[Terrapreta] Fwd: Fwd: Global Carbon Cycle

[Sean K. Barry]

Hi Kevin,

I would suggest that we do not need advanced technology or computers or 
Scanning Electron Microscopes and all the neat stuff that gets people 
PhD's, to figure out how to make Terra Preta work. I would suggest that 
we work with the resources they had at their disposal. They had char, 
they had pottery, they had domestic waste, they had animal manure. They 
had pee and poo. They had slaughtering wastes. They had vegetative wastes.

We might not have the all of the anthropological underpinnings for the recipe for Terra Preta.  However, I do think scientific advances can still help us learn more (and maybe faster) what Terra Preta is and isn't made of.

You do have a great imagination, Kevin.  But, I will NOT be putting charcoal onto the dog shit piles that are already standouts as super-green islands in my lawn.  I might change the dogs name to Xipadu, though.

There certainly is merit in the trial and error method you propose.  It is likely more similar to what happened back when the ancient Amazon people discovered Terra Preta.  Good luck with that.  Some people are thinking we are now in a race for our lives to cover all the poo we've put out into our garden (global environment) with the black stuff.  We want to use imaginations like yours AND the very best tools we can avail ourselves of to really make "Neo Terra Preta" land reforming work; we have billions of people to to feed and billions of tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere.

The synchronicity of those two numbers just came to me; 6 billion people and 6 billion tons of carbon per year.
That means, if every man, woman, and child, took a whole year to make just one ton of charcoal and buried it, then the human race would have a carbon neutral footprint, even while we still burned up all the fossil fuel at the rate we are burning it now.  Make it two or three tons per person per year and we could march the carbon balance right back to pre-industrial levels in probably a few decades, and still burn all of the fossil fuel (at even faster rates, perhaps).

What does anybody think of that?  Butt-load (and then some) of charcoal, I say.

Look at that clean slate dragged behind, Kurt !
v
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