Frank Aragona of Agroinnovations.com interviewed me for a podcast earlier this month about policy and soil carbon. Thanks Frank for helping get the word out!

Last year Allan Savory wrote the paper attached below, A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change, which clarifies the importance of biosphere processes to our situation, and to any improvement. To download, right click and select Save Target As, or Ctrl-click on a Mac.

"Only through uniting and diverting all the resources required to deal with climate change and land degradation can we avert unimaginable tragedy. We have all the money we need. All we cannot buy is time."

(Part 1 of this post)

To summarize: the lack of organic matter in our soils isn't a problem, to be fixed with a solution. It's an opportunity, with divergent solutions. Yet our policy systems tend to select for convergent and standardized solutions, which are difficult to implement because of power struggles and escalating fears, or are too compromised by a "best practices" format to be most effective in a variety of situations. And if they do get implemented, they depend on large appropriations that may not always materialize.

Approved, implementable, and effective strategies and actions get scarcer and scarcer as the need for them gets more and more urgent. In the face of grave threats, the sense of freedom and possibility shrinks to a point. Is this what we want? It is a situation we have contributed to.

Challenging these dynamics, important as it is, won't be enough. Giving the "right" answers to the wrong questions is a steady job, but boring. A different selection system, with different selective forces, is needed. One that asks not what to do about global warming pollution, for example, but asks how the carbon cycle functions in this or that place, and what are the possibilities for enhancing it. For example, what are the possibilities, in a variety of situations, for turning atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter?

Prize competitions are a proven strategy for exploring, pushing the boundaries, and telling the story of what is possible. They can help change the questions, which can help shift leadership from top-level experts to successful local practitioners.

The problem with carbon is that it's not a problem. It's a cycle, encompassing the fields and pastures where your breakfast came from, your every breath and thought. It’s a network, linking together the metabolisms, life histories, and deaths of all the biosphere’s organisms--which are autonomous, mostly single-celled, and made largely of carbon.

There is too much carbon in the atmosphere, and humans are responsible. The cues are all there to see this as a problem, and an environmental problem at that. Such a recognition can be unconscious and instantaneous. The self-evident solution is to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

Within its frame of reference, the diagnosis is true--fossil fuel burning is bad, it's pollution, and ought to be slowed or stopped. But the diagnosis is useless. It will keep the problem unsolved.

It sets up a power struggle over who owns the issue, who frames it. There is widespread and stubborn resistance to the environmental framing and its embedded solution. This resistance is not about peer-reviewed science or data. It's about fear--of scarcity, of loss of choices, of being controlled by liberal do-gooders and dysfunctional international agreements.

Ridiculing, belittling, or ignoring such fears doesn't make them disappear. It nourishes them. Likewise, the fears of climate change--sea level rise, drought, famine, booms and busts of plants and animals, economic collapse, refugees--will gain urgency and strength under denial or lack of action.

These are not the dynamics of change. They are the dynamics of a pendulum, where motion in one direction guarantees motion in the other, and which can only be stable when it is hanging straight down, after all energy is dissipated.

by Vandana Shiva

From the Chandigarh Tribune http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20090410/science.htm NOTE: This opinion piece does not necessarily represent the views of the Soil Carbon Coalition. It may be an example of how difficult it is to distinguish between ideas or management tools, and their implementation. It also typifies the reactive debate over solutions to climate change.

Burning trees and biomass has ironically emerged as a “solution” to climate change.

Following the false solution of industrial bio fuels we now have the waste left from production of bio fuels as the next magic bullet. The process used is pyrolysis – incineration that chemically decomposes organic materials by heat in the absence of oxygen. Through pyrolysis organic matter is transformed into gases and small quantities of liquid, used as bio fuels. The waste is a solid residue containing carbon and ash. This waste has now been given the elegant name “biochar”. It is being wrongly treated as the same as “Terra Preta de Indio” — the black soils created by the indigenous people of the Amazon by burying charcoal over hundreds of years. Charcoal in every soil and every ecosystem can prove to be an ecological disaster.

“Biochar” is basically the next new trick of global investors to make money on the global market of carbon trading. As the biochar website www.biochar.org clearly states “A prerequisite for the above mentioned management practices is access to the global carbon trade.” The global carbon market which has a potential to grow to $ 1 trillion by 2020, and this is what is driving “biochar” — not love for the soil, nor the wisdom of indigenous people.

The collapse of Wall Street in 2008 should be enough reason for governments and people to be cautious about the charcoal solution. We cannot afford to have an economics of greed and fraud drive false solutions to climate change.

Lee Pengilly in Canada has written a wonderful "cowboy" guide to greenhouse gas sinks and sources, published by the Canadian Cattleman's Association. Includes a simple monitoring guide for water cycling, nutrient cycling, energy flow, and succession.

Download below (right click, save as). Here is a sample from the "Kyoto Cowboy" poem that ends the document.

I’ve heard it said by some folk that of “climate change” they have some doubt.
“It won’t happen in my life-time, so there’s nothin’ to worry about.”
But after thinkin’ closely, of grandkids comin’ on someday,
I figure I’d rather be safe than sorry, I’ll make Kyoto pay.
I’ll be the Kyoto Cowboy, I hold Ranchin’ deep within my heart,
And about those greenhouse gases, I guess I can do my part.

My cows I’ll highly manage - through small fields they’ll daily graze.
With fresh, green grass a growin’ it’ll show that fencin’ pays!
There’s no manure build-up, dung beetles work to fertilize.
Manure disappears so quickly - it has no time to volatize.
The creek will be protected, with very limited access.
I’ll capture tons of carbon through photosynthesis.

On Feb 15 the Australian Landline program broadcast a documentary about Christine Jones and her efforts to promote awareness of the soil carbon opportunity.

Her message is simple: Rebuilding carbon-rich agricultural soils is the only real productive permanent solution to taking excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

"She's frustrated that scientists and politicians don't see the same opportunities she sees. This year Australia will emit just over 600 million tonnes of carbon. We can sequester 685 million tonnes of carbon by increasing soil carbon by half a per cent on only two per cent of the farms. If we increased it on all of the farms, we could sequester the whole world's emissions of carbon."

Transcript here:

http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2008/s2490568.htm

Ohio State University soil scientist Rattan Lal writes, "We are dealing with 10 global issues at the moment: food security, availability of water, climate change, energy demand, waste disposal, extinction of biodiversity, soil degradation and desertification, poverty, political and ethnic instability, and rapid population increase. The solution to all of these lies in soil management. It doesn't mean that agriculture is the only solution, but it plays a major role in addressing these issues."

For the rest, including 10 recommended steps to better soil management, see

http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story...