a little optimism...

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility

It's called biochar, and if you believe its most ardent supporters, then this unassuming, fine black powder is a vital tool in the solutions to some of humanity's most urgent ecological threats, including climate change, peak oil, soil degradation and water pollution due to agrochemicals. However, if you side with biochar's staunch opponents, then it seems like a fledgling, poorly understood technology with real risks, including the displacement of entire communities and the serious jeopardizing of world food security and biodiversity. Which view is correct? That's the question that sustainability expert James Bruges, who is cautiously optimistic about biochar, investigates in his book The Biochar Debate.

Biochar is essentially charcoal made through a process called pyrolysis (which involves burning organic material in the absence of oxygen), and then finely crushed and worked into the earth as a soil amendment.* The pyrolysis process has two byproducts, syngas and bio-oil, which can be used for generating heat and power, hence biochar's appeal to alternative energy enthusiasts. And once the biochar is in the soil, it has an amazing ability to retain nutrients and moisture due to its unbelievably porous structure (a single gram can have twice the surface area of a tennis court). This enables it to dramatically boost crop yields and reduces the need for industrial fertilizers. Thus, biochar has the potential to simultaneously ensure our future food supply and wean croplands off of the poisons in which they must be doused in order for today's mineral-depleted soils to sustain production. Another advantage of biochar is that it can be made from virtually any organic material (from manure to wood to switchgrass), meaning that there would be no shortage of suitable feedstocks, and biochar production could double as a waste recycling scheme.

Most important of all, however—assuming that climate scientists have called it correctly with their warnings of an imminent, irreversible climate tipping point—is biochar's ability to pull substantial quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and trap them underground effectively forever, in human terms. Biochar's oft-repeated sales pitch is that it isn't merely carbon-neutral, it's "carbon-negative." And this capacity for sequestering carbon could, conceivably, allow us to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels within our lifetimes.

Further resources about biochar.

A world beyond petroleum needn't be a scary proposition --it can be something to relish. As we move from a global culture addicted to cheap, abundant petroleum to a culture of compelled conservation, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook provides useful, practical advice for preparing your family and community to make the transition.

Taking a positive, upbeat, and optimistic view of "the Great Change", this book offers recipes for these turbulent times that mend the many rifts that oil culture has spawned. Wide-ranging in scope, topics covered include rebuilding civilization, changing your needs, water and waste disposal, energy and transportation, equipment and tools and food storage and first aid.

Also featuring over 100 playful recipes --some using basic, wholesome foods, some illustrating food growing or preservation, and all emphasizing organic, flavorful and locally grown produce -- this book is about having your catastrophe and eating it too.

Though it's long, dense and heavily documented, the book is clearly organized, well written and crammed with lively anecdotes that made it hard to put down. I also found it profoundly unsettling--not so much because it documents familiar bad news about the dangers of our present course, but more because of its good news of promise and possibility. Reading it makes you ardent to do anything within your power to spread the word and to help bring about the changes it advocates.

Like Rob, I found that this book is particularly suited for where we are right now--at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its message that "there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically" and its revelation of the environmental, political, and moral significance of good engineering, design, resource management and business practices could lead our university to a new and higher mission statement for its second century of growth.

Each of its fifteen chapters can stand on its own, but cumulatively they build to a climax. The first chapter lays out the overall thesis with a historical perspective and an outline of general principles. Later chapters divide the subject into categories like Transportation, Real Estate and Construction, Agriculture, and Climate. The two penultimate chapters return to more general observations, and the final chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of disseminating the book's ideas on university campuses.

Incidentally, the book can be downloaded chapter by chapter from the website.

Read the book online.

McKibben is an eloquent advocate for deep emissions cuts to slow global warming, but making that case is not the purpose of his latest book. Instead, he aims to alert us that on a planet we have altered so profoundly that it deserves a new name ("Eaarth"), we need to shift our lives in light of new realities.

The book surveys the evidence for climate-driven impacts on the planet's major features, challenges the notion that we can grow our way out of this predicament and celebrates locally based, decentralized approaches that McKibben believes can supply food and comfort on our newly volatile home.

In a chapter titled "Backing Off," McKibben turns to colonial history to argue that the debate between big and small solutions is quintessentially American. James Madison and his fellow Federalists won that debate on behalf of "big" the first time around thanks to a unifying national project, the conquest of the West. That project is finished, McKibben points out, leaving us with "a big national government and smaller national purposes." Scaling back begins to sound almost inevitable.

McKibben is inspired by "the quieter movement for what might be called functional independence," the practical folks developing local food systems, insulating homes and making communities work. He clearly believes that every corner of America harbors similar post-peak patriots.