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Native Shrubs and Why They’re Essential for Carbon Sequestration

January 2, 2019

Native Shrubs and Why They’re Essential for Carbon Sequestration

Sand prairie merging into shrubland in southeast Wisconsin. Credit: The Prairie Botanist


“Shrubbiness is such a remarkable adaptive design that one may wonder why more plants have not adopted it.” (H. C. Stutz, 1989)

In light of the newest IPCC and US climate change reports, coupled with reports of the ongoing declines of wild species—birds, insects—you name them, just so long as they aren’t human, I have turned to thinking about shrubs. It is precisely their adaptive characteristics that give shrubs their potential to be powerful players in soil carbon sequestration and ecosystem regeneration in certain parts of the world, such as the Midwest.

Although alarming, the reports are not surprising to anyone who’s been keeping track. The IPCC report says human global society has 12 years to reduce carbon emissions to 45% below 2010 levels if there is to be any hope of holding overall average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F). The US report, searchable by region, adds fairly detailed, equally dire scenarios for this country. No place on earth will be immune to the destructive consequences of our failure to act.

Since the world has already warmed approximately 1 degree C, even if we are able to keeping warming to 1.5 degrees—an almost insanely optimistic proposal, given the array of forces, from active malice to blind inertia, all backed by money, power and influence poised against success—there will still be massive, destabilized weather patterns and disruptive, destructive weather events similar to and worse than what we are already experiencing. The resultant ecological destruction and human misery will only increase with each half a degree beyond 1.5 degrees until large parts of the earth are literally uninhabitable by humans. We are, right now, on track to warm roughly 3.3 degrees  by century’s end.
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Waiting on amber: a note on regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

March 22, 2018

Waiting on amber: a note on regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

This post offers some further notes on the issue of carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, arising out of the discussion in this recent post of mine, particularly via the comments of Don Stewart. Don set me some onerous homework – a lengthy presentationby Elizabeth and Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs farm in California, another lengthy presentation by David Johnson of New Mexico State University, and an interview with Australian soil scientist Christine Jones. Diligent student that I am, not only have I now completed these tasks but I’ve also read various other scientific papers and online resources bearing on the issue and am duly turning in my assignment. I hope it’ll provide some interest and a few points for discussion.

I started out with considerable sympathy towards carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, but with a degree of scepticism about some of the loftier claims made on its behalf by regenerative agriculture proponents (henceforth RAPs). And in fact that’s pretty much where I’ve ended up too, but with a somewhat clearer sense of where my grounds for scepticism lie. I hope we’ll see a shift towards more regenerative agriculture in the future. But if that’s going to happen, the RAPs will have to persuade a lot of people more inclined to scepticism than me about the virtues of their proposals – and if they’re going to do that, I think they’ll need to tighten up their arguments considerably. Anyway, in what follows I define what I understand regen-ag to be and then critically examine some of the claims about it.

Defining regenerative agriculture and carbon farming

Doubtless there are numerous possible emphases, but the fundamental idea revolves around restoring or maintaining the biological life of the soil, in particular the fungal component. Working as symbionts to plants and other soil organisms, fungi are able to deliver nutrients to plants that are otherwise unavailable, and also to sequester carbon by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into stable organic carbon compounds in the soil. In order to achieve this, it’s essential to avoid tillage, since this destroys the fungal hyphae in the soil, and to keep the soil covered with living plants at all times so that there’s a healthy rhizosphere (root zone) interacting with the soil food web. It can also be necessary to inoculate the soil with the right kinds of fungi – apparently, not just any fungi will do1.

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Connor Stedman: Carbon Farming

October 10, 2017

Connor Stedman: Carbon Farming

Sequestering atmospheric carbon through natural means

Climate change remains a hotly debated topic. But a scientific fact not up for dispute is the pronounced spike in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past two centuries.

There’s a building urgency to find solutions that can manage/reverse that spike — a process known as carbon sequestration. But how to do that on a planetary scale? It’s a massive predicament. And most of the ‘solutions’ being proposed are technologically unproven, prohibitively costly and/or completely impractical.

Enter carbon farming. It uses nature-based farming practices to park gigatons of carbon in the soil, rebuild soil health and complexity, and revitalize the nutrient density of the foods that we eat. It is quite likely the only practical — and best — way to sequester carbon at massive scale, as well as reap a multitude of by-product benefits.

In this week’s podcast, field ecologist and agriforestry specialist Connor Stedman explains the science behind the carbon farming process:

For the last few million years of the Earth’s history, when there’s been this cycle of glaciers advancing and receding in the northern hemisphere, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone between about 180 parts per million and 280 parts per million. That is the band in which all of human history has happened, up until the last 200 or 300 years.

Now the concentration of carbon dioxide is about 407 parts per million, almost 50% higher than the upper end of that historical normal. Carbon dioxide is one of a number of greenhouse gases that hold heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, rather than it being fully reflected back out into space

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Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

October 22, 2015

Backyard Carbon Sequestration: What Does Synthetic Fertilizer Have to Do with It?

Part two of a series exploring how regenerative gardening techniques can enhance carbon storage while improving soil health. In part one I discussed some of the principles behind the factors involved in soil health and how plants and the soil biological community work together to store carbon and build appropriate fertility. “Why Not Start Today: Backyard Carbon Sequestration Is Something Nearly Everyone Can Do” can be found here. 

 A brief digression about the term “regenerative gardening” 
So what is regenerative gardening, anyway? Regenerative gardening is an umbrella term that embraces many styles and traditions of organic cultivation and adds explicit intentionality regarding carbon sequestration. The recent Rodale white paper, “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” says that, “regenerative organic agriculture refers to working with nature to utilize photosynthesis and healthy soil microbiology to draw down greenhouse gases.” The same goes for gardening. Like regenerative farming and ranching, regenerative gardening aims for land cultivation and management that builds soil health and helps improve the health of the ecosystem within which that garden is located, while growing plants and harvesting crops useful to humans, whether food, medicine, fiber or wood—and along the way, creating beauty. And, doing all this while, importantly, helping mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon in the soil and reducing nitrous oxide emissions. So what’s so special about that? Isn’t that what all farming and gardening aims for, or should? I can imagine many readers asking this, especially those already practicing some form of ecosystem-based gardening.

The City of Cahokia, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, boasted 20,000 inhabitants in 1200 C.E.

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Nicole Foss Talks Energy Industry Issues and Oil Price Collapse

August 30, 2015

Nicole Foss Talks Energy Industry Issues and Oil Price Collapse

Part I- Energy Industry Issues

The Doomstead Diner site blurb:

Coal Industry Collapse-Carbon Sequestration
One of the biggest effects we see lately is a collapse in commodity prices, through all sectors. Most intriguing to me is the collapse in coal prices, since coal is used in so many places for the production of electricity. Several large coal mining companies have gone into bankruptcy. How will this affect electricity production as we move along here? Q2: Will the efforts for Carbon Sequestration, Carbon Credits and Taxation have any meaningful effect on this dynamic?

Oil Price Collapse
Many people thought the price collapse in Oil that came at the end of 2014 was unforseen and unknowable. In fact many people in the peak oil community believed for a long time the price of oil would spiral inexorably upward. Some of us here have argued otherwise, that credit constraints would drive the price downward. Steve did the best job of this, and actually pegged the price crash for oil to the month more than two years in advance with his infamous Triangle of Doom charts. Steve, can you tell us how you were able to pull off that stunt? Q: John Mauldin and other shills for the Oil industry assure us that better and cheaper drilling technology will bring up all the oil we need and keep the industry solvent. How realistic is this?

 

The Carbon Ranch

June 7, 2015

The Carbon Ranch

Novelist and historian Wallace Stegner once said that every book should try to answer an anguished question. I believe the same is true for ideas, movements, and emergency efforts. In the case of climate change, an anguished question is this: what can we do right now to help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from its current (and future) dangerously high levels?

In an editorial published in July of 2009, Dr. James Hansen of NASA proposed an answer: “cut off the largest source of emissions—coal—and allow CO2 to drop back down . . . through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.” I consider these words to be a sort of ‘Operating Instructions’ for the twenty-first century. Personally, I’m not sure how we accomplish the coal side of the equation, which requires governmental action, but I have an idea about how to increase carbon storage in soils.

I call it a carbon ranch.

The purpose of a carbon ranch is to mitigate climate change by sequestering CO2 in plants and soils, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and producing co-benefits that build ecological and economic resilience in local landscapes. “Sequester” means to withdraw for safekeeping, to place in seclusion, into custody, or to hold in solution—all of which are good definitions for the process of sequestering CO2 in plants and soils via photosynthesis and sound stewardship.

 

The process by which atmospheric CO2 gets converted into soil carbon is neither new nor mysterious. It has been going on for millions and millions of years, and all it requires is sunlight, green plants, water, nutrients, and soil microbes. According to Dr. Christine Jones, a pioneering Australian soil scientist, there are four basic steps to the CO2/soil carbon process:

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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