This is a sponsored feature. All opinions are 100% from Her Campus.
Last week, my previous National Government, Professor Mirsad, held his second annual symposium of worldy matters that are of the upmost important to the public eye.
One of the parts I enjoyed and found very informative was the concept of carbon farming. Right here is everything that I have learned….
Scientsts say we have only 10-12 years to stop global catastrophe.
Converting to 100% renewable energy addresses half the problem, halting the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. However, the more immediate task is to reduce greenhouse gases that have accumulated there, to safe levels quickly enough to avert catastrophic climate change. Various forms of sustainable agriculture, under headings such as Ecoagriculture or Carbon Farming,may be employed. This article features carbon farming as proposed by author Albert Bates, which utilizes biochar as a key element.
Conventional agriculture is a major contributor to climate change: It emits large amounts of CO2; pollutes our waterways with herbicides, pesticides and nutrient runoff contributing to algae blooms; destroys rainforests in indigenous communities to raise cattle and monocrops; and degrades the soil mircobiome and soil carbon content. Raising beef cattle for food is inordinately consumptive of grain and water, and is majorly polluting.
Conventional agriculture poses a threat to our survival.
Food writer Michael Pollan states in a Washington Post Dec 4, 2015 Op-Ed: “Our unsustainable farming methods are a central contributuor to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change, quite simply, cannot be halted without fixing agriculture.:”
Looking forward positively, transforming agriculture into a regenerative engine, along with reforestation, could drawdown enough CO2 from the air and store it safely and inexpensively in the soil where it belongs, to help prevent runaway global warming, and Re-Green the planet in the process. Otherwise, the task would be complicated bioengineering projects proposed to trap CO2 underground, or technological devices designed to extract carbon from the air and repurpose it somehow.
We must rely on the healing power of nature, unleashed through the magic of plant photosynthesis.
In his book “The Biochar Solution,” Albert Bates makes the case for faciliating the agricultural sequestration of carbon by plants into the soil (which includes plant bodies and roots, decaying plant material, micro organisims, and other biochemistry) with sustainable methods.He maintains that sufficient long term storage would benefit by the use of biochar, a recalcitrant form of carbon that both stimulates soil biology and locks up carbon for thousands to millions of years, whereas the normal biomass mabile carbon cycle is a decade or less. Long lived hardwood trees also can hold carbon the extended periods.
Vandana Shiva places the prudent use of biochar in the larger context: “To cultivate the future, we need to cultivate life in the soil. We need to cultivate the humility that soil makes us, we do not make the soil, and we can only serve her process of making life.”
Bates says in his following book, “The Paris Agreement,” that conventional agriculture’s plowing method destroys soil, releasing “gigatons of greenhouse gases from the very place where we can safely store them – in the soil. [It] is progressively “desertifying the most fertile foodbelts on Earth.”
Fortunately, conventional methods are “being replaced with a suite of tools that produce more food per land area and net sequester more carbon every year, build soil, store water, and increase the resiliency of land to withstand storms, floods and droughts. The new tools include no-till organic farming, agroforestry, aquaponics, keyline design, holisitc management, remineralization, biochar from biomass energy production, and permaculture.”
Bates continues: “According to a recent report by the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, ‘ecoagriculture’ is the only way we are going to feed the population of the world by 2040. Then we need to go beyond that and perform what Mark Shepard calls ‘restorative agriculture,’ building back the web of life and returning us to a garden planet.”
A New Economy
David Korten, in “Agenda for a New Economy,” advocates for evaluating economic performance by indicators of “real wealth,” that is, based on human and natural systems health rather than financial indicators of “phantom wealth.” He describes “living enterprises” that serve community needs, networked in “a planetary system of coherent, self reliant local (living) economies,” achieving “a more equitable distribution of power and real wealth,” while having the smallest possible ecological footprint.
Self reliant local living economies are engaged in their own food/materiale production and distribution. Such decentralized distributed networks are more democratic, more sovereign, and more safe and secure, especially in the potentially chaotic conditions ahead.
These principles are in perfect harmony with the mission of carbon farming / ecoagriculture / restorative agriculture. Eco Ag naturally lends towards more agrarian local/regional economic networks, having many small farmers, ranchers, entrepreneurs and cooperatives participating in sustainable food growing and production of feedstocks, such as industrial hemp, bamboo, managed forests, biomass for biochar and biofuels…. all operations being carbon negative, that is, stashing more carbon in the soil than is harvested, and retaining it there for the long term, with the help of trees and biochar.
At the Paris COP21 Climate Summit, Albert Bates spoke of the profitability of a typical biochar cascade, “building upon each other to provide yields at each step, rather then creating the necessity for massive subsidies….” He also brought attention to an “emerging business model – eCO2 – which uses social permaculture, indigenous wisdom, large-scale offsets for biodiversity, and multiple-ecovillage watershed economies to take all this to scale at the diffusion rate required to bring the planet back into normal Holocene range by mid-century.”
Getting It All Going
Bates acknowledges that “we are in the early stages of this agricultural revolution, re-learning how to live in balance. Like a toddler taking first steps, we have not yet found our equilibrium.” Daring thinkers, scientists, enterprising farmers and ranchers, and off grid ecovillages are doing the pioneering work. Some have envisioned creating a kind of youth core to do massive tree plantings, or help manage desert restoration, or deploy mushrooms to clean up environmental pollutants.
A Solution with Many Advantages
As the complement to 100% renewable energy conversion, Carbon Farming presents the only suite of tools we can rely upon to reduce atmospheric carbon to safe levels. With the magic of photosynthesis, plants capture and store the carbon safely and inexpensively in the soil. Nurturing soil life is crucial. In the form of biochar, carbon can be stored for millenia. Biochar also has the ability to catalyze more abundant plant growth to draw down even more carbon faster.
Eco-agriculture also facilitates the formation of carbon negative, self reliant local living economies, serving community needs, being democratic, sovereign, and more safe and secure in a changing world.
Bates makes the case that with carbon farming, “I can provide more power than (governments) need, at a tenth of the cost of the oil, and I can do it from feed stocks the consider wasts, and I can use processes that net-sequester greenhouse gases at each step, with life-cycle cost that is high in the black, low capital outlay, and quick return on investment. Oh, and it arrests global warming, deepens soils, saves water, and increases biodiversity while preserving and protecting indigenous culture.”
Bates believes that regardless of the outcome of the Paris talks or governments’ action or inaction, “Once this package is readily available, and the expense is more then justified by immediate returns, the product will sell. Little, short of catastrophic economic collapse, can stop it.” The ability of carbon farming to “solve so many seemingly intractable problems simultaneously that once set in motion it will never be arrested. It will create a garden planet.”
Time is of the essence!
For more information, research these following scources:
Agenda for a New Economy, from Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth,
David C. Korten, BK publishers, 2010
The Biochar Solution, Carbon Farming and Climate Change, Albert
Bates, foward by Vandana Shiva, New Society Publishers, 2010
The Paris Agreement – the best chance we have to save the one
planet we’ve got, Albert Bates, an ecovillage imprint, 2015
*This article is sponsored by the Miami-Dade Green Party
Putting People, Planet and Peace before Profit!
*For more information….
Fb/Twitter: Miami-Dade Green Party
Green Party of Florida
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