[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 4, Issue 2

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Siwmae pawb (Hi all),

A comment, and an interesting link on the following snip from TP 4/2:

"Sort of, how would a small biochar producer tap into this market. He
cannot just dump his char into a ploughed field and claim a credit.
>From what I have seen of any regulated market activity the
verification process spawns a vast employment hierarchy which tends to
attract the brighter people, who then basically parasitise the
industry. So whilst there is scope for corruption it's the regulatory
framework that adds the costs. We have good evidence of this from
wartime rationing through to the recent scandals with butter, wheat
and olive oil "mountains". While I can see potential benefits
from,say, a small scale sugar cane farmer charring his leaves and
trash and incorporating them I cannot readily see a way of verifying
it robustly."

This is why I'm working on the idea of finding practical ways of 
producing your own terra preta on anything down to the smallest 
garden scale, with absolutely minimal financing needed. Rather than 
carbon credit trading, which I think people already see is likely to 
be a messy and probably corrupt process, I'm going on the assumption 
that people will be more directly motivated, and discipline 
themselves to do things right, if immediate, urgently-needed 
subsistence food-getting is their goal. (Still the major concern of 
about eighty percent of people globally, let's never forget)

Perhaps we need to remind ourselves in the cybersphere that we're 
(probably) all members of the privileged, not to say grossly pampered 
twenty percent of the world's human population, and that the very 
great majority of humans have no access even to a phone, let alone to 
the internet.

On the other hand, you can do what the Appropriate Technology people 
do: use the (over)abundant facilities of the Northern Hemisphere to 
develop practical knowledge which can then be taken and 'seeded' 
directly into Southern Hemisphere communities, who begin using - and 
of course refining and evolving - it because they see the instant 
advantage that it gives them in their daily efforts for subsistence.

This is what the Henry Doubleday Research Association (now called 
'Garden Organic') did. It's also what many people in the permaculture 
community around the world do. Without wanting to sound too 
doctrinaire, or tread on anyone's cherished beliefs, may I suggest 
that a famous adage applies here: When you're in a hole, more digging 
isn't the way out. Or, to apply that idea to our discussion here, 
when the world has been seriously messed up by much too much faith in 
the allegedly all-wise, all-competent market, and in hitech 
industrial economics, maybe market-driven industrial 'solutions' to 
our crisis aren't the best way to go.

In any case, if the interacting global crises get as bad as they 
might, then maybe no-one, anywhere, is going to be in any position to 
operate large-scale, marketised industry. But if there are still 
communities of people surviving in many places, then they could sure 
use this knowledge which terra preta delvers are trying to 
re-discover. And so could Gaia, of course.

We start from the hunch that, somehow, people long ago, perhaps in a 
particularly favoured location, long prior to the Industrial 
Revolution, and probably with little concept of markets, and 
certainly no idea that market processes are sacred and may not be 
questioned, nevertheless discovered how to make terra preta, saw its 
extraordinary advantages just in the field of agriculture (no need 
for carbon sequestration as well then), and - collectively - made 
vast acreages of it which seem to have sustained a considerable 
civilisation.

As I develop it, I want to report here, and anywhere else that might 
be interested, my practical experience with doing terra preta growing 
on what Fukuoka might call a 'one-straw' scale: absolutely minimal 
funding input, peasant-level technology, and mainly muscle-powered.

If large-scale, hitech, tradeable activities survive, as they well 
might, then they'll make their input too to terra preta re-discovery. 
This ain't an either/or thing. But I find the appropriate 
super-peasant level of things more convincing for the near future, 
and more reassuring.

One other piece of information, which I find fascinating: A 
practitioner and teacher of permaculture, David Blume, who has 
achieved quite astonishing levels of benign, sustainable productivity 
in his gardens; and this, as far as I can tell, without yet adding 
terra preta soil to his alchemy. Take a look at this: 
http://www.permaculture.com/permaculture/About_Permaculture/food.shtml

In spite of what I know already about permaculture, David Blume's 
account of his practise leaves me open-mouthed with astonishment, 
with delight, and with a great ambition to attempt to match his 
results.

Cofion gorau (Best remembrances),   Rhisiart Gwilym

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