[Terrapreta] Is terra preta too complex for environmental organisations?

[lou gold]

Lorenzo,

I'll help in whatever way that I can. I think I'm best as an editor.

I share your perception and I am equally challenged by the seeming lack of
interest among green organizations. Let me take a moment to offer some
speculations as to a possible explanation for this situation:

I write as one who spent nearly three decades solidly in the nucleus of
environmental organizations seeking to preserve nature against the
onslaughts of expanding populations, rapacious profit-driven technologies
and runaway consumption. Despite all the talk of a possible mix between
conservation and sustainability, each year the bottom line showed that there
were fewer primary forests, fewer wild places, less biodiversity and more
polluted water, more fouled air, more sprawl, etc. Truly, it has seemed like
a war between humans and nature for a long time, leading one to speculate
that Malthus might have been right -- humans like other species overshoot
the carrying capacity of their niche and then crash. BOOM!

I don't believe that the environmental movement was able to offer a way out
of the dilemma. There simply was no real constituency for placing limits on
growth. Thus, it was quite natural to fall back on double-pronged approach
of trying to reduce the human footprint through greater energy efficiency
and creating protected areas that were off-limits to human development such
as under the US Wilderness Act.  In general, development was viewed as
something to be preferably avoided but at least regulated and controlled. Of
course, it didn't work.

Because the green movement is broader than the environmental movement,
tensions became very apparent as the seemingly elitist notions of a pure
preservationist approach came into conflict with notions of social justice
that demanded that there be development to eliminate the terrible poverty
and suffering that now afflicts a large portion of the world's population.
Sustainability became a magic word even though it was difficult to know
exactly how to achieve it in the face of the pressures of population and
profit which seemed always to trump it. The environmental movement
constantly veered back toward the issues of limiting population, slowing
runaway consumption, improving energy efficiency and protecting wild areas
while social justice movements focused of limiting the power of the global
corporations, regulating the inequities of market capitalism, warning of the
dangers of high-tech solutions (such as GM foods) and promoting land
redistribution to the landless.

Your search results among green groups does not surprise me Lorenzo as I
found something similar when I searched the press releases and articles of
the world hunger grassroots activist coalition presently calling itself
Terra Preta and found that somehow they were not discussing biochar. Today,
both the environmental movement and the social justice movement seem to have
an enormous distrust for what might be called an agricultural solution. They
have good reason for this distrust given the structure and power of the
agricultural-industrial-complex. One only needs to look at how biofuels were
twisted toward corn ethanol in the US and at the economic development
alliance between Mato Grosso Soy King Maggi and ADM and Cargill in Brazil.

The influence of this agricultural power elite, which is supported globally
by subsidies of more than one billion dollars each day, is awesome. It
distorts everything from the quality of food we eat to who gets to eat and
who does not to the quality of soil, air and water. I guess that the green
movement fears that fiber-based solutions in an energy hungry world will
produce moncultural colonization of more land in ways highly destructive of
forests and bio-diversity, exascerbate the food crisis and continue to
disregard or harm the poor who live close to the land. This is the current
charge being leveled against biofuels.

I know you understand this Lorenzo and I want to say that I feel that you
and your colleagues at Biochar.fund have provided the clearest, best written
and most attractive visionary picture of how things might be different. Poor
people and degraded land go together. Healing the land feeds more people,
provides new energy sources, slows deforestation, creates local economies,
etc, etc, etc. And it even addresses global warming. How could it be any
more perfect?!

Well, it needs a constituency for the massive R&D that seems necessary to
discover exactly where, when and how biochar works --  something like GE
going after wind power because it can make the turbines or Google going
after solar energy because the Internet will soon demand half of all the
electricity presently generated worldwide. This is the kind of necessity
that mothers invention and generates investments of all kinds, public and
private.

In the case of biochar, I am not sure of the role of the green
organizations. They do not seem to have a very deep reach into the
agricultural sector at this time. Surely there is overlap at the edge, such
as with the permaculture movement, the organic food growers, etc but these
are not the movers and shakers when it comes to passing a farm bill -- the
recent reduction of the proposed agrichar research budget from 500 to 3
million USD is a case in point. I wonder if the environmental organizations
simply feel that they can exert much more influence in the energy sector
than in the agricultural sector. Or perhaps they are fearful of becoming a
green-washing device for something like corn ethanol.

However, James Hansen has now placed agriculture and forestry on the center
stage of the search for global warming solutions. When deforestation was
recognized as a great source of greenhouse gases, it triggered an effective
coalition of tropical forest countries and environmentalists for REDD
payments to avoid being this part of the problem. The IPCC is responding.
Now we need to stimulate a similar lobby in support of carbon sequestration
in the soil to change the agriculture practices of these countries, not only
from slash-and-burn to slash-and-char, but by linking biofuel production to
biochar soil amendments thus making these emergent agricultural economies
part of the solution.

Someone has written that in the new global economic patterns, China will be
the workshop, India the back office, and Brazil the farm. Commodity
production is surely driving the current Brazilian economic expansion. Do
you think that green groups can be allied with emergent agricultural
economies by somehow linking biofuel production with biochar for carbon
sequestration and soil enhancement?

Right now a country like Brazil is looking at fantastic opportunities to
market its very efficient sugarcane ethanol and it is also having to defend
against a broadside attack against biofuels in general coming from both the
environmental and social justice components of the green movement. It
strikes me that massive R&D program under a premier tropical agricultural
research organization such as EMBRAPA might be a wonderful response. Just as
the US once championed its Marshall Plan or space program, Brazil in
alliance with other tropical countries might spearhead an effort to change
agriculture from soil depleting to soil enhancing while providing food, fuel
and carbon sequestration.

This alliance of food, fuel and soil is what I'm hoping might happen. I am
totally out of my depth as a soil expert policy wonk. I would welcome
anyone's suggestions as to how to achieve the necessary R&D that will move
all this from speculation to practice.

hugs,

lou











On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 4:02 AM, Laurens Rademakers <lrademakers at biopact.com>
wrote:

>  Okay, let's get real. I just did a random check of some of the large
> "green" organisations that came to mind (from Greenpeace to the World
> Resources Institute), to see whether their libraries and search engines
> turned up anything dealing with biochar, agrichar or terra preta. Nothing.
> Did a search for "carbon-negative" or "negative emissions" and a host of
> other search terms. Rien du tout!
>
> The news about terra preta should have reached these organisations by now.
> But they seem to stick to every type of renewable energy, as long as it
> doesn't have anything to do with biomass - so that includes biochar, even
> though biochar could yield carbon-negative energy, which other renewables
> can't.
>
> What's going on? Is the concept too complex? Is it too new? Are these
> organisations afraid they can't explain this to their readership/members?
>
> I'm growing so impatient... Terra preta must really begin to make an impact
> amongst environmental organisations, policy makers and green lobbies. But it
> isn't happening.
>
> I suggest we draw up a list of green organisations and send them a leaflet
> in which we explain the concept and its potential in brief.
>
> Anyone willing to put some time in this? I have some graphic design skills
> and could make a nice brochure. If someone wants to help with the writing,
> let me know...
>
> Best, Lorenzo
>
>
>
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>



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