[Terrapreta] What's Up Doc?

[Mark Ludlow]

Hi Michael,

 

The way I gather things is that the "active" phase of Amazonian soil
transformation only existed for about five-centuries, say 400 to 900 A.D.
Just like "sodbusters" that transformed the prairies west of the Mississippi
into farms, later civilizations exploited the earlier happenstance creation
of high-carbon soils.

 

Weighing the environmental fate of feedlot organics is a no brainer: there's
the alternative of anaerobic digestion (advocated by ruminant voters) or a
tempered alternative: sequestration of a portion of the carbon with the
expectation that it will return a benefit to the soil on which we all
depend.

 

Rest assured that not all Terra Preta resulted from hardwood (towering,
massive trees) carbonization. Primitive cultures exist in a delicate energy
balance (so do we, unknowingly). There's not a lot of excess energy
available to chop-down a big, silica-laden hardwood tree, just to torch it
off.

 

As a modern civilization, our task is to recreate the upside that primitive
societies likely created serendipitously. Will bullshit (or human shit, for
that matter) be transformable into active carbon? Why not? Every crop
'waste' should have a terminal destination as activated carbon, after the
energy to transform it is spent and the excess energy remaining is
productively used. So what if we  return 50% of the carbon to the
atmosphere. It's the cost of making the soil (on which we all depend) more
productive.

 

Here's the equation: we take CO2 from the atmosphere to grow food for life
and return the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 or methane; or we grow food
for life and return a portion of the carbon to the atmosphere as CO2 or
methane and improve the productivity of the soil in the process
(presumably).

 

Amazonian Terra Preta? What? Me Worry? Is there any evidence to suggest that
generic carbon, from whatever source, has a deleterious effect upon the
soil? If origin pedigree is critical than this should be a topic of the
list. Most of the "unknowns" are unknowns we already know about.

 

Best,

Mark

From: Michael Bailes [mailto:michaelangelica at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 1:15 AM
To: mark at ludlow.com; terra pretta group
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] What's Up Doc?

 

 

On 18/04/2008, Mark Ludlow <mark at ludlow.com> wrote:

Dear Kevin,


 

You make some good points Mark


Should we be focusing on speculative accounts of Amazonian pre-1400 history
and archeology or should we be looking at the practical benefits of adding
char ( and SOM and perhaps some clays) to modern day soils. We have plenty
of modern day science to support a case for char.

One problem I think is if we make char from waste stream (feed-lots etc)
some research may need to be done to see if this sort of char works
differently from Amazonian hardwood char.
michael b

 


-- 
Michael the Archangel
How strange and sad for the species - have people forgotten that they can
always escape to the fairy dell and talk to the ducks?
-Leunig, 2008 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /attachments/20080418/ffd54c01/attachment.html