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Peter Donovan
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Peter commented on the article |Instead of touring the flooded areas after the disaster hits, I wish that Senator Kerry or other concerned people could take a good look, with a good guide, at the soil surfaces of the catchment. Over vast acreages, these soils are bare of cover and offer little resistance to the flow of water across the land.
When we manage AGAINST what we don't want (flooding, water scarcity, greenhouse gases) we effectively ensure that these problems will always be with us, and we will have conflict and misunderstanding around them. Our agenda becomes, "let's wreck the world slower." Urgency takes our focus away from the fundamental biosphere processes, such as carbon cycling or water cycling, which are ruled by biology (particularly microbes) and usually don't respond to quick fixes.
The condition and cover of soil has an enormous influence on water.
http://managingwholes.com/eco-water-cycle.htm
but the condition of soil is not easily amenable to a political fix. Enhancing soil organic matter is the #1 recommendation of the NRCS Soil Quality Team, yet the overall effect of USDA policies, such as commodity subsidies, is to oxidize vast amounts of carbon-rich soil organic matter into atmospheric carbon dioxide, and limit the replenishment of soil organic matter.
We can manage FOR what we need, but our political systems and institutions are not well adapted to this. Here's an alternative:
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Peter commented on the article |Katherine, good questions. My guess is that people feel powerless to affect the outcome and therefore lose interest.
With the climate problem framed as an atmospheric one, and the solution to reduce emissions, the science may be good but there is little traction for people or governments on the atmosphere. IPCC scenarios show complete reductions in 2007 taking 90 years to get to 350 ppm, meanwhile we lose the significant cooling aerosol effects. And emissions reductions have even less leverage on the atmosphere when they are local or unilateral--there is no way to test it piecemeal.
The framing has also raised a determined and powerful opposition, as we all know. Although the debate appears to be about the science, it is not. It is about underlying values. Some, but not all, is mere defense of fossil fuel markets.
The end result is that people are nearly powerless to mitigate global warming. But the way we see the problem IS the problem.
For an alternative framing, see
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Peter commented on the article |The biosphere's carbon cycle moves 10 times the carbon, and does 10 times the work, of all fossil fuel emissions. Emissions control has almost zero near-term leverage on atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 2007 the IPCC scenario showed that with 100% emissions cuts, it would take about a century for atmospheric carbon dioxide to get to 350 ppm.
Even in currently depleted state, soils hold way more carbon than forests and the atmosphere combined. They are the hub and major reserve of biosphere carbon cycling.
For millennia we've been unwittingly on the wrong side of the biosphere's work of carbon cycling. We've let gigatons of soil carbon go into the atmosphere through fire, tillage, drainage, and excessive and insufficient rest periods from grazing, as one reader pointed out recently on one of your posts, talking about holistic management.
Iowa soils, for example, can gain carbon far more rapidly, with stable soil organic matter, than tropical rainforests. If we ignore the delays of ocean buffering, reducing atmospheric CO2 from 390 to 350 ppm would amount to only a 3% increase in soil carbon worldwide. The math for forest carbon is considerably worse, and there are many competing demands on forests. Soil carbon, however, does great things for water and food security as well.
However, attempts to fit soil carbon into offset schemes are mostly a fail. The motivations as well as the stakeholders are all wrong.
However, there are independent farmers and graziers on every continent who have doubled soil carbon in a decade, in order to increase productivity and profit.
The Soil Carbon Coalition is pioneering a new policy model, in the form of a prize competition (Soil Carbon Challenge), that will connect the innovative and creative land managers on the ground with the power of the biosphere's carbon cycle. We do this through measurement and monitoring, and recognition of outstanding successes.
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Peter commented on the article |Good points about the lack of effectiveness of public shaming.
At the Soil Carbon Coalition, we're pushing the opposite approach. The Soil Carbon Challenge is a prize competition to see how fast land managers can turn atmospheric carbon into water-holding, fertility-enhancing soil organic matter. The soil carbon accrual rates (tons per hectare per year) will be posted publicly as geolocated data.
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Peter commented on the article |However, "produced the way we produce it" is often invisible, or not seen as a variable. One commonly reads that "It takes 12000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef" or some such. A lot hides behind the words, "it takes."
Consider another popular phrase: It takes a village to raise a child. This doesn't mean we destroy or consume a village in the process of raising a child.
The beef I eat takes a lot of sunlight, a lot of grass, a lot of microbial activity, and of course water flowing through the system. The grass helps absorb and retain rainwater, leading to more groundwater recharge. The grazing is good for the grass, because it gets ample recovery periods, but not so much as to cause senescence and unproductivity of the grass. The managed/timed grazing helps the whole grassland system turn atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter, which may be our greatest leverage on climate change.
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