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.

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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.