I’m a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who became a dues-paying member of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association as a producer of local, grass-fed beef.
For a boy raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, during the heyday of sprawl, fast food, and disco music, this was a bewildering sequence of events. I grew up surrounded by cars, malls, concrete, transplanted cacti, and copious amounts of air-conditioning. The closest I came to livestock were the horses my parents owned for trail-riding purposes. Cattle? Local food? Sustainability? I had no clue. Even when I became active with the Sierra Club in the mid-1990s after a move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, my conservation work was highly conventional. I lobbied for new wilderness areas, protested clear-cut logging in national forests, and helped publish a citizen’s guide to fighting the environmental damage caused by hard-rock mining. I led activist outings, organized letter-writing campaigns, testified in public hearings, and fought a cynical assault on environmental regulation at the time called “takings” legislation. When I had time to think about livestock grazing at all, it wasn’t in a positive light.
This all changed in 1997 when I cofounded the nonprofit Quivira Coalition with a rancher and a fellow conservationist. I did it because the constant brawling between environmental activists and loggers, ranchers, and other rural residents had dispirited me. No one was winning; everyone and everything was losing, especially the land. Even worse was the negative energy employed by all parties involved—attacking each other in the media, pointing fingers in meetings, filing lawsuits in court, even threatening physical violence. There had to be another way. When I met a rancher who not only did things differently on his land but sought a different relationship with environmentalists, I decided it was time to give peacemaking a chance.
With Quivira, we waded into the middle of the grazing wars in a deliberate attempt to create a “third position” outside the continuum of combat. We called it the New Ranch—a meeting place “beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing,” to quote the poet Rumi, where people interested in innovative ideas and fruitful dialogue would have a place to meet, talk, listen, and learn.
It wasn’t just talk, however. The New Ranch meant managing land differently, including moving livestock around in ways that mimicked the natural behavior of migratory herds of wild grazers. New Ranchers operated on the principle that the natural processes that sustain wildlife habitat, biological diversity, and functioning watersheds are the same processes that make land productive for livestock. It wasn’t just a theory—it worked in practice, as I saw over and over on ranch after ranch. The key was land health: the degree to which the integrity of the soil and ecological processes of rangeland ecosystems are sustained over time. I learned that before land can sustainably support an added value—such as livestock grazing, hunting, recreation, or wildlife protection—it must be functioning properly at a basic ecological level. This included healthy water, mineral, and energy cycles, flowing round and round from the soil to plants and animals and back again.
With Quivira, my conservation work became highly collaborative, with a focus on improving land health, promoting progressive cattle management, implementing creek restoration projects, and repairing damaged relationships. My Sierra Club experience had taught me a hard lesson: that the missing piece of the conservation puzzle was the positive role that people could play. Environmental problems, I came to understand, were as much about social and economic relationships as they were about the environment, thus requiring economic solutions to go along with ecological ones. I learned this by listening to the many heated confrontations between activists and ranchers and loggers over the years. Conservation, I saw, meant prudence, care, good stewardship, and trust as much as it meant passing laws, enforcing regulations, and establishing new parks. That’s why I chose a quote from farmer and author Wendell Berry as Quivira’s motto: “We cannot save the land apart from the people; to save either, you must save both.” Saving both became the mission of the Quivira Coalition.
Over time, our collaborative work grew to include an annual conference, a ranch apprenticeship program, a capacity-building collaboration with the Ojo Encino chapter of the Navajo Nation, numerous publications, a ton of workshops, and lots of creek restoration projects—including a long-running project in northern New Mexico on behalf of the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. By our calculation, at least 1 million acres of rangeland, 40 linear miles of creeks, and countless people have directly benefited from Quivira’s collaborative efforts across the Southwest.
The membership in the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association happened in 2006 when 49 heifers were delivered to Quivira’s 36,000-acre Valle Grande ranch, located on a national forest near Santa Fe. They were the first installment of what would become a 124-head herd of heifers, plus three Corriente bulls, all under our “Valle Grande” brand and our management. Shortly thereafter, an invitation to join the Cattle Growers’ Association arrived in our office. We filled out the form, wrote a check, and mailed it back. And just like that, this former Sierra Club activist became a dues-paying cattle rancher!
Our plan was to sell grass-fed beef in Santa Fe, joining the rapidly growing local food movement, and use the revenue to pay for conservation activities on the ranch. For a while it worked. Thanks in part to best-selling books by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, grass-fed beef was an easy sell to customers. In 2008 I had the honor of traveling to Turin, Italy, as a delegate to Slow Food’s biennial Terra Madre gathering as a producer of local, grass-fed beef. It was an experience that changed my outlook on conservation. Food made people smile, I saw, binding us together. It was positive energy at work again, reminding me that the only lasting change is the one that comes from the heart.
Unfortunately, our happy little world began to unravel in the fall of 2008. The financial meltdown on Wall Street, a product of huge amounts of negative energy (greed), triggered a cash-flow crisis for Quivira and other nonprofits as the stock portfolios of foundations and donors shrank dramatically. Grass-fed beef suddenly looked expensive to customers as well. All of this put our Valle Grande ranch in financial jeopardy, calling to mind the old joke: “How do you make a small fortune in ranching? Start with a big one.” We didn’t start with any fortune, big or small. Soon we were forced to sell our cattle herd to pay the bills. Eventually we had to sell the ranch too. This was a big disappointment personally, but I vowed to put our experience to good use somehow.
Here’s a photo of the JX Ranch, near Tucumcari, NM – a successful carbon ranch:
Meanwhile, I had begun to fret about the Big Picture.
It started in the spring of 2006, during a fund-raising trip to New York City. Rummaging in an airport bookstore for something to read on the outward leg of my journey, I came across James Kunstler’s best-selling cautionary tale The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Curious, I plucked the book from the rack and flipped it over to survey the promotional blurbs, reading how the author “graphically depicts the horrific punishments that lie ahead for Americans for more than a century of sinful consumption and sprawling communities, fueled by the profligate use of cheap oil and gas.” Yikes! Then I thought, “Oh come on, how bad could things be?” I handed the clerk fifteen dollars to find out.
Bad enough to refocus Quivira’s mission, as it happened.
At our annual conference in 2007, Wendell Berry said that “we are not walking a prepared path,” in response to a question from the audience about the difficulties posed by the twenty-first century. In other words, to meet new challenges we need to blaze a new trail. That suggested unexplored country ahead, which is after all what the word quivira originally designated on old Spanish maps of the New World. After some thought, I decided this new trail was building ecological and economic resilience, which the dictionary defines as “the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” In ecology, it refers to the capacity of plant and animal populations to handle disruption and degradation caused by fire, flood, drought, insect infestation, or other disturbance. The word also has a social dimension. Ranching, for instance, is the epitome of resilience, having endured centuries of cyclical drought, low cattle prices, and other challenges.
Resilience is also an important concept for those of us who live in cities, as I had learned the previous winter when a major snowstorm shut down both highways into Albuquerque, New Mexico, isolating the city. In a story for the local newspaper, a reporter asked how long it would take for the shelves of Albuquerque’s grocery stores to be emptied of food. His answer: six days. That’s not very resilient. What about other challenges, I wondered, such as our supply of fresh water? Was it resilient for the long run? Were we?
Realizing that the times were changing, in the fall of 2007 we added the words “build resilience” to Quivira’s mission statement. In doing so, I realized that I was now a long way from the grazing wars of the 1990s—not to mention the suburbs of Phoenix.
There was a lot to learn in this new country. Take climate change. It wasn’t on our radar screen at all in 1997, but a decade later it had become a major concern. As I learned, the rising content of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide (CO2) especially, poses a dramatic threat to life on Earth. Here’s a graph from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California–San Diego, which pretty much sums it all up.1 It’s a scientific projection of CO2 (in parts per million).
In 2013, the CO2 level rose above 400 ppm for the first time in five million years, according to researchers, and it is on a trajectory to reach 600 to 700 ppm by the end of the twenty-first century, with all sorts of bad consequences, unless we act quickly. Double yikes!
Something needed to be done, but what? In 2009, I found a partial answer in an op-ed written by James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the nation’s top climate scientist. Reducing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere back to 350 ppm, he said, is imperative to preserve a habitable planet. “If we cut off the largest source of carbon dioxide—coal—we have a chance to bring CO2 back to 350ppm,” he wrote, “and still lower through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.”2 Cool! I thought to myself. But what did he mean by “carbon storage”?
An explanation arrived a month later when a publication came across my desk from the Worldwatch Institute titled Mitigating Climate Change through Food and Land Use. Its authors, Sarah Scherr and Sajal Sthapit, wrote that for political, technological, and economic reasons, the only possibility for large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere currently is through improved ecosystem function, climate-friendly livestock practices, conserving land, and restoring degraded watersheds.3 I did a mental double take. That sounded like the work of the Quivira Coalition!
The miracle cure is called photosynthesis. As Scherr and Sthapit pointed out, plants naturally pull CO2 out of the air and convert it into soil carbon, where it is safely stored for long periods of time in the ground unless disturbed—by plowing, for instance. This process has been going on for billions of years, and all it requires is sunlight, green plants, water, nutrients, and soil microbes. It creates a simple equation: more plants and deeper roots = less CO2 in the atmosphere.
It’s more complicated than that, of course. But here’s the really exciting part: if land that is bare, degraded, tilled, or monocropped can be restored to a healthy condition, with properly functioning carbon, water, mineral, and nutrient cycles, and covered year-round with a diversity of green plants with deep roots, then the added amount of atmospheric CO2 that can be stored in the soil is potentially high.
Globally, Scherr and Sthapit wrote, soils contain about three times the amount of carbon that’s stored in vegetation and twice the amount stored in the atmosphere. Since two-thirds of the earth’s land mass is grassland, additional CO2 storage in the soil via better management practices, even on a small scale, could have a huge impact. Grasslands are also home to two billion people who depend on livestock—an important source of food and wealth (and culture) to much of the earth’s human population. Both these animals and their human stewards could be mobilized for carbon action.
This made huge sense to me, so I called Scherr and invited her to speak at Quivira’s annual conference in the fall of 2010, which I had titled “The Carbon Ranch.” The purpose of the event was to describe the many ways by which food and stewardship can be used to build soil, store carbon, and fight climate change. I told her I was determined to explore this exciting country and spread the good news. When she agreed to make a presentation, I began calling up other carbon pioneers, eventually assembling an exciting lineup of speakers. But then a thought struck me: Where was I going? Climate? Carbon? Where had we wandered off to?
I decided we needed a map.
I sat down one morning at my dining room table and began sketching on a sheet of paper. I drew every joyous, sustainable, resilient, regenerative, land-healing, relationship-building, climate-mitigating, local food–producing activity I could pull from my experience, putting them into a single mythical landscape. I sketched (badly) cattle-herding ranchers, weed-eating goats, bat-friendly water tanks, creek-restoring volunteers, land health–monitoring crews, fish-friendly wetlands, grass-fed beef businesses, no-till farms, and on-site renewable energy projects. Then I added cities, schools, farms, beavers, wolves, bird-watchers, kitchen gardens, wildlife corridors, compost piles, and more. I intentionally left out boundaries, including property lines, political divisions, and geographical separations. There was no distinction on my map between public and private land, or between wild country and nonwild. It was all one map—all one vision in which wolves, cattle, bats, organic farmers, biologists, artists, foxes, fish, cities, and ranchers all worked together and got along.
When I was done, I sat back and studied my map. I knew this place. It was the land I had been exploring for years—except it wasn’t. I hadn’t considered it from a carbon perspective before. It felt like a new country, ripe for further exploration. But where would I go? What would I discover? Were there actual on-the-ground solutions to the rising challenges of the twenty-first century? If so, was there an answer to an increasingly anguished question being asked by Americans of all stripes: what can I do to help?
I knew a few things going in:
- Carbon is key. It’s the soil beneath our feet, the plants that grow, the land we walk, the wildlife we watch, the livestock we raise, the food we eat, the energy we use, and the air we breathe. Carbon is the essential element of life. Without it we die; with too much we suffer; with just the right amounts we thrive. A highly efficient carbon cycle captures, stores, releases, and recaptures biochemical energy, making everything go and grow from the soil up. In the last century or so, however, the carbon cycle has broken down at critical points, most importantly in our soils, which have had their fertility eroded, depleted, and baked out of them by poor stewardship. Worse, carbon has become a source of woe to the planet and its inhabitants as excess amounts of it accumulate in the atmosphere and oceans. It’s all carbon. Climate change is carbon, hunger is carbon, money is carbon, politics is carbon, land is carbon, we are carbon.
- We don’t have to invent anything. Over the past thirty years, all manner of new ideas and methods that put carbon back into the soil and reduce carbon footprints have been field-tested and proven to be practical and profitable. We already know how to graze livestock sustainably, grow organic food, create a local food system, fix creeks, produce local renewable energy, improve water cycles, grow grass on bare soil, coexist with wildlife, and generally build resilience into the land and in our lives.
- It’s mostly low-tech. It’s sunlight, green plants, animals, rocks, mud, shovels, hiking shoes, windmills, trees, compost, and creeks. Some of the work requires specialized knowledge—such as herding livestock or designing an erosion-control structure in a creek—and some of it has high-tech components—such as solar panels or wind turbines—but most of Carbon Country can be easily navigated by anyone.
- Lastly, you’re on the map too. Everyone is, whether you live in a city, go to school, graze cattle, enjoy wildlife, grow vegetables, hike, fish, count grasses, draw, make music, restore creeks, or eat food—you’re on the map. You live in Carbon Country. We all do. It’s not a mythical land; it exists.
This is what I knew—and all that I knew. Surveying the map, I realized that there were specific questions that needed answers: (1) Was it actually possible to significantly increase the amount of CO2 in soils via land management practices and thus impact climate change, as the experts suggested? (2) What were the range of activities that sequestered carbon in soils? (3) Was it practical to scale up sequestration practices and their cobenefits in ways that would address rising challenges in the twenty-first century? (4) What paradigms would need to be shifted to make this work possible? (5) What were the best incentives to make all of this work economically? (6) Who was going to do all this new work?
It wasn’t clear, so with my rough map in hand, I set out to explore this new land. Here’s what I discovered.
This is the Prologue from Grass, Soil, Hope: a Journey through Carbon Country. See: http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/grass_soil_hope
Jan Weber said:
I am so grateful to Michel Pollan and Chelsea Green for helping me “stumble” on your blog. I’ve been “covering” farm & food for many years, documenting the best and the worst in an attempt to be a good citizen journalist and documentary maker while trying to parse various notions of how things should go in the mighty world of agriculture. In the process, I have visited farms of every stripe and met some of the betsy people I know in states across the country. Also in the process, I have become disillusioned, or at least terribly discouraged, with the wrangling between farmers & their advocates (both urban and rural) about just how our food system (such as it is) should operate, and what role farmers play in it. It has turned into an almost biblical battle of good vs. evil, with no one speaking to the other and forbidding any compromise or even discussion. I have always been for a big tent, but some of the more intractable disagreements, for example GE/GMO, seem to have no solution in sight in this Manichaean environment. Your blog, and the prologue to your book are both refreshing and inspiring. I look forward to reading more.
Mark C. Radosevich said:
Ditto to Jan Weber’s comments. Your personal Odyssey of discovery was a wonderful read, something which can educate the uninformed and persuade others to follow your lead. You mentioned mono-cropping only once, nothing about genetically-modified seeds produced by Giant Corps here in the USA – groups which are being banned across Europe.
I wish to inform you and others that some near-term carbonbridging pollution solutions are at hand which will quickly reduce the amount of uncombusted carbon emissions from vehicles and coal-fired power plants into this blue planet’s atmosphere. Solutions which would go hand in hand with your understanding of how the earth via green plants, trees and grasses successfully stores and sequesters carbon in the soils. A major key here is no-till farming practices coupled with not plowing up virgin prairie to grow more corn for batch-fermented ethanol.
About 20 years ago I attended a lecture provided by a Ohio Farmer who was first in the ‘no-till’ practice in his home region. At first, he was scorned by his farming neighbors. Yet within just two years, earthworms had returned to his soils in great abundance, same worms digested the stover from last year’s crop left on the land’s surface over winter. After heavy rains, the earthworms covered the asphalt roadways adjacent to his farmlands, same worms were run over by cars and stayed upon the asphalt for days.
In farm areas where county roads are developed on a one-mile grid, it became easy to distinguish this particular Farmer’s crop lands apart from his neighbors. The roads paralleling his property were the only ones covered with earthworms after heavy downpours. And this “visual evidence” of nature’s ecosystem in better harmony is what convinced other Farmers in his area to join him in no-till farming practices.
Live & Learn.
Good luck and thank you for your personal activism and shared concerns.
Daniel Kolos said:
I inadvertently moved to a BioDynamic food producing area of Southern Ontario back in 1988 and discovered the wholistic (sic) practices of these small, completely self-sustaining agricultural units. I thought I lucked out and exuberantly supported these farmers, the eventual CSAs, started my own BioDynamic food production and even bought shares in a local fledgling cooperative (OntarBio), which, unfortunately, went corporate and changed from BioDynamic to Certified Organic. So I began to explore the difference and saw the ‘problem’ that Jan Weber referred to, above: the wrangling about how our food system should operate.
“Wholistic” or “holistic”, when used with BioDynamic food production, refers not just to agriculture, but to a lifestyle where mind, body and spirit are integrated. I started calling BioDynamic food production “organic, with prayer and homeopathy.” Then, like in your own blog you identified “uncombusted carbon production” the major problem in profit-driven Agri-business, I discovered food nutrition lacking in both conventional and organic food production! Both methodologies deplete the soil!
As Dr. Joseph Mercola pointed out in an article today (July 1, 2014) that is partly based on your blog, “Soil… is a living symbiotic system …(whose) microbial balance … is critical for growing bountiful, nutritious crops. (It is microbes that) take the mineral material that’s in your soul and convert it into a plant-available form.”
Microbes die from the glyphosate (a patented antibiotic) content of Roundup and other herbicides. Earthworms die from intensive tilling. Treating food production as a profit-driven business deprives all of us essential nutrition and, if it has not already, will cause serious health damage (imbalance) to all who eat Agri-Business foods.
Perhaps BioDynamic food production is not the only one that returns and nurtures soil and crop nutrition, but it adds another factor that makes if “wholistic” – a level of traditional spirituality. The best way I can describe this additional contribution to crop and soil nutrition, is to refer to the successful Findhorn eco-village, where plants thrived in the most unfriendly conditions because the people ‘prayed’ over them, talked to the plants, and invoked the Elemental ‘beings’ whom traditional agricultural communities have called upon from Ireland to India throughout our times.
How to convince a ‘farmer’ to change his/her methodology from chemical monoculture to BioDynamic wholistic food production? No one can, and no one needs to. Although BioDynamic food producers are doing well in every sense of economic and ecological matters, their operations are a drop in the bucket. Only approx. 34,000 hectares are being worked within this system throughout the world, as opposed to 195 million under Monsanto’s Roundup-ready crops alone!
There is a food and nutrition crisis brewing and perhaps it is again time to pull the Foundations and other funding organizations together, the kind you accomplished and lost in the 1980s, to fill this nutrition gap and train a new army of individuals in the wholistic BioDynamic food production method. Money flows where there is a need, because there is always the hope of profit-making on the long-run. If non-profit foundations could get this process started, the venture capitalists can take over either when they become ill from lack of nutrition or when the demand for wholistic food becomes overwhelming. Already, organic food retailers are coming up short in many areas of demand through the US and Canada.
How do we build a structure that will nurture the growth of such wholistic, nutritious food?
Taborri Bruhl said:
I enjoyed your book! I wrote about it at http://sustainableus.org/2014/07/02/soil-carbon-and-its-disincentives/ , in case you’re interested. You didn’t mention Mark Shepard’s work in the book, but your ideas and his, combined, could change the planet.