Carboniferous!

Driving through the coal country of northeastern Wyoming two weeks ago set me to thinking: where did all that coal come from? The quick answer: it came from swamps, a long, long time ago. We don’t give swamps much credit today, other than as a source of alligators and redneck reality TV, but without ancient swamps the world today would be a much, much different place.

Here’s a quick history lesson.

Most of the world’s carbon that we know today as coal and oil was laid down between 360 and 300 million years ago, between the Devonian and Permian Periods in a time called the Carboniferous Period, which was coined by two geologists, William Conybeare and William Phillips, studying England’s coal deposits way back in 1822. In North America, the Carboniferous is divided into the Mississippian and the (later) Pennsylvanian sub-periods.

It was a geologically active time as the Earth’s two massive continents, the southern Gondwana and the northern Laurasia, merged by the end of the Carboniferous into the mammoth Pangaea supercontinent (I’ve often wondered why the Earth didn’t wobble like a lopsided spinning top with so much landmass accumulated in one place!). Actually, Pangaea began its life as a massive O-shaped continent, which I didn’t know.

At the start of the Carboniferous, huge ice sheets at the southern pole locked up large amounts of water as ice, dropping sea levels significantly, which in turn led to big increases in tropical and swampy conditions across both continents. These conditions fostered the novel evolutionary development of bark-bearing trees, which included the fiber lignin, which when buried in the soil can linger relatively intact for thousands of years. The humid, swampy conditions also encouraged ferns and other seedless plant life to grow to huge proportions.

Shallow, warm oceans repeatedly flooded the continents, covering fallen trees and plants in water that apparently lacked bacteria, which is necessary for biological decomposition. With the flooding came sediments which covered and sealed the plant material. These layers, some of which were over 33 feet thick, eventually formed peat beds, which eventually became coal. The Carboniferous was also a time of active mountain-building as the supercontinent Pangaea came together. It was this process geological uplift and submersion that generated the intense heat and pressure required to transform the peat beds into coal and oil.

All this plant life resulted in the oxygen composition of the atmosphere rising to 35% (compared with 21% today), which is why the Carboniferous is sometimes referred to as the Age of Oxygen. Not surprisingly, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere lowered correspondingly, as plants ‘inhaled’ it in copious amounts. In fact, the CO2 level during the Carboniferous became the lowest in Earth’s history. This had two effects: (1) the vast amounts of CO2 that plants pulled from the air remain locked in their stalks after they fell into the swamps, which contributed to the carbon richness of the coal they were eventually transformed into; and (2) the sinking amount of CO2 in the atmosphere changed the planet’s climate – cooling it significantly.

In fact, climatologists credit the Carboniferous with creating the pattern of warming and cooling – Ice Ages separated by warm periods – that continued right up until the end of Holocene (when we messed it up by burning all that coal and oil).

Another important biological milestone was the development of the amniotic egg (such as a chicken egg today). A gradual drying of the climate on continents over the course of the Carboniferous encouraged reptiles to diversify and expand their territory, at the expense of some types of amphibians. This eventually resulted in adaptation of a hard-shelled egg. Scales too. In fact, it wouldn’t long (only another 100 million years) before ‘terrible lizards’ – dinosaurs – became a dominate species on the planet. Insects also grew well in the humid and high-oxygen conditions of the Carboniferous. One of the largest was an ancestor of the dragonfly, which had a wingspan of 60 to 75 centimeters. A giant millipede grew to be more than 1 ½ meters long, and had thirty pairs of legs.

Exciting stuff! With the advent of the Pangaea supercontinent, however, and the geological and biological changes that it inspired, the Carboniferous Period drew to a close.

Except, of course, it hasn’t. Every time you flip on a light or plug in an electronic gizmo, you step right back into the Carboniferous Period. As long as we continue to burn coal and oil, we’ll be revisiting the Age of Oxygen. As William Faulkner once said, the past is never really past, and of all the geological Periods on Earth, his quote best describes the Carboniferous. We can thank swamps for that.

By the way, coal use is on a serious decline in America, which frankly is good news. Here’s a great New York Times story that explains it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/business/energy-environment/even-in-kentucky-coal-industry-is-under-siege.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

And here’s a picture of a Carboniferous swamp:

Carbon Country

Perhaps appropriately, I sequestered myself recently. For two weeks, I had the honor and good fortune to be a writer-in-resident at the U Cross Foundation, in north central Wyoming. It’s an opportunity for writers and artists to leave the real world behind for a while in order to concentrate on a project, which I greatly appreciated. I made the best of my time. In addition to working on the carbon book, I managed to pull together a collection of essays into a new book! We’ll see if it makes it into publication or not, but I was grateful for the chance to give it a go.

During my last two days at U Cross, I decided to unsequester myself and do a little carbon tourism. The Foundation sits within the famous Power River Basin, which, if you don’t know your carbon geography, is home to one of the largest coal deposits in the world. The Basin produces over 400 million tons of coal a year, which is about 40% of all the coal burned in the nation’s power stations and more than twice what second-place West Virginia mines. Recently, the U.S. Department of the Interior made more coal leases available on public land in the Basin for production, much to the consternation of many of us who are worried about climate change.

To see for myself, I jumped into my rental and headed east toward Gillette, Wyoming, in the heart of carbon country.

The word coal comes from the Old English term col which means ‘fossilized carbon’ and the substance itself has been in use as a fuel source in England since the 13th century. Geologically, it’s a brown or black sedimentary rock laid down in layers or seams usually as the result of plants becoming submerged in an oxygen-less medium (such as the bottom of a swamp). Subjected to intense heat and pressure over the eons, the carbon first becomes peat, then lignite, then subbituminous coal, then bituminous coal, then anthracite, which is a rock-like substance.

I suspect everyone knows that coal is primarily burned to produce electricity and that the resulting release of carbon dioxide is a primary cause of global warming, so I won’t go into those details.

The Powder River Basin contains a lot of subbituminous coal, which is highly prized because it is low in sulpher dioxide (SO2), another pollutant. Production in the Basin exploded when regulations kicked in to limit the amount of SO2 that could be released from Appalachian mines and power plants. However, mining the coal seams in the Basin requires the removal of a great deal of overburden – the rock lying between the coal and the surface. The cost of removing this overburden is high, which means coal dances back-and-forth across a fine economic line – cost effective vs. not cost effective. Right now, it’s having a hard time competing with natural gas (also produced in the Basin), which has glutted the energy market.

There’s another price, of course – climate change.

But don’t tell that to Wyoming-nites. They love their coal. And they have the pick-up trucks to prove it – many of which traveled well in excess of the speed limit past the U Cross compound on their way to work, scaring the beejesus out of the wild turkeys trying to cross the road. They scared the beejesus out of me a few times as I traveled down a back highway to Gillette. Powder River mines have a life expectancy of only twenty years on average, so maybe the drivers felt a need to get to their jobs as fast as possible!

Actually, it’s not a joke to the locals. According to a recent news story, power generation in America from coal is falling quickly. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, coal made up 36 % of U.S. electricity in the first quarter of 2012 – down from 44.6 % in the first quarter of 2011. This steep drop is primarily due to low natural gas prices and it is expected to continue into the foreseeable future. That’s bad news for Wyoming-nites, I suppose, but good new for everyone else.

As far as carbon tourism goes, however, there wasn’t much to see. I had expected something like a ‘National Sacrifice Area’ around Gillette – a veritable moonscape of gouged-out land and rusting infrastructure. Instead, what I mostly saw were coal trains, often 120 cars in length stretching a half-mile on the tracks. Each carries 17,000 tons of coal at a time. I chased one as it left Gillette, paralleling Interstate 90. I wanted to snare a photograph of it, if I could.

As I chased it, another coal train passed going in the opposite direction – empty. I watched as the two trains sidled past one another, one full of climate-damaging carbon, the other returning for a refill. There was something oddly symbolic about seeing the two trains pass each other. We shouldn’t burn coal; we know it’s bad for the planet and us – but we do it anyway. It’s an addiction that we can’t stop. 17,000 tons of coal heading out to feed our habit, an empty train coming back for more. And more. And more.

It’s not just Americans. Coal companies are increasingly looking to overseas markets for their unwanted coal, especially in Asia, which has an apparently insatiable appetite for the black stuff. According to the same news story, the Asia export market is exploding, jumping from 3.8 million tons in 2009 to 27.5 million tons in 2011. One of the Powder River Basin coal companies said its exports ballooned 42 % to almost 5 million tons of coal last year. This is doubly bad news. Instead of staying in the ground, where it belongs, the CO2 from Powder River coal would still end up in the atmosphere.

I say, the best place for this type of carbon is in the soil – leave it be.

Here’s a photo to go with my opinion:

Grapes and Olives

I knew I had reached the Fetzer vineyard when I saw the sheep.

In the vineyard. Hundreds of sheep. Happily grazing. This was news. On my trip up and down the Camino Carbon in California recently, I had seen a lot of vineyards out the car window. Miles and miles of grape stumps in row after row. It was hard to imagine how so much wine gets consumed in this nation, and beyond, but apparently it does. In no vineyard that I saw, however, from Santa Barbara to Santa Rosa, did I see sheep. Only at Fetzer.

That’s because Fetzer is a different sort of wine company, for a major label. While many wine makers have gone “green” in recent years, whatever that means, few (if any) have gone as far as Fetzer, especially on the carbon front. That’s why I drove all the way to Hopland, near Ukiah, CA, to see for myself. I just didn’t expect to see sheep!

I had first heard about Fetzer’s sustainability program at a conference on climate change and agriculture at UC Davis in 2011, organized by the California Climate and Agriculture Network, or CalCAN, a great group. (see: http://calclimateag.org/)

Program Director Dr. Ann Thrupp told the large audience that Fetzer had implemented a variety of carbon-friendly practices, including: composting leftover grape skins and stems, which are then added to the soil to boost carbon stocks; planting cover crops between the vines in order to protect the soil from erosion (this is what the sheep were eating); attracting beneficial insects with the type of cover crops they plant; and eliminating fossil-fuel based chemicals and fertilizers (this is another reason why the sheep were there).

There was more: the grapes for its Bonterra brand are certified organic, biodynamic, and sustainable (by the California Certified Sustainable Winegrowing program, which was established in 2009). Started in 1992 – making Fetzer a pioneer – Bonterra has become, Thrupp said, the number one selling brand of wine made from organic grapes.

Better still, unlike the wall-to-wall grape stumps that I had seen in other vineyards up and down the state, Fetzer is dedicated to conserving its oak woodlands and riparian areas. As much as 45% of its land is protected by the company as wild country.

This is important, said Dr. Louise Jackson of UC Davis, who followed Thrupp’s presentation, because mosaics of vineyards and wild land can store a lot of carbon. Jackson had directed a comprehensive assessment of the carbon stocks across Fetzer’s various land holdings, including its undeveloped woodlands and determined that the ecosystem service being provided by Fetzer – voluntarily and unremunerated – was substantial. This has policy implications for California, Jackson said, because there is a lack of focus on the benefits of carbon sequestration among policymakers, who are more focused on emissions. Changing this focus would encourage better farm stewardship and habitat conservation. (see: http://www.cbmjournal.com/content/6/1/11)

Good stuff!

Earlier in the day, I had visited with Dr. Jeffrey Creque at the McEvoy Olive ranch, near Petaluma. Jeff is an agroecologist who has been working at McEvoy since 1997, primarily on their composting program. I went to see Jeff because I knew McEvoy had doubled the organic content of its soil in ten years, which is amazing. I won’t go into the technical details here, but raising the amount of organic material in your farm or ranch’s soil has HUGE benefits, including increased fertility, water holding capacity, nutrient uptake, and carbon sequestration.

As regular readers of this blog should know by now – this is a GOOD thing.

Jeff told me they did it by (1) applying lots of compost to the soil, made up of 25% olive waste + off-farm compost + livestock waste + landscaping waste + willows from riparian area via chipping; (2) cover-cropping between the rows of olive trees; (3) rotational grazing of sheep through the orchard; and (4) riparian area restoration, which reduces erosion and builds topsoil.

Jeff takes dozens of soil samples every year from all over the farm which are then sent to a laboratory for analysis. While results have shown year-to-year fluctuations in the organic content of the soil, due to weather variables mostly, the trend has been clear: upward. Jeff notes that millions and millions of tons of green waste – food, grass clippings, branches – go into landfills every year. Why not divert them instead to farms and rangelands where they could be composted for multiple benefits? There’s a cost, of course, but it could be offset by increased ecological productivity + profits + potential carbon credits.

In fact, Jeff wants to see if the farm can double the organic content of its soil again – to levels higher than what nature might have had there originally. Why not? There’s nothing in nature that says we can’t, Jeff said. Besides, there are no downsides to trying and lots of upsides, especially for climate change. If we can encourage soils to store more carbon than normal, and keep everything functioning properly ecologically, then that’s a BIG upside.

More good stuff!

Here’s a photo I took of the Fetzer sheep:

Ethical Meat

[Last month, the New York Times put out a call for essays to answer the question 'Why Is It Ethical to Eat Meat?' My effort didn't make the cut, alas, so I'll post it here. If you like it, please feel free to share it - CW]

Some years ago, a rancher in Montana stood up at a rowdy meeting with environmentalists and defended his livelihood this way: “If God didn’t intend for us to eat animals,” he said, “why did he make them out of meat?”

Ethically, in other words, the issue was largely out of his hands.

As a meat-eater, I thought his rebuttal pretty much ended the argument with vegetarians until I came to understand that not all meat was created equal. Which meat did God intend for us to eat – the pastoral, grassfed variety of biblical times or meat from manure-infested feedlots, industrialized by growth hormones and anti-biotics?

Not too long ago, meat-eaters didn’t have much of a choice. Ninety-nine percent of the nation’s beef produced after World War II came from feedlots, where cattle are fed corn and other annual grains that Nature – or God – never intended them to consume. “All flesh is grass,” the Bible’s Book of Isaiah reminds us. Not “All flesh is corn (or animal) byproducts.” Herbivores are designed to graze or browse on grass, forbs, weeds, sedges, rushes, bushes, even young trees. God did not intend for them to eat other animals. That choice was ours. 

There is an old saying in organic agriculture that ‘Nature never farms without animals.’ From herds of microbes in the soil to bands of wild elephants criss-crossing African savannahs, the eating, defecating, and disturbance caused by grazing creatures is integral to the health of ecosystems worldwide – and has been for millennia. Organic farmers understand this, which is why so many of them integrate domesticated herbivores – cows, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, even horses – into their operations, albeit under careful management. Call it the ‘bison principle’ at work.

To paraphrase the Montana rancher “If God didn’t intend for the earth to be grazed, why did he make so much of it out of grass?”

Which brings me to another reason to consider meat: it can help fight climate change.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) can be sequestered in soils via photosynthesis and green plants for long periods of time. Plants peal the carbon (C) away from the oxygen (O₂) and send much of it into the soils through their roots. The carbon content of soil can be increased three main ways: the establishment of green plants on previously bare ground; deepening the roots of existing healthy plants; and the general improvement of nutrient, mineral, and water cycles. Herbivores can help a lot if properly managed, especially the domesticated varieties. By controlling the timing, intensity, and frequency of animal impact on the land, a “carbon rancher” can improve plant density, diversity, and vigor. It’s all about getting the Earth’s great carbon cycle functioning properly.

And there’s a very good reason to try – more than one-third of the planet’s land surface is grassland, which means the potential for increased carbon storage in soils is huge, with a correspondingly huge depletion of atmospheric CO₂.

That’s why when I hear people say that an answer to climate change is to eat less meat I respond “No, eat more meat! But eat it from a carbon ranch.” Or an organic farm. Fortunately, today we have choices.

Whether God meant for us to eat animals or not is secondary now to the larger issue at hand: our future. All flesh is grass, and all grass is carbon, which means all meat was originally a gas – carbon dioxide. What we do next is up to us, but I think it is entirely ethical to eat CO₂.

As fast we can.

Restored grasslands on Tom Sidwell’s ranch, near Tucumcari, NM:

The Carbon Sheriff

I spent the second half of my pilgrimage to California last month in the Bay Area, visiting an olive farm, a winery, catching up with a climate activist, and spending a day with John Wick, a landowner and founding member of the Marin Carbon Project, located near Nicasio, in Marin County. I met John two years ago, on my initial carbon pilgrimage to the Golden State, and was deeply impressed by what I learned. In response, I invited John to speak at Quivira’s Annual Conference in 2010, along with Dr. Jeff Creque, an agroecologist and fellow founding member of the Marin Carbon Project (MCP).

On this return trip, I was eager to find out how things were coming along. But I should back up a bit first.

The principle goal of the MCP is to explore the value of local soil carbon sequestration in rangelands – private ranches and publicly owned open space – to provide ecological and agricultural benefits to rural communities. Rather than get into the “weeds” here, however, I think the best way to explain the promise of the Project is to quote from a National Public Radio story, reported by Christopher Joyce, titled “Scientists Help Ranchers Wrangle Carbon Emissions.”

It ran on December 10^th, 2009, just as the critically important United Nations Conference on climate was beginning in Copenhagen, Denmark. I heard the story in the kitchen of my house, while doing the dishes. The general news from Denmark was already rotten, I thought. A comprehensive agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions looked like an impossibility, so I pricked up my ears when the NPR story started. Joyce reported:

“…some people in Marin County, California, may already have a partial solution. They call it ‘carbon ranching.’ The idea was hatched by scientists who are trying to coax carbon dioxide out of the air and into cattle pastures. Proponents of the idea say if it proves effective, the practice could be used around the world.

Whendee Silver is a soil scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. If soil is the earth’s skin, then Silver might be considered its dermatologist.

“What we’re interested in doing out here is figure out how much carbon is added to the soil and how much carbon is lost,” she says.

Soil and the plants that grow in it depend on carbon. Essentially, carbon dioxide is plant food and Silver wants them to eat more. To encourage the uptake of carbon dioxide, Silver has spread compost over these plots of pastureland. The compost is a mix of plant clippings and animal manure, the same kind you might put on your garden at home.

The compost, she says, “increases plant growth, it actually also lowers the temperature a little bit, so the soil doesn’t get quite as hot, it doesn’t stimulate as much microbial activity.”

Her experiment seems to be going well. The grass here is visibly taller, which means there is more carbon in the plant, which also means more food for cows. Ranchers like that part. But those microbes she mentions complicate the process. Soil is full of them, and when they eat plants, animals and bugs, they emit carbon dioxide into the air. So Silver’s composting has to work a balance between supercharging carbon-consuming plants – without beefing up carbon-producing microbes.

Scientists are experimenting with grassy pastures like this one in California to increase how much carbon dioxide the pastureland captures from the air. So far, the grass in the composted plots grows so well that it captures 50 percent more carbon from the air than grass in the untouched plots. And the soil is taking up almost all the carbon in the compost — carbon that likely would have gone up into the atmosphere if it hadn’t been added to the pastureland. Silver is now measuring exactly how much that is.

“Grasslands, because they are in these dry regions, have really, really high root biomass, and it tends to go pretty deep, these plants are looking for water and that’s what builds that dark, organic rich soil and that carbon-rich soil,” says Silver.

Silver thinks composting could work for thirty years before the soil is saturated with carbon. During that time, Silver says ranchers could see a payoff of sorts for their work. “Hopefully, they’ll be able to participate in a carbon market, where we can quantify how much carbon is being stored on the land, and we can sell that as a carbon offset,” she says.

That idea intrigues John Wick, a rancher who owns grazing land where Silver is conducting her experiments for the Marin Carbon Project. “Now I think about carbon in everything I’m doing, and it’s completely changed my life. This whole ecosystem down there, is alive, I mean up until this point it was just dirt to me, something I pushed around with my bulldozer,” says Wick.

This all sounds complicated, and it is. But as negotiators at the Copenhagen climate meeting struggle with ways to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, storing carbon in soil and plants may start to look like an attractive option.”

As we know, negotiators in Copenhagen failed to produce anything substantive and follow-up meetings in meetings in Cancun, Mexico, and Durban, South Africa, likewise failed. John remained undaunted, however. That’s because he knew that the potential the planet’s grasslands to sequester CO₂ in its soils was huge. “We can solve climate change right here on the ranch,” he told me during my first visit. “There’s no doubt about it.”

John’s revelation began in November, 2007, when he went to hear permaculture guru Darren Dougherty speak about soil carbon – the stuff that makes life thrive underground. What he heard changed John’s life. Like many people, John worries about the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This buildup began with the invention of agriculture nine thousand years ago, expanded with the advent of fossil fuel combustion during the Industrial Revolution, and dramatically accelerated in recent decades.

The main culprit is carbon dioxide, a colorless and odorless gas which has existed on Earth in small, but varying, quantities for billions of years. In many ways, carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been given a bad rap. It is, after all, an essential gas for the maintenance of life on the planet. As every schoolchild knows, all green plants require CO₂ to live. In other words, CO₂ is a good gas. But like any substance, it’s only good in proper amounts. Scientists warn us that there is too much CO₂ in the atmosphere, creating a potentially toxic situation for life on Earth. Levels of CO₂ must come down, they insist, way down.

This is where Darren Dougherty’s talk comes in.

Dougherty reported that a mere 2% increase in the organic content of the planet’s soils, particularly in its grasslands, could soak up all the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere within a decade. The hairs on John’s neck stood up. Soils around the planet, Dougherty continued, have been mismanaged for centuries, resulting in the depletion of their original organic content – and thus their capacity to soak up CO₂. But now, in a big irony, all these depleted soils were available to start absorbing all that troublesome atmospheric CO₂ again – if we rebuilt their organic content through better land management. Our mission, Dougherty said, is to build topsoil – and save the planet.

John was stunned. Could it be true? Could it be that simple? It’s estimated that the original soil carbon content of the rich, dark prairies of the American Midwest, before the Great Plow-up began in the mid-1800s, was as high as 25%. Today, this total has fallen to around 4% in many places, thanks to plowing and erosion, all of which depleted the soils of its organic content. Doughtery’s idea to reverse this slide was highly intriguing, John thought. But soak up all the excess CO₂ in the atmosphere? That was crazy talk!

Or maybe it wasn’t.

The wheels in John’s head were turning, so as soon as he returned home he began to read about the carbon cycle. This is the process by which carbon dioxide flows out of the atmosphere and into the soil via photosynthesis and green plants, as organic carbon, then back out again into the air via decomposition and respiration, round and round in a perpetual circle – sustaining nearly all life on Earth. It wasn’t a complete circle, however. A bunch of the carbon stayed in the soil, having exited the plants roots in order to feed the microbial life there, where it stayed for decades if it wasn’t disturbed.

In other words, Dougherty was right, at least in principle – excess CO₂ not only could be pulled out of the air by a natural process, it could be stored safely in the soil for long periods of time. It’s called sequestration, which the dictionary defines as the process of “safekeeping, withdrawing, or seizing for the purposes of placing in custody.” What if we became carbon sheriffs, John thought, seizing excess CO₂ and placing it into custody of soils for a lengthy jail term – where it would feed plants and promote life.

Now John’s wheels really began to turn. Three ideas leapt to mind after Dougherty’s talk:

• Could farming and ranching actually play a significant, positive role in reducing excess CO₂?
• Could the practices that sequester CO₂ in the soil also improve land health – and profits?
• Could this be the basis of a new carbon economy?

 John decided to find out. And in early 2008, the Marin Carbon Project was born. 

Here is a photo of John speaking to a Chinese delegation about CO₂ in 2010:

Carbon High

Do high school students think about carbon very often?

This question crossed my mind during the Quivira Coalition’s Annual Conference in 2010, titled The Carbon Ranch, when I met Mariah Chen, then a junior at Midland, a boarding school located about an hour’s drive north of Santa Barbara, California. Mariah attended the event with Katie Isaacson, who manages Midland’s 10-acre farm (and cooks for the kids on Fridays). To graduate, seniors at Midland are required to complete a thesis project, and Mariah wanted to initiate a carbon ranch project on school property. She had picked up the idea from John Wick, director of the Marin Carbon Project, whose wife was a friend of Mariah’s mom (it’s a small world). Mariah and Katie came to our conference to hear John speak and to pick up ideas for the thesis project.

They introduced themselves, prompting me to say “How cool! I’ll have to visit Midland one of these days and see how things are going.”

Well, thanks to the persistence of Katie and her boss, Ben Munger, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Midland last month as part of my carbon pilgrimage to the Golden State. I was very glad I went.

I don’t know anything about boarding schools, but I could tell right away that Midland is unusual. Although it is a college preparatory school, it looks like a summer camp. Located on 2400 acres of lovely, rolling foothills near Los Olivos (pop star Michael Jackson was a neighbor), its campus is set in a large grove of trees and the buildings exude a rustic charm. At the same time, 20% of the school’s energy is supplied by a still-expanding solar energy project, managed by faculty and students. Sustainability is definitely part of Midland’s curriculum. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to learn that a school tradition requires all one hundred students to chop wood and heat their water for their daily showers. How many prep schools do that, I wondered?

I arrived in time for the evening assembly. At the sound of a deep bell, students and faculty gathered in a large circle in front of the dining hall to share news, thoughts, instructions, and plans for upcoming activities, including an exchange trip to Mexico and a sailing adventure for Spring Break. Then we went inside to eat a meal that included veggies from the school’s farm. The hall quickly filled with restless teenage energy, maybe more so than normal. That’s when I noticed that something was missing: no gadgets. Personal electronics are prohibited on campus. If students want to access the Internet or send an email, they have to visit the library. How many prep schools do that?

Ben Munger graciously hosted me for my stay. A former Forest Service archaeologist and Midland student, Ben had returned to the school with his wife to direct the land management aspects of the property, as well as teach. The land is grazed by cattle, and until 2003, it had been leased to a neighbor and his family for well over 75 years. However, Ben wanted to go in a new direction with the program – what he calls a “carbon ranch future” – and when the lessee refused to go along, they parted ways. Ben found a new lessee who was willing to manage for ecological goals, and as Ben put it “They haven’t looked back.”

Enter Mariah Chen. Her goal was to establish a 10-year experiment in some of the pastures to study the impact of short-duration cattle grazing on the carbon and nitrogen content of the soil via various study plots. Her hypothesis was this: rotational grazing may increase carbon sequestration while improving land health. She speculated that the ideal rotation was five days of grazing – which is the amount of time it takes for the next generation of microbes in the soil to be generated, she wrote in her thesis. Very cool! I won’t go into the details. I’ll just quote from the last paragraph:

“The potential to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration through rotational grazing and its effects are enormous….Midland School is playing an astronomical role in helping to bring this topic in the right direction: producing a study, committing 2000-plus acres to rotational grazing, and proving that all you need to do to contribute is to start.”

That’s exactly right. Whether the experiment ultimately bears out her hypothesis or not ten years from now is not as important as simply asking the question in the first place. And then trying to answer it. Few schools are even thinking about these issues, it seems to me, but one of them is Midland.

I knew I wouldn’t see Mariah Chen on my visit. She graduated in 2011 and is now studying environmental policy at Columbia in New York. But I did have the pleasure of interviewing the heirs to Mariah’s carbon project: Miles Dakin, a junior with a strong interest in chemistry, and Wallace Cooley, a freshman from a ranching family in northern California. Each is eager to keep the project going for their own reasons. I thought this was illustrative: the interests of all three students involved in the project – policy, chemistry, and ranching – shows how diverse carbon can be. And how exciting.

Chopped wood, solar energy, farm veggies, books, cattle, soil – it’s all carbon at one level or another. It was great to see it all in action.

I’m eager to learn how things go for Midland’s carbon project. And for Mariah, Miles, and Wallace. Young people today are the inheritors of a world in which carbon will be increasingly on their minds – for better and for worse. While we have a pretty clear picture of the carbon challenges ahead, especially atmospherically, the opportunities are just emerging. What will be key to both is leadership – and thanks to places like Midland, young leaders are on the way.

Ben Munger talks grass to a Midland class.

 

 

The Soil Solution

While visiting Santa Barbara last week, I had the honor of being interviewed by Jill Cloutier and Carol Hirashima of Sustainable World Media for their documentary The Soil Solution. The film focuses on farmers, scientists, and educators who are exploring the link between soil fertility, water quality, food security, and carbon sequestration. Check out a clip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5h7rqIsOleU

The entire film will be screened at the Sausalito Film Festival (CA) in May.

It’s part of a wave of books, articles, and media on soil and carbon coming out in a steady stream these days, which is good news. Part of the reason, of course, is that very little is happening on the national and international front to confront greenhouse gas emissions, and there won’t be much more happening any time soon, apparently. That leaves us – as I explained in my interview – few options other than working to sequester carbon dioxide someplace. And that ‘place’ is in the soil. Fortunately, soils are a wonderful location for carbon storage, if handled properly, as many people are just beginning to understand. It’s not an easy process, however, given the many barriers to good land stewardship, but the first step is simply understanding the idea of carbon sequestration in soils.

That’s why documentaries such as The Soil Solution are so important.

I don’t quite feel like an expert on carbon yet (that’s what the pilgrimage is for), but Jill and Carol were eager to add an interview to their film. We met at Fairview Gardens, which is a 12-acre organic farm in the middle of a subdivision in Goleta. I had no clue the farm existed, so when we completed the interview, I was graciously given a tour of the grounds by Mark Tollefson, the Executive Director of the Center for Urban Agriculture, which manages the farm. This was an unexpected bonus for me. Part of my pilgrimage is to explore the link between soil health and human health, which is too often overlooked. The link, of course, is food – in the form of plants and animals. I’ll return to this topic in later postings.

It was an interesting experience to wander around the tidy farm, sampling succulent strawberries straight from the vine, listening to Mark’s plans for expansion, education, and resilience, especially within sight of the houses in the adjacent subdivision. He is especially fired up about teaching ‘urban homesteading’ workshops – beekeeping, cheese-making, and other off-the-grid food-making activities. He likens what is happening on Fairview to an ‘ark’ of sorts, meaning that it is a keeper of a sustainability ‘skill set’ – just in case it’s needed later on a bigger scale (I bet it will be needed). There’s a great side-by-side comparison of aerial photos of Goleta in 1954 and 1998 that strongly reinforces Mark’s ark argument. Take a look. (www.fairviewgardens.com)

Here’s a photo I took of Mark and the farm.

El Camino Carbon

I’ve been traveling in California for the past week, on a research pilgrimage for the carbon book. To say this has been an incongruous task would be big understatement. No state in the nation burns up more carbon, in the form of fossil fuel, and I admit to contributing my share, both on this trip and during a previous life as a graduate student at UCLA. The incongruity doesn’t wait to hit you in the face either – as soon as I exited the airport in my rental car, slipping onto the Camino Real – or Royal Road – I became mired in a traffic jam.

Welcome to the Golden State.

Still, California is a leader on the carbon front, more so than any other state I can think of, except for Vermont. On the renewable energy front, of course, California – thanks to its high tech industries – has been a leader for quite a while. I’m not here, however, to explore ‘green’ energy or any important technological breakthroughs. The only green energy I seek is the million-year old, low-tech variety: photosynthesis. I wanted to see black too – as in black soil.

What I saw initially, however, was a lot of brown – as in dry country. I had been warned that California was suffering from a terrible drought and from the appearance of its lovely hills and valleys, despite a recent storm, it looked it. California gets most of its precipitation in the winter, which means it grows its grass in the spring, before going dormant, largely, for the summer. This winter’s storms had been sparse, causing a fair amount of hand-wringing throughout the state. If the drought persisted, trouble loomed. The culprit was La Nina, I was told. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation baked under record-breaking heat. The real culprit, of course, is climate change, but no one wants to acknowledge that.

Weary of the long drive, and the endless stream of SUVs on the highway, I detoured to La Purisima Mission, near Lompoc, now a state park. Built in the early 1800s, when Spain still ruled these lands, the original mission was destroyed in 1812 by a strong earthquake, which the priests told the resident Chumash Indians was a sign of God’s displeasure. So they rebuilt the mission (and designed it to withstand the next earthquake!) and carried on until the Mexican Revolution turned everything upside down in 1823.

I parked the car in the relatively empty lot, grabbed my camera, and wandered the lovely grounds for an hour or so. The park is divinely serene – a much needed respite from the helter-skelter world that surrounds it. The only evidence I could detect of the outside world was a steady stream of joggers and hikers on a nearby trail, who seemed just as oblivious to the mission’s presence as any SUV. That was alright, it meant more serenity for me.

It was a relief in other ways to wander through the mission ground. I didn’t need to think about the Big Picture for a while, for example. Back in 1820, of course, the cares of the 21^st century were a million years away. Carbon was something you used to cook your food, or warm yourself by. Nothing more – and nothing more was necessary. The mission was self-sufficient, self-contained, and humble before God. We could some of that humility today….

Are these mission donkeys upset about climate change, or do they just want another carrot?

The Bus Driver

I was sorry to miss Peter Donovan’s bus.

Peter is an educator who has been driving around Americafor the past nine months in an old yellow school bus enrolling farms and ranches in his Soil Carbon Challenge which will give a $10,000 prize to the landowner who can transform the most atmospheric CO₂ into soil carbon over a period of time.

That might sounds somewhat academic, but it’s not. As I’ve begun to explain in this blog, building topsoil, and thus sequestering more CO₂, is terribly important for all sorts of good reasons. The challenge is trying to explain and communicate its importance to audiences, especially landowners. Which is where the $10,000 award comes in – and the yellow bus.

Since leaving his home in eastern Oregonlast July, Peter has driven his bus as far afield as North Dakota, Vermont, North Carolina, and Texas. You can see his route on his web site: www.soilcarboncoalition.org. He has enrolled sixty ranches so far in the Challenge. Mostly, that means taking a soil sample on the ranch in order to create a baseline measurement of its carbon content. When he returns in five years or so to take another measurement, he’ll have a self-referential number which he can then compare to other ranches. The ranch that has done the best job of elevating the carbon content of their soil wins the $10,000 (which he hasn’t raised yet).

Peter also runs one or two-day workshops, focused on the carbon cycle. He believes soil carbon is being managed haphazardly and accidently, to the detriment of life all over the planet. Every decision we make involving the soil surface, he likes to say, impacts the carbon cycle. Most people don’t think ‘below the surface’ of the soil (much less out-of-the-box), preferring to manage only what’s above ground. If they manage what’s ‘up top’ poorly – as is too often the case – then the below-ground management will be poor as well. Peter is trying to change that.

Needlesstosay, Peter’s tour in his yellow bus has been a voyage of discovery – his own pilgrimage – and he’s heartened by the success of the Challenge to date. People have been receptive to his ‘evangelical’ message about carbon, biology, life, and the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Here is Peter’s philosophy in his own words, from an essay on his web site titled Unscrambling the Egg:

“It is often said that you can’t unscramble an egg. An egg has a wholeness or integrity, a poised arrangement of membranes and layers. You cannot reverse the breaking, mixing, and cooking, even with the most advanced technology and equipment.       

“But a hen can. Feed her a scrambled egg or two, and she can lay a new, whole egg. It may not be instant, but expensive technology is not required. If the egg is fertile, it can become a new hen, who can unscramble more eggs, and so on.   It’s important to remember the relationship here, and who has the power. The hen wants to eat it, and produce a new egg, for reasons that are hers, not ours. Like all the biosphere’s organisms, she is self-motivated. Trying to force her may cause problems for both her and us. If we want the egg unscrambled, we invite her.

“We’ve got a scrambled egg situation on a global scale: biodiversity loss, extensive land degradation, water shortages, acidifying oceans, and too much heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere. But we’ve framed it in such a way that the hen isn’t even in the picture.

“But she may be quietly edging into the picture…

“The biosphere is the sum of all the living and the dead. It doesn’t just sit there looking pretty, wild, or vulnerable. It does work, a lot of it… The pattern and process of this work is the carbon cycle. Carbon is life and food, and cycles from atmosphere to plants and back. The dead can become soil. On land alone, the biosphere moves 10 times the carbon, and does 10 times the work, of all fossil fuel burning. The hub of the terrestrial carbon cycle, containing more carbon than atmosphere and forests combined, is soil organic matter….”

I’ll stop there. You get his drift. I like his point that life is a force that can be used to create more life, and thus solve problems. Let a hen be a hen, in other words.

I didn’t get to see Peter’s bus because he took the train to Santa Fe, bringing his piano tuning equipment along. Our piano needed a serious tuning. Peter is a man of passions, and one is music. After he finished the tuning, he played Bach and Chopin and Beethoven. The house filled with sweet sounds, and for a moment I could forget the talk of life and death, of cycles, rewards, and possibilities.

Since monitoring is largely about numbers (data), I asked Peter if he believes that facts can change people’s minds – because in my experience, it often seems to drive people farther into their superstitions.

“I don’t believe that facts alone will alter people’s beliefs or behaviors,” he responded, “or at least not in predictable directions. The reason that I am doing soil carbon baselines is not that data will change people’s minds. It’s that data on soil carbon change may provide support, be a platform, for shifting people’s ideas of what is possible, in specific situations and locations. This is about beliefs and imagination, not mere facts. It’s not a blueprint for what people should do.”

I agree. I wonder if a better approach might be via music, and hens, and a yellow school bus. We need to pause in our busy lives and reflect on small things that are nourishing and make us happy. I do, anyway.

The Dance

Here’s something I wrote last week to explain the role of the carbon cycle in our lives in more detail. I promise to tell a story next time!

The carbon in the atmosphere, the oceans, the trees, the soils, us and everything else is constantly in motion, flowing in a giant circle from air to land and back to air again in an unending, closed loop. The Law of the Conservation of Matter says that in a closed system matter can neither be created or destroyed. It can only cycle and recycle. The Earth has been a closed system almost from its origin, with only solar energy, an occasional electromagnetic pulse from the sun, and stray bits of asteroids entering the atmosphere from space (to burn up). What’s here today has always been here, including carbon, whose total amount is essentially the same as it was when Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago.

The ancient Greek philosophers understood all this intuitively, proclaiming that ‘nothing comes from nothing.’ Epicurus wrote “the totality of things was always as it is now, and always will be.” Nothing can be created or destroyed. This observation was explained scientifically by none other than Monsieur Lavoisier, who discovered that although matter may change its form or shape – a diamond into gas – its mass always remains the same.

So it is with carbon. And what carbon does is cycle – a process essential to life on Earth. It’s a carefully regulated process too, so that the planet can maintain critical balances. Call it the Goldilocks Principle: not too much carbon, not too little, but just the right amount. For instance, without CO₂ and other greenhouse gases, Earth would be a frozen ball of rock. With too many greenhouse gases, however, Earth would be like Venus. Just right means balancing between the two extremes, which helps to keep the planet’s temperature relatively stable.

It’s like the thermostat in your house. If it gets too warm, the cycle works to cool things off, and vice versa. Of course, the planet’s thermostat gets overwhelmed at times, resulting periods of rapid warming or cooling (think Ice Ages). No matter what happens, the miraculous carbon cycles keeps working, scrubbing excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere, or adding more if necessary. The carbon cycle never sleeps.

Who does all this regulatory work? Two quick answers: green growing plants and evolution. Photosynthesis is the process by which carbon is transferred from sky to soil. It’s what makes the Goldilocks principle tick. Evolution is the process by which life changes over succeeding generations – what lives, what dies, which population expands, which one contracts. It keeps the Goldilocks principle ticking over time – long periods of time. The two work in concert. The quantity of carbon in the environment influences the course of evolution and vice versa.

The effects of an excessive build up of CO₂ in the atmosphere, for example, will impact the fate of generations of living things. Carbon and evolution interact and adjust to each other, regulating and responding in a sophisticated dance. Carbon chooses the music, if you will, while evolution dictates the steps in a planet-wide choreography. It is a dance with a profound effect on audience members.

During the Carboniferous Period of Earth’s history, for instance, which lasted from 350 to 300 million years ago, the music was turned up very loud. A potent combination of swampy terrain, warm temperatures, high humidity, and unprecedented levels of oxygen caused an explosion of life across the planet. Insects grew to huge sizes. Modern-looking fish evolved. Birds, reptiles and mammals began to lay eggs on solid ground for the first time – in a fateful evolutionary leap. It was the vegetation, however, that really went wild. As the Period’s name implies, massive amounts of carbon-bearing trees grew during this time, many of which toppled into swamps when they died becoming entombed in muck. Layer after layer of trees and muck piled up, creating, 300 million years later, the rich coal seams that we exploit today for our energy (for better or worse).

Carbon is not the only dance on the planet, of course. Our world is full of cycles – water, energy, nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, and many more – each interacting with each other in complicated ways. Some cycles are short, like a song, while some are long, like a symphony, or a mass. Carbon has both. Its short, or fast, cycle revolves around green plants and photosynthesis – the process by which carbon is separated from oxygen, stored in roots and soils, or released back into the atmosphere via death and decomposition. Its long, or slow, cycle is geologic – what happens when carbon is released after being trapped or frozen in layers of rock for millions of years. In the case of the slow cycle, the symphony is really long – carbon can take between one to two hundred million years to rotate fully through rocks, soil, ocean, and atmosphere.

In the slow cycle, carbon in the atmosphere combines with water vapor to form carbonic acid (in a weak solution) that falls to the ground with rain events and begins to dissolve rocks – a process called chemical weathering. This process releases minerals, including potassium, sodium, calcium, and magnesium, all of which are carried by streams and rivers to the ocean. There, it provides the calcium carbonate necessary for shell-making creatures, such as corals and plankton to grow – a key to life underwater. When these organisms die, they fall to the sea floor where they become, over time, carbonate rocks, such as limestone. Then, after more time (a lot more), carbon is returned to the atmosphere via volcanic activity. Ejecta flies upward into the air in the form of ash, lava or other material. Volcanism also releases trapped carbon dioxide – and the cycle starts all over. Round and round, very slowly. If too many volcanoes go off at once, the process of chemical weathering will rebalance things again – but only after hundreds of thousands of years.

The fast carbon cycle involves sunlight, green plants, water, nutrient minerals, and soil microbes and has four basic dance steps:

• Photosynthesis
• Resynthesis
• Exudation
• Humification

Photosynthesis: This is the process by which energy in sunlight is transformed into biochemical energy, in the form of a simple sugar called glucose, via green plants – which use CO₂ from the air and water from the soil, releasing oxygen as a by-product.

Resynthesis: Through a complex sequence of chemical reactions, glucose is resynthesized into a wide variety of carbon compounds, including carbohydrates (such as cellulose and starch), proteins, organic acids, waxes, and oils (including hydrocarbons) – all of which serve as “fuel” for life on Earth.

Exudation: Carbon created by photosynthesis can be exuded directly into soil to nurture the microbes that grow plants and build healthy soil. This process is essential to the creation of topsoil from the lifeless mineral soil produced by the weathering of rocks over time. The amount of increase in organic carbon is governed by the volume of plant roots per unit of soil and their rate of growth. More active green leaves mean more roots, which mean more carbon exuded.

Humification: or the creation of humus – a chemically stable type of organic matter composed of large, complex molecules made up of carbon, nitrogen, minerals, and soil particles. Visually, humus is the dark, rich layer of topsoil that people generally associate with stable wetlands, healthy rangelands, and productive farmland. Once carbon is sequestered as humus it has a high resistance to decomposition, and therefore can remain intact and stable for hundreds or thousands of years.

A lack of humus can mean that the carbon exuded from plant roots simply oxidizes and recycles back to the atmosphere as CO₂. Additionally, humus-rich soils can be disturbed by human activity, such as plowing, which exposes the stored carbon to air, facilitating its release. In each case, oxygen combines with sugar to release water, carbon dioxide, and energy.

The key to creating humus are a class of microbes called mycorrhizal fungi, which get their energy in liquid form, as soluble carbon, directly from actively growing plant roots. In turn, these fungi facilitate the transport of essential nutrients, such as phosphorus, zinc and nitrogen, into plant roots in exchange for carbon. In this way, these mycorrhizal fungi help turn atmospheric carbon into humus, often quite deep in the soil profile. When mycorrhizal fungi are functioning properly, say scientists, 40-50% of the carbon fixed in the leaves of plants can be channeled directly into soil as soluble carbon – which is why people get excited about the prospect of storing excess CO₂ in the soil. Not only is it possible, on a practical level, all it requires are the processes that create life, including cycles – and life is something that Earth does very, very well.

By the way, this complex interplay of carbon, microbes, nutrients, and water in the soil is nearly identical to what happens in the digestive gut of humans, livestock, and other animals. It is not a coincidence either. The ‘purpose’ of what goes on in the soil is the same as what goes on in our gut: to create the optimal conditions for life. The chemical, physical, and biological components of the human ecosystem also require regulation and balancing, often through slow-and-fast cycles of our own. We are star dust, after all, just like every other living organism on the planet. And just like a watershed or a population of animals or the microbial universe in the soil, the way this balance is expressed is by health.