climate negotiations.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that was adopted many years ago said that the member nations should make every effort to “avoid serious or irreversible damage.” Solomon says we recently passed that point. Because of the long time that greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere, even if we halted all emissions immediately, the planet will continue to warm for at least another 600 years.

In the past 20 years, most of Tennessee has moved at least one agricultural zone to the southward, and some parts have moved as many as 3 zones. That means we can plant earlier and harvest later, which I suppose is a good thing. It also means that we are now ideal habitat for armadillos, fire ants and scorpions, all of which are pushing our possums up into Ohio.

Of course it is much worse for the trees, which can’t just uproot and move north. In earlier years we have seen blights claim white oaks and dogwoods. This year we are losing more hickories from the weather fluctuations that make droughts, extreme rainfalls, late frosts and early thaws more frequent.

Mitigation is not about rushing to relocate our families to Nova Scotia or Terra del Fuego, as the famous ecologist, James Lovelock, has been suggesting. For now at least, mitigation is painting roofs white to reflect sunlight back into space, saving greywater, and building drought-resistant shelterbelts to cool the microclimate around our homes.

Albert Bates and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at the North American Biochar Conference.

Some of us are not ready to give up on prevention quite yet. I recently attended the North American Biochar Conference to learn more about the possibility for lowering temperature by reversing the carbon flow from the soil to the atmosphere.

One gram of charcoal (a piece about the size of a pencil eraser), it turns out, has a surface area of 500 to 1000 square centimeters (imagine a cube about the size of a piece of letterhead paper on each of its six sides) because of all its micropores.

Biochar is charcoal derived, without flaring, from sustainable sources (typically products that would otherwise be burned or allowed to decay to GHG without any control). Because of the micropores, it acts like a coral reef in the soil. If it is turned in a nutrient pile (any compost will do) before being tilled into the ground, it becomes immediately colonized by soil microbes, much in the same way coral reefs are populated by all manner of marine life. The microbial products attract fungi, which benefit the roots of plants, carrying nutrients from the “reef” to where they will do the most good.

Besides stimulating the health of the soil, the char and its fungal conduits also provide a reservoir for soil moisture, soaking up water from oversaturated areas and giving it back to dry areas. All this, and changing the residence time of carbon in the soil from a few years to hundreds, or even thousands, and we have a chance to stop the warming.

And that has the potential to do more, quickly and safely, than all the LED light bulbs and hybrid cars we can possibly replace, or buying a lakeside cottage in Alaska.

Some years ago, scientists working at the International Charcoal Cooperative Association in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, were called to rescue the black pines of the Izumo Taisha Shrine that were dying of acid rain. By filling a shallow trench between trees with fertilized biochar, they were able to fully recover the trees within a few years.

Pines at the Izumo Taisha Shrine before, during and after application of biochar.

Many of these same scientists also experimented with methane reduction from animal husbandry. After initial success in adding charcoal to cattle feed, and eliminating ruminant off-gassing from both ends, they began working with poultry. They starved chickens until they were hungry enough to begin pecking and eating biochar, after which the subjects routinely consumed the black chips without further stress, with the result that the chickens thrived, the coop smelled sweeter, the poop was even more fertile than before, and methane output was greatly reduced. The results, as reported to the First Asia Pacific Biochar Conference held on the Gold Coast, Australia in May, 2009, were fifteen ears per stalk of corn and 250% yield increases for a variety of field crops after using biochar made from pyrolyzed chicken litter.

On August 1^st, in Dunlap, Tennessee, Mantria Industries has opened a Carbon Fields project, designed to make enough biochar to offset the carbon footprint of a 3000-home eco-community the company is building in the scenic Sequatchie Valley. Initially operating on woody wastes from landfills and sawmills, hundreds of hectares are being sown with fast growing bamboo, switchgrass and elephant grass. After being pelletized and pyrolyzed, the biochar produced will fertilize field and forest. The recaptured heat and gases of production will generate two megawatts of green energy, more than enough to power the eco-community in a carbon-negative way.

Mantria is only rolling up its first sleeve, however. In Hohenwald (Swiss-German: “High Forest”) Tennessee, it is building an 8- or 16- or 32-megawatt facility to pyrolyze the woody wastes the town is currently trucking 150 miles away to a landfill to bury (and decay into greenhouse gases). By intercepting this tax-dollar drainage, Mantria will capture a cash flow of tipping fees, electricity sales, and revenues earned placing its new, Eternagreen^TM brand biochar into garden centers from Schenectady to Shenzhen. If Copenhagen and Congress approve cap-and-trade, the carbon credits Mantria generates could be another income stream.

Troy Wragg in front of biomass canisters awaiting pyrolysis; Mantria Carbon-Fields

The first question I had for Mantria CEO Troy Wragg was, “But is this sustainable?” He was unhesitant, enthusiastic, and emphatic. “Absolutely,” he said. There are currently 250,000 tons of wastes per year being trucked out of Lewis County alone. If you look at the surrounding counties, that number multiplies. Is it 8-, 16- or 32-megawatts? The Hohenwald recycling center is scalable

Even at the smallest scale, 8-megawatts is 8 times more than Hohenwald (pop. 3000) needs to meet current residential and commercial electric demand. The Tennessee Valley Authority is paying Mantria for the surplus kilowatts, which it intends to sell through its Green-Power Switch program. If Mantria were so inclined, it could even give away the power to local residents — with all the other revenue streams, it is too cheap to meter.

And Mantria is not alone. Biochar Systems can deliver a ready-to-run pyrolysis plant on a 1.8 ton skid that can take 500 kg per hour from any landfill, sawmill, or poultry farm, and, with a clean, GHG-free airflow, deliver biogas, power, and biochar fertilizer back to you. More competitors are popping up around the world. A system is available to make green energy of this type at almost any scale.

Ever since biochar started getting traction in the UN climate talks and the endorsement by climate activists James Lovelock, Jim Hansen, and Bill McKibben, opponents like Biofuelwatch and Vandana Shiva have been throwing up red flags about genetically modified forest monocultures being planted to fuel a vast biochar industry, displacing indigenous peoples and pumping up a carbon-trading Ponzi scheme to replace the recently exploded commoditized-mortgage-and-credit-default-swap bubble. This attack has now ramped up to the point where it has effectively derailed biochar’s inclusion in the UNFCCC language that is slated for ratification in Copenhagen this December.

Traveling from the Mantria ribbon-cutting in Tennessee to the North American Biochar Conference in Boulder this August, we arrived to discover that, much to our delight, biochar advocates had risen like the Rocky Mountains to receive the challenge and raise the vision. Each day of the conference, roundtables met to discuss criteria for sustainability, how to characterize biochar and what to require of manufacturers. It was quickly apparent that at least in Australia, and likely elsewhere as well, there are enough profits to be made in charing wastes from poultry and paper that just those two sources could support the installable output of the emerging char-industries for many years to come.

Potential earnings from biochar made from paper or poultry wastes (in Australian dollars).

Sustainable Obtainable Solutions founder and former USFS forester Gloria Floria introduced draft standards that would compel producers to commit to full Life Cycle Assessment for energy, water and carbon footprints. The draft mandates would also require the biochar industry to optimize plant, animal, benthic and microbial biodiversity, improve forest health and habitat, and assist open and transparent citizen involvement in the construction, operation and monitoring of facilities and farms. A policy committee will continue to work on these standards between now and the next International Biochar Initiative meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 2010.

In Boulder, David Yarrow, biochar pioneer, small farmer and permaculture trainer in New York and New England, unveiled a vision of a community-centered biochar lifestyle that obtains fertility, fuel and food in an ecologically responsible cycle between humans and the living natural world. The three economic drivers for biochar development are farm products (including fertilizer, fuels and power); climate services; and carbon-negative community. That third driver is the greening of the human habitat to deliver carbon-negative housing and workplaces — the whole built environment.

All of this is to say biochar is about putting the earth back into the black. To quote Geoffrey P. Glasby at the University of Göttingen, Germany, “How ironic that a civilization capable of tracing the origin of the universe from 10-43 seconds after its formation and putting a lander on Titan does not have the rigor and self-discipline to sustain itself for as long as the ancients managed to do.” It seems likely now that a combination of climate reality and peak everything may yet alter our destructive trajectory, hopefully in time. We are relearning some ancient wisdom about soil care, and, with appropriate humility, we are starting to power our homes from the back end of a chicken.

Searching for Livingstone

"Soon the Cacique sent orders that the Indians bring food, and with very great haste they brought in abundance what was necessary; meats, partridges, turkey hens and fish of many types. And later, the Captain thanked the Cacique and said to him that the gifts were not for himself, but went with God."

— Father Gaspar de Carvajal, companion of Conquistador Francisco de Orellana

This is a very personal essay, so I am dropping the “we” convention this time and speaking in the first person singular. In an earlier post at this site I described my “Houston moment;” when I came to a full realization that ours is among the last generations of humans, and like the Elves going into the West, all life on Earth will presently perish, possibly within two centuries, more probably over the course of a few millennia. I include in this gloomy prediction even deep sea microbes and fungi in caves.

Since that glimpse of the shadow backcast by our future, I have been grappling with the internal existential crisis, and whatever should I be doing with my life now. The challenges of peak everything, nuclear winter and financial collapse pale in comparison. This past weekend I celebrated my granddaughter’s third birthday and whenever I look into her deep black eyes, I feel a pang of sorrow, as if I were experiencing a foretaste of her sweltering hot future. Naturally I can’t share this feeling — what a party killer! — so I’m stuck with chit chat among the friends and relatives, nothing heavy.


At the other end of the denial spectrum, I have taken myself off that sweet kitesurfing beach I had planned to retire to, buckled up my Kevlar vest and first aid pouches and stepped out into the propwash. Never mind that I am Medicare-ready myself, if this Godzilla-thing devouring the planet has a weakness, I am going to find it. The peyote prayer rings in my ears: “I am going to follow God, I am going to follow God, I am not turning back.”

God’s plan, to my lights, is for Gaia not to die on this rock rotating around a medium-size yellow star, at least not until that star is ready to give it up. James Lovelock warns that we are already too late to rescue her. The signs and portents in every scientific publication are profoundly ominous.

Hell, Gaia’s fate may have been sealed before I was even born. But here is what I know: entropy is universal — things run down and bad stuff happens; but life organizes, expands, and draws unity to the whole. The human piece, as Buckminster Fuller said, is the problem-solver. I am just doing my part of that piece.

So it was that July found me flying into Manaus to attend the 61st Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Academy for the Advancement of Sciences, or more specifically, their two-day session on “Estado da Arte das Terras Pretas de Indio no Ambito Mundial” (State of the Art for Terra Preta and World Environment).

At the University where we met they have to keep a 20 mph speed limit so that cars and buses don’t run over monkeys. This might be within the city limits of Manaus, but Manaus has the Amazonian rainforest for its campus.

Day one was held a stuffy classroom with fluorescent lights and powerpoints in Portuguese. Despite my language handicap, I learned plenty from listening to the speakers. I was especially interested in the explorations of Lilian Rebellato, who came at the terra preta origins from an anthropological angle.

While compositions vary, terra pretas are not always laid down uniformly, but rather show layering contours that are independent of natural terrain. In terra preta from 10 cm to 180 cm deep, the maximum phosphorus content is found at 30 to 140 cm. Why is that, she wondered. There is a general theory that terra preta was a byproduct of village life, since it contains animal residues, house residues, humanure, bones, and pottery shards. One theory is that since the houses are thatched with reeds and reeds have rootballs of swamp muck when pulled, the stalks then get separated to make the building material, and the discarded swamp muck is the origin of terra preta. It does explain the phosphorus.

Rebellato discounted that theory by analyzing the various models of settlements, some of which would not have had access to wetland reeds. In the Amazon, terra preta examples extend from the Atlantic coast up to the Andean plateau, so there are many different building styles used.

Wenceslau Teixeira’s studies of terra preta characteristics lent support to the notion that there was a gradual learning curve in the Amazon. The deepest layers are the least rich, but by the time you reach 90 to 60 cm below the surface, there is a sharp increase in soil fertility. This correlates to a time horizon that puts the highest carbon content at around 2500 BP, gradually falling off until 1500 AD, when traditional agriculture was discontinued because of European contact and the population crash.

Precisely when the terra preta formula was discovered might be revealed from a dig at site called Santa Catarina. There archaeologists have found a dark horizon in the layer of oyster shell mounds. Could this have been the Ah-ha Moment?

Are we at this moment at our own dark horizon in the shell mounds? Or is it just Monsanto and Cargill from here on out?

We need a 25-ton per acre increase in soil organic matter to reverse climate warming. At the UN climate conference in Poznan last year, reknowned soil scientist Johannes Lehmann told the delegates that “biochar production from agriculture and forestry residues can potentially sequester one gigaton of carbon in the world's soils annually by 2040.”

A gigaton is a billion metric tons. Currently, powerplants worldwide emit 10 billion tons of CO2, so by Lehmann’s estimate (which I believe is overly conservative), we could knock 10% off electricity emissions globally just by charring residues (the parts other than those left in the field or forest to replenish active soil carbon) and burying the newly-minted inactive carbon as compost-amended biochar. Moreover, using the biochar energy co-products (about 25 kWh/ton in electrical generation from kiln gas and some amount of liquid “wood vinegar,” biogas for cooking, and so forth) to displace fossil fuels, we can approximately double the prospective carbon reduction, to about 20% of global electric emissions. The cost for installing a kilowatt of biochar producing reactors is just $1.33, compared with $4.77 for dirty coal, $3.86 for advanced coal gasification, $1870 for offshore wind and $1984 for nuclear energy, assuming the US is willing to dismantle its WMDs to fuel new nukes.

This does not solve our problem, yet, but it begins to shift us in the right direction. Human will have to teach their children to get by on lower carbon emission levels per capita, and we will have to seriously address world population, or this entire exercise will be futile. Woody wastes are finite, and if you exceed the carrying capacity of the forests, you wind up with the same situation as a fished-out fishery. What is needed to scrub the atmosphere is more trees, not fewer.

The U.S., with over 8,000 power plants out of the more than 50,000 worldwide, accounts for about 25 percent of the world carbon total, or 2.8 billion tons of annual CO2 emissions (China is second with 2.7 billion tons). Strangely enough, the biggest carbon burner in the U.S. is the Southern Company, which serves a geographic area with abundant solar energy year-round, and the dirtiest county in the US is Walker County, Alabama, in an area with abundant forestry residues (and closer to where I live than Nashville).

On Day Two of the conference, we took a boat up river to visit a farm where the terra preta is being used to produce fruit and vegetables for the Manaus market and at the same time the ancient soils are being studied intensively. I asked Christoph Steiner and Lilian Rebellato if the Rio Negro gets its deep black tint from terra preta. No, they said, it is from the teas, made in the river from leaves dropped in the rainforests and carried by the currents. Manaus is the “Meeting of the Waters,” where several muddy rivers converge with the black Rio Negro to form the Amazon River.

What interested me in Brazil was a chance to look at the terra preta soils close up, and to speak with some of the many scientists now studying them. I am trying to understand how and why the ancient Amazonian cultures began the practice of carbon farming, reconciled the near-term expense with the prospect of long-term gain, and kept it going for thousands of years, creating a vast carbon sink in the Americas that perfectly balanced the rise of Amerindian civilization without desertifing the environment through farming and grazing, as happened in all the other continents where humans practiced agriculture.

As Alan Yeomans calculates, just increasing the percentage of soil organic matter an extra 1.6% in the one and three quarter acre block representing each one of us, we save our planet. So how is it that we can effect the shift from carbon emitting to carbon farming, and do it fast enough to pull our fat from the fire? I am going to be exploring these pathways in the next several posts, and this month we are going to begin offering our carbon farming coursewares from here at the Ecovillage Training Center.

Confronted with the opportunity to go inward and slide down a vortex of despair, fretting over a wasted life, loss of historical context, and meaninglessness of every prior goal, I have chosen instead to go back into the jungle, like Stanley in search of Livingston, and pick up the faint trails that just perhaps, with long odds against, could lead to the hidden secret we need to rescue Gaia’s future.

My next stop on this trek will be the regional conference for the International Biochar Initiative in Boulder, Colorado.


Recipe for Blueberry Açai

One of the great pleasures of living in Manaus is going to an açai shoppe and having a sundae. Unlike in North America, where açai (pronounced as-eye-eee) is sold as a vitamin supplement or blended in minute quantities with other fruit juices to give an antioxidant component to beverages and confections, in Brazil açai is a part of the diet, and can be a whole meal. When I stayed with Leo Principe and Vanessa Marino, they served their children puddings of açai berry almost every day. At home or in the açai shoppes like Waku Sese, açai is served as a semi-soft cold paste, whipped into a pudding and served with tapioca seeds, granola and chilled fruit like banana and papaya.

When I returned to Tennessee, I tried to find açai to order on the web but it was exceedingly expensive — $100 for two gallons shipped frozen. Rather than try to grow an açai palm (it isn’t that warm yet in Tennessee), I substituted blueberries, which are now in season here. I blended the blueberries into a smooth pulp and placed the bowl into the freezer. I had no problem getting tapioca seeds, granola and chilled fruit locally, so now I have my daily açai, at least as long as the blueberries hold out.