[Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 3, Issue 55

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

>Message: 1
>Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:20:20 +1000
>From: rukurt at westnet.com.au
>Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] Terrapreta Digest, Vol 3, Issue 38
>To: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
>Message-ID: <4609A6B4.5010204 at westnet.com.au>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>Any objection to me forwarding this to another list? Called "Soil&health"
>
>Kurt
>
>
>
>
>Rhisiart Gwilym wrote:
>>  Request from list-member Rhisiart Gwilym:
>>
>>  Dear List Members,
>>
>  > I want to ask for approval for a proposal.

Siwmae everyone,

Sure, post the edited version out anywhere it'll take. Can't be too 
many people trying it, it seems to me.

I think that Christoph and Sean are painting a picture of a way of 
life which needs to come back into use after the wrong turnings of 
over-industrialisation and commercial globalisation. Fortunately, 
that seems to be what will be happening, as current interlinked 
global crises continue to grow. In practice, it seems to me very 
likely that the ancient pattern of local human communities getting 
most of their necessaries of life from their own local efforts will 
re-establish itself very widely, perforce, even in the (previously) 
over-rich countries. We won't have much choice about it, I suspect.

If this and other pioneer networks can get out widely the idea, with 
practical experience added, that char amendment to soil, together 
with other amendments that lead to full blown functioning terra 
preta, can greatly improve long-term soil fertility, and at the same 
time sequester substantial amounts of atmospheric carbon, then our 
pioneering efforts will have had an effect out of all proportion to 
the small numbers and limited means of the pioneers.

Let me thumbnail sketch what I'm doing. And then imagine literally 
millions, if not hundreds of millions of similar small-scale 
scratchers in the earth doing the same, for their own immediate, 
essential food getting (all the motivation anyone will need, when - 
not if - the overblown international industrial-farming food-chains 
break down):

First, a bit of background information. I make, amongst other things, 
stainless steel wood-burning stoves. I have models based on the 
traditional Norwegian long box stove, and models based on the 
super-efficient, super cheap and simple designs developed over years 
of fieldwork by Larry Winiarski and colleagues, Ianto Evans and 
associates, Tom Reed's 'upside-downdraft gasifier' experiments, and 
the Eindhoven Group. Incidentally, several of these researchers have 
also developed wonderfully simple, ultra cheap, yet beautifully 
efficient stoves made from closely-local materials such as cob 
(adobe) and lorena (mud and sand) so the structures don't have to be 
of hitech, high-energy materials like stainless. I have enough 
woodlands around me, and enough lazy neighours who only want the 
push-button, pipe-it-all-in, hyper-convenience life, to have a 
superabundance of free wood just for the picking up. Far more than I 
can use. Walk the dogs and come back with enough fuel for the next 
24-36 hours. The woods are always producing more dead wood than I can 
keep up with. I collect a small percentage of this abundance, and use 
it to heat my cabin, and do all my cooking. To payback, I do 
'guerrilla tree-planting', mainly by just gathering and scattering 
tree-seeds absolutely anywhere where they have a chance. Not asking 
permission, and not worrying too much about technical ownership of 
the land. Lately, I've started to plant a lot of seeds from good 
hardy, self-tending fruit and nut trees/shrubs.

I discover that, after a cooking session, and with my cabin good and 
warm for the next few hours, I can put in a fresh load of wood, then 
close my stove down for a brief while, and then look inside and find 
a good weight of charred, but not very far gone wood. Though now 
mainly charcoal, it still retains much of its structure, as Sean was 
describing, and has only had a short heat period at fairly low 
temperature, with restricted airflow. Without waiting for this mass 
to cool, I lift it out with blacksmith's tongs, and sprinkle it 
lightly with water to quench the remaining burn.

Thus, just as an afterthought from my cooking/heating, I can get 
several pounds a day of mixed-source lump charcoal. It's that simple. 
Doing it every day, as one of the daily routines, builds up a stock 
pretty quickly. This material is now receiving light hand breakdown, 
to small lumps down to dust, and then going straight into my compost 
bins, to mix with the compost. The compost where I'm working gets 
everything from small-holding vegetable waste, to household waste, to 
visitor-refectory waste, to substantial amounts of humanure from the 
handsome four-chamber composting johns that we have here for the 
annual stream of visitors. Lately, I've been adding shots of 
forest-floor litter as well.

Can I point up one phrase in that preceding paragraph: '......several 
pounds a day......' Since I began to learn about terra preta, and 
started seeing charcoal as carbon retrieved from the atmospheric 
carbon-cycle WHICH CAN THEN BE SEQUESTERED LONG-TERM JUST BY PUTTING 
IT IN THE GARDEN SOIL I realised with some astonishment just how much 
carbon I personally can pull out of the air and re-sequester: 
probably tons-per-year! And that's just one person working a very 
low-tech, low impact method that fits in easily with my life.

Consider the idea of - what? - several hundred million 
gardeners/small farmers, maybe, making little batches of char in this 
backyard way, some of them using the smallish-scale integrated 
systems that the terra preta apostles are now developing, some of 
them just doing even smaller scale charring like mine, over and over 
again, for years, and burying it in their - necessarily - organic 
soil. We might make some dent in the annual 6 gigatons. And anyway, 
the near future looks as if it might be bringing us all sorts of 
entirely new experiences which should seriously reduce the amount of 
fossil carbon, and the amount of exuberant over-prosperity, that we 
(some of us, anyway) have had to play with. Also, lately, I've 
started to doubt that our global population will actually  get much 
higher, before it starts to trend down again, because the death rate 
has finally overtaken the birthrate. There's persuasive evidence that 
our current human population overshoot beyond the Earth's balanced 
carrying capacity is strongly correlated with the global 
energy-use-per-capita index, which started down from its all time 
high quite a few years ago, and doesn't seem likely ever to go up 
again. There's a lot of background research to support this sketch of 
trends, with which I won't load this post. But the general idea is 
that the 6 gigatons might reduce spontaneously. And as for 
motivation: when all the Walmarts are dead and gone, and the 
ten-thousand-mile Caesar Salad is an oddity of history, we'll grow 
our own food of necessity. I guy from Iowa whom I met on a language 
course in Firenze once told me a country saying from his home turf: 
'Root, hog, or die!' In that situation, so long as people know about 
terra preta, they'll be making it every chance they get, I think, 
just to enhance their food harvesting.

On the other hand, barring a total, worldwide collapse of industrial 
civilisation, which seems perhaps one of the less likely scenarios, I 
suppose we'll be doing a transition into something that you might 
call a deep-green version, probably with less humans altogether. In 
that case, the sort of moderate scale, precisely controlled hitech 
integrated systems that Sean and others are working on are going to 
be necessary and widely welcomed, I think.  What I'm saying here is 
that the 'peasant-style' creation of terra preta that I'm working on, 
and the somewhat more hitech methods will need to function side by 
side, to service the various permacultural scales on which people 
find themselves working.

A couple of other points: I believe silicates are a common ingredient 
in all grasses, not just bamboo, which is why so many grazing 
creatures need continually growing teeth, to combat the abrasive 
quality of the silicate content. So clearly its a big part of the 
natural systems, and probably not a worrisome stuff.  And, regarding 
coppicing and pollarding: The traditional form in Britain has been 
what's called 'coppice with standards', where about four big trees 
per acre are left standing tall, for a long-term timber-harvesting 
cycle, whilst the rest of the trees are cut to coppice stools, and 
cropped for regrowth shoots on anything up from a four year cycle, 
depending on speed of regrowth of the species, and purpose of the 
harvest. If I were a tree, I might quite approve of being coppiced, I 
think, since the stools live for very much longer than trees left to 
run through their natural life-cycles, and if the coppicing ever 
stops, they then regrow to make big trees again: arboreal 
hyperlongevity! This kind of forestry never died out completely in 
Britain, and is making a modest comeback now. And as for the green 
lobbies: well, here at least we rather like the idea, I think. 
Cofion,   Rhisiart.