A Climate Solutioneering Superhero

"Its superpowers: limitless locations, few entry barriers, proven technology, diverse antifragile yields and self-financing early returns." 

 

A.I. assistance from DALL-E, Dzine, Affiinity Photo and Comic Life

In his Collapse Curriculum substack, Justin McAffee writes:

Today, humans face a double bind of existential proportions for the entire species, and millions of other species. Put simply, we must choose between:

Option 1: Prolonging human civilization through aggressive extraction, production and resource use, which causes severe environmental degradation that breaches a point of no return making the planet mostly or entirely uninhabitable, leading to the extinction of the human and millions of other species.

Option 2: Ushering the collapse of human civilization prior to breaching point of no return thresholds, potentially increasing short-term human suffering but staving off the vast suffering and deaths and further mass extinction.

I’m inclined to go with door number three, the fantastical notion that suddenly we will Wake Up! and graduate into responsible species adulthood, call it permaculture, a great spiritual awakening or whatever. Demand utopia! The floods, wildfires, hurricanes, Musk—those are merely initiation rites.

McAfee concedes:

I think some people will say there is zero chance for humanity as it is. In other words, its possible we’ve already breached the thresholds, the “no return points.”

He says very soon, Earth won’t be habitable, at least not for the foolish two-leggeds with their opposable thumbs and smartphones. While I have often considered that to be foretold, even before I was born, I can’t be certain. Certainly not the timing. I don’t think there’s any way for someone to know at this point. And, if we can’t know, doesn’t it compel us to do what we can to choose the best possible outcome and try to reverse engineer a path from here to there? Making the try—that is where this week’s essay goes.

Thinking Permaculturally

It is often said that permaculture is not karate. By that they mean that traditional agriculture, going back 8000 years to irrigation and the plow, is a process of brutally taming nature—forcing it to serve us. Think of Gregor Mendel’s peas, John Deere’s mechanical horses, then Big Ag and Big Pharma turning the planet into food, fuel and forever pollution, now in a vertical asymptote of Modern Monetary Theory destruction. It is as if a Vogon Constructor Fleet showed up, clearing space for a galactic superhighway. Our planet is just in the right of way, no blame. Consider our agriculture as the Vogon QUEST (Quite Unwieldy Experimental Sublimation Torpedo).

Aikido differs as a martial art because the defender considers the well being of the attacker. The word "aikido" is formed of three kanji:

合 – ai – harmony, combine, unite, join, meet—the idea of reciprocity.

気 – ki – energy, spirit, truth force, feeling.

道 – dō – way, path—as in shodō (calligraphy), kadō (flower arranging), or sadō (tea ceremony)

One applies aiki by understanding the rhythm and intent of the attacker to find the optimal position and timing to brush aside the attack without harming the attacker—to set things back in balance. Permaculture is that. Permaculture is aikido. Its primary goal is to overcome oneself instead of cultivating violence or aggressiveness.

Returning to the theme of this mini-series of blog posts—climate solutions: we last examined popular nature-based solutions, listing their pros and cons. We left off the last item on our list, biochar, because it requires greater resolution and nuanced discussion than the others.

What is biochar?

The author lecturing permaculture teachers in Shenzen China, 2018.

Biochar is a lightweight black residue originating from the carbonization of biomass through pyrolysis. It can commonly be 90-95% carbon. Some compare it to charcoal, but biochar is used as a structural material and porous repository—for nutrients, water, epoxies, etc.— instead of fuel. Burning fossil sunlight is a complete waste of our time, energy and species.

The properties of biochar depend mainly on the biomass used, pyrolysis temperature, heating rates and residence times in the pyrolysis reactor. Some key characteristics are carbon content, surface area (porosity) and permanence, which is a function of the allotrope of carbon (lignin, diamond, or somewhere in between?) that is determined by cooking conditions. The most permanent biochar (now called inertinite) is nearly incapable of wear or biological destruction and can persist for hundreds of millions of years. When you are trying to reverse climate change by restoring the balance of the carbon cycle between land and atmosphere—restoring the 500 million-year Jurassic Trust Fund (something humans like to call fossil fuels as they burn it away)—permanence is a premium subscription feature.

From a brochure by Biochar Zero:

Biochar applications are plentiful, but often require modification, hence raw biochar should not be treated as a product by itself. Most common applications are:

• Soil amendment, e.g. direct application after loading with nutrients, for improved crop yield, water retention, and more,
• Feed supplement for livestock, e.g. after milling, for improved animal health,
• Concrete additive, e.g. after milling, for insetting and improving concrete properties.

I would add water filtration to that list since it has emerged as a major application for biochar, particularly for magnetic biochars. A market report by Biochar Zero in Dresden Germany says:

To produce 1 tonne of biochar typically 3-4 tonnes of biomass is required. The climate effect of 1 tonne of applied biochar in a BCR system equates to about 2.8 tonnes of removed CO2. For each tonne of realized Biochar Carbon Removal, a carbon credit can be generated under a carbon removal framework. There are various certification frameworks for carbon removal with Puro and EBC C-sink being the most widely used ones. The certificates can then be sold on the voluntary carbon market either directly or through a marketplace. Typical buyers today have a high profit margin and low emissions themselves and include IT companies like Microsoft, service companies like Shopify, and global consultancies like Boston Consulting Group. The voluntary carbon removal market is still small, but growing heavily. It is expected to be integrated in the EU Emissions Trading System, which will allow to reduce the need to buy pollution allowances.

My Own Story

On an inland trip through Brazil 20 years ago, I learned about the agriculture that existed in the Americas before European contact, which involved a combination of tree crops in long-term rotation (milpas), aquaculture (chinampas), and biochar—or Terra Preta do Indios—the regular, systematic practice of transforming carbon from plant to mineral and creating the mysterious Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE).

Wim Sombroek lived through the Dutch famine of 1944-45—the Hongerwinter. Sombroek’s father improved the land in part by strewing it with the ash and cinders from their home fireplace. In the 50s, Sombroek came across terra preta in the Amazon, and it reminded him of that life-giving ‘plaggen’ soil. His 1966 PhD thesis on ADE led to the discovery of biochar. We now know Indigenous peoples had been systematically making and using it in the Americas for 8000 years, and that parallel discovery had spanned six continents for nearly as long.

The dark earths were first glimpsed by Francesco de Orellana in 1542. He told the King of Spain, “the land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.” This began a mystery because the Amazon Basin is at the same latitude as the Sahara desert. It should be an infertile and unpopulated land.

Orellana’s second voyage was unsuccessful. He was killed by a poison dart the second week. No others explored the region for half a century. General Small Pox left an impression before then. As Charles C. Mann put it in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus:

Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam.

Terra preta soils had astonishing consequences when suddenly humans were removed from the landscape by European diseases, slavery and ethnic cleansing. Their monumental cities vanished until LIDAR surveys began to reveal them to us today. In the meantime, the regrowth of the rainforest in the 16th and 17th centuries withdrew gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, cooling the Earth and throwing Europe into a Little Ice Age. Call that “proof of concept.”

A few years ago, I visited the original site of agriculture in China from 6000 BCE and roamed through the museum there. There have been two styles of agriculture practiced for the past 8000 years. The one we are most familiar with, beginning in Northeast China and in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, cut down forests and relied upon irrigation and the plow and later chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMOs. When the land gave out or the climate changed, whole civilizations packed up and moved, leaving behind deserts. People are still doing that. Maybe the Vogons have a better plan.

By the 16th Century, Europeans were running out of fertile places to farm but then discovered the New World and began the process all over, imposing the same sort of wanton destruction on the pre-existing “Architecture of Abundance,” as Lyla June Johnson called it. This ongoing process of removing carbon from topsoil and sending it to the atmosphere is the precursor to desertification—and happening in the Amazon today. It is also, coincidentally, where the greatest potentials exist for ungulate grazers and reforestation to restore vast ecosystems and all their benefits and diversity.

In the New World, for 8000 years, local peoples used the opposite style, integrating perennial plants, tree crops, aquaculture and animals, which do not destroy soils or cause climate change and are eternally regenerative. We’ve done the best we could to kill all those people but have not quite succeeded yet.

 

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Okay, you are the brain of Gaia. You have four organs that you are balancing for carbon (and nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other elements too—you have to keep them all in balance, but lets start with carbon). At present, there is too much carbon dioxide in the air, and reducing its concentration from 425 ppm to 350 means we’ve got to take 600 billion tons out. We can’t put it into the already oversaturated ocean, and in fact, the 350 concentration from 1986 is probably too much, so we really need to remove around 1000 gigatons of manmade carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and lock it safely away.

Land plants hold 600 billion tons of carbon at present, but Earth’s soil holds about three times that amount. That is the storage medium we need. While slow to understand what soil scientists like Sombroek, Glazer, Lehmann and others were telling them, climate scientists are now connecting the dots and starting to glimpse how a terra preta therapy might heal our atmosphere and ocean. Let us hope it is not too late.

Do you remember in 1997, George H.W. Bush refused to go to Kyoto because “the American way of life is not up for negotiation?” The USA was a climate criminal in ’97, never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and never honored its very modest targets (reducing climate pollution by 4.7% over a decade). Same for the Paris Agreement in 2015. It is a scofflaw.

In my 1990 book, I predicted exactly what we see now in 2025 playing out around the planet. I did not put a date on these things, like massive and repeated wildfires in the Pacific Palisades and Malibu, or car soups in Austria, Asheville, or Mecca, but it turned out to be about 30 years. We did not stop emitting greenhouse gases in those 30 years. In fact, we gradually increased almost every year. The only exception was two years during Covid, but we are back on the accelerating emissions track again now, and the US just elected a climate criminal. It is safe to say that the worst is yet to come. This is only the beginning of climate change.

Fortunately for us, it is also just the beginning of the biochar solution.

Next week, we’ll turn to the non-agricultural side of biochar and some great news for fans of Formula One who also care about the environment. Also, this coming week I will be recording the podcast Sense-Making in a Changing World with Morag Gamble, available on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.

References

Bates, A. (2010). The Biochar Solution: Carbon farming and climate change. New Society Publishers.

Bates, A., & Draper, K. (2019). Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth. Chelsea Green Publishing. FREE ON GOOGLE BOOKS

Hassan, M., Liu, Y., Naidu, R., Parikh, S. J., Du, J., Qi, F., & Willett, I. R. (2020). Influences of feedstock sources and pyrolysis temperature on the properties of biochar and functionality as adsorbents: A meta-analysis. Science of the Total Environment, 744, 140714.

Mastalerz, M., Drobniak, A., Briggs, D., & Bradburn, J. (2023). Variations in microscopic properties of biomass char: Implications for biochar characterization. International Journal of Coal Geology, 271, 104235.

Sanei, H., et al. (2024). Assessing biochar's permanence: An inertinite benchmark. International Journal of Coal Geology, 281, 104409.

Sanei, H., & Ingermann Petersen, H. (2023, May). Carbon permanence of biochar; a lesson learned from the geologically preserved charcoal in carbonaceous rocks. In EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts (pp. EGU-10913).

Gaza Ceasefire, ABC News

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to bring an immediate cessation to the war. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years and will continue to do so, with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read all about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger, Substack and Medium subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions can be made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.

#RestorationGeneration.

當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is: Human beings are not important. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the great old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.