[Terrapreta] Branson prize

[Kelpie Wilson]

Hi everyone,
I discuss Terra Preta and the Branson prize in my Truthout column 
today, please pass it along. Anyone can reprint this article as long 
as they give proper credit.
-Kelpie

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021407J.shtml
     Virgin, the Dynamo, and the Prize
     By Kelpie Wilson
     t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor

     Wednesday 14 February 2007

     Like most American kids in the 1960s, I was an avid Star Trek 
fan and I rooted for every new development in the US space program. 
I'll never forget staying up past midnight to watch Neil Armstrong 
take Man's first steps on the moon.

     But by the time of the first shuttle disaster in 1986, I was 
less concerned with the Star Trek mission and more concerned with the 
fate of the Earth. Apart from the human tragedy of the disaster, the 
setback to the space shuttle program didn't seem to matter much, and 
the image of the Challenger flameout at 48,000 feet over Florida 
seemed symbolic of the utter failure of Western society to create a 
sustainable civilization on Planet Earth.

     The recent release of the IPCC's fourth assessment on climate 
change is just one more milestone documenting the disintegration of 
Earth's planetary life-support systems. The world must act quickly, 
but I am not impressed by the announcement last week that Sir Richard 
Branson, founder of a company that is building a fleet of excursion 
vehicles for the space tourism market, has offered a $25 million 
prize for the invention of new carbon-sequestration technologies.

     Branson's space travel company, called Virgin Galactic (in line 
with his other ventures, Virgin Media, Virgin Trains and Virgin 
Airways), is building five suborbital spacecraft based on Burt 
Rutan's X-Prize winning design, SpaceShipOne. Tourists will pay about 
$200,000 a ticket to spew greenhouse gases into the upper atmosphere 
and enjoy an hour of bouncing around in microgravity. Presumably, it 
was the success of the X-Prize competition in producing this space 
toy that inspired Branson to offer the carbon-sequestration prize, 
which he calls the Earth Challenge. Sadly, Branson's prize may do 
more harm than good.

     There are two big problems with the Earth Challenge prize. 
First, and most important, it sends the wrong message to those who 
are just waking up to the true threat of climate change: it says we 
can solve this problem by inventing the right techno-fix. Branson 
himself said it at his news conference announcing the prize: "Man 
created the problem; therefore Man should solve the problem."

     If "Man" is about to jump in and fix the carbon problem, then 
we'll all be able to carry on with business as usual, right? Yikes! 
If this perception becomes widespread, then there will be no 
motivation to change our wasteful habits. We can relax, because we 
have plenty of coal in the ground and our techno-heroes will find a 
way to capture and store those pesky carbon molecules out of the way somewhere.

     Encouraging complacency is one problem. Then there's the problem 
that any techno-fix solution big enough to make a difference has the 
potential for dangerous unintended consequences of planetary 
magnitude. Ideas like pumping CO2 deep into the ground or the ocean 
may sound promising, but can create new disasters. For instance, the 
oceans have already been absorbing much of the CO2 generated during 
the fossil fuel era, and as a result, they are turning acidic. No one 
knows how much more acidic the oceans can become before the calcium 
shells of animals like clams and corals begin to dissolve.

     We can also inject CO2 into old oil and gas fields and coal beds 
- it is being done right now in Norway, Texas and Canada. But in 
order to be effective as a carbon-sequestration strategy, hundreds of 
underground reservoirs would need to be created and maintained. Jeff 
Goodell, writing in his book Big Coal, says that each reservoir would 
spread out "fifty or so square miles underground, which means that if 
carbon sequestration does indeed become widespread, tens of thousands 
of people will be living above giant bubbles of CO2." Leakage is a 
problem, he says, "CO2 is buoyant underground and can migrate through 
cracks and faults in the earth, pooling in unexpected places." A 20 
percent concentration of odorless CO2 can cause a person to lose 
consciousness in "a breath or two" and asphyxiate.

     And here's an unintended consequence I have never heard 
discussed - what happens to all of the oxygen in the CO2 molecules 
that get sequestered? When plants pull CO2 out of the air and use it 
to grow stems and roots, they recycle the oxygen back into the 
atmosphere. Are we in danger of burying a needful portion of our 
oxygen deep in the Earth?

     Ultimately, Branson's Earth Challenge prize reflects the same 
attitude that got us into the climate crisis in the first place. It's 
a wet dream for engineers who now get to play with a whole planet, 
acting out their favorite science fiction scenarios. If they want to 
terraform a planet, I say send them to Mars, but don't experiment 
with the Earth.

     In his landmark critique of Technological Man, The Time Falling 
Bodies Take to Light, historian William Irwin Thompson observes: 
"When we have moved beyond the desolation of all our male vanities, 
from the stock market to the stock pile of rockets, we will be more 
open and receptive. Open and bleeding like that archaic wound, the 
vulva, we will be prepared to receive the conception of a new civilization."

     The truth is that we already have all the technology that we 
need to save ourselves. Most of the world does not drive cars, use 
air conditioning or fly in airplanes, let alone spaceships. Provide 
an African village with a few solar panels and they can have lights 
at night, and a refrigerator to store medicines. Add a satellite dish 
and a computer, and they have the world's knowledge and culture at 
their fingertips. If the environment around them is healthy, it can 
provide everything else they need for a good life - water, food, 
clothing, shelter, musical instruments and the enjoyment of nature.

     The new, post-carbon civilization will require that we be open 
to radically new ways of living. At the same time that the 
industrialized world helps African villagers upgrade their lifestyles 
to include electric lights and computers, it needs to downgrade its 
own lifestyles to eliminate wasteful consumption and feel the Earth again.

     But what will motivate the rich populations of the industrial 
world to do this? Conventional wisdom says that they will never give 
up their wasteful luxuries. They will embrace every techno-fix 
imaginable before making even the smallest sacrifices, because they 
feel that they have already won the prize. The prize, in fact, is 
their monopoly over fossil fuels and the concern is that someone - 
greens, Arabs, Venezuelans or Russians - will take it away. It's no 
accident that Daniel Yergin's definitive history of the oil industry 
is called The Prize.

     We must come to see that the ultimate prize is not sitting on 
top of a pile of consumer goods; the ultimate prize is the miracle of 
our continued life on this beautiful planet. Unfortunately, Richard 
Branson's offering of a carbon-sequestration prize perpetuates the 
dangerous illusion that we can avoid the hard choices because 
Technological Man will always prevail.

     That said, however, perhaps Branson's contest will surprise me. 
His roster of judges includes the brilliant Australian evolutionary 
biologist Tim Flannery, who has written The Weather Makers, the best 
book yet on climate change. Flannery is well-qualified to root out 
false solutions and sniff out unintended consequences.

     And there are many practical things we can do to enhance the 
natural carbon-sequestration ability of fields and forests, like 
planting and fertilizing trees and using no-till agriculture. There 
is even a potentially revolutionary technique waiting to be developed 
that could greatly accelerate carbon storage in soils.

     The technique is called "Terra Preta," Portuguese for "black 
earth." It is not new. It was invented by an ancient agricultural 
civilization in the Amazon that made charcoal and buried it the soil. 
The charcoal absorbs and holds nutrients from manure and supports 
beneficial microbes. Some of these fertile soils are more than 1000 
years old. You can read more about Terra Preta in 1491: New 
Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann.

     There is a company called <http://eprida.com>Eprida that is 
developing a process to manufacture this agricultural charcoal with a 
biofuel as a co-product. Perhaps they will apply for the Earth 
Challenge prize and perhaps, if the judges are open to it, their 
process or some similar process will win the prize.

     Survival requires that we restore a balance to our relationship 
with the Earth. This is the balance that Henry Adams wrote of upon 
his visit to the great Paris Exposition of 1900, in The Education of 
Henry Adams. The experience was heady for him as he recognized that 
the world was then teetering between the pull of two great forces: 
the powerful engines of the future he encountered in the Hall of 
Dynamos, and all the spiritual truths of the ancient world as 
represented by the Virgin of Chartres:

     "As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he 
began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the 
early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less 
impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily 
revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at 
some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring - scarcely humming an 
audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of 
power - while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame."

     Now, barely 100 years later, we see that the baby is too close 
to the frame, and the age of the dynamos has brought us to the brink 
of disaster. It is this disaster that Richard Branson, possibly with 
the best of intentions, is responding to. And his prize may yet do 
some great good, particularly if he honors his creation's namesake, 
the Virgin of his Virgin Enterprises.

     For the Virgin is none other than the ancient Goddess of the 
Earth. Henry Adams says, "She was Goddess because of her force; she 
was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the greatest and most 
mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund."

     We don't have to roll over the Earth with our dynamos. We have a 
much better chance of success if we can find ways to work with the 
Earth to enhance her fertility and restore her natural cycles.

     As Henry Adams noted, wandering through the cathedrals and 
museums of Paris, the "force" of the Virgin "was the highest energy 
ever known to man, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art, 
exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the 
steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of ... All the steam in the 
world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres."


----------
     <http://truthout.org/contactkw.php>Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's 
environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on 
a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to 
engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She 
is the author of <http://www.kelpiewilson.com/>Primal Tears, an 
eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of 
Darwin's Radio, says: "Primal Tears is primal storytelling, 
thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our 
definitions of human and family."

Kelpie Wilson
www.kelpiewilson.com

My first novel, Primal Tears, is now available. Order from 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583941339/103-4392120-0843036?n=283155>amazon 
or other online booksellers or ask your local bookstore to carry it. 
More information at my website www.kelpiewilson.com

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