Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This is definitely not a case of, “Problem solved!” At this stage, the pathways outlined in the book represent a theoretically possible set of strategies that could help us escape the climate trap—if we can summon the courage to change not just policies, but significant and deeply engrained aspects of our industrial ways of life.
Wherever there is a lawn, a tree and possibly a small garden, or even a tiny strip along the foundations of a building, there should be a native shrub or two, or possibly more.
The US could meet its pledge to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement through “natural climate solutions” (NCS), a new study suggests. NCS comprise a group of techniques that reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, or boost carbon uptake from land and wetlands through changes to the way they are managed.
Forests containing several tree species could store twice as much carbon as the average monoculture plantation, research finds. A study looking at the carbon storage of forests in southern China finds that each additional tree species introduced to a plantation could add 6% to its total carbon stocks.
With more careful measurements, I or others could see if we could use these techniques on some kind of fast-growing wood, like willow, and see if we could do with terra preta in temperate climates what Amazonian tribes did in the rainforest.
The central, overarching question on which all sides apparently agree is this: To avoid disastrous climate change and environmental destruction, how are we humans to manage our land such that the land regenerates, biodiversity increases, and carbon is sequestered?
Criticism of model reliance on BECCS has led researchers to examine the potential of “natural climate solutions” (NCS) to remove CO2 in the atmosphere through reforestation, land-use change and other ecosystem-based approaches.
In a grand experiment, California switched on a fleet of high-tech greenhouse gas removal machines last month. Funded by the state’s cap-and-trade program, they’re designed to reverse climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These wonderfully complex machines are more high-tech than anything humans have designed. They’re called plants.
This is where large-scale regenerative land management comes into play: it is the most effective tool for carbon sequestration that presently exists. Carbon sequestration through natural means includes not only vitally important conservation and restoration, but necessitates incorporation into all landscape management.
I started out with considerable sympathy towards carbon farming and regenerative agriculture, but with a degree of scepticism about some of the loftier claims made on its behalf by regenerative agriculture proponents (henceforth RAPs). And in fact that’s pretty much where I’ve ended up too, but with a somewhat clearer sense of where my grounds for scepticism lie.
I am a farmer and that is where my world begins. What is an agriculture? I say it is a culture of cities, towns and villages, bridges, roads, canals, harbours – of trades’ people and the trades, which have been created by the specialised cultivation of fields. The industrial revolution was a revolution within agriculture – germinated by fossil fuels, so that today, nearly every culture on Earth is an agriculture.
Recently I’ve learned to see some good in the approximately 40 million acres of lawn that engulf the residential landscape in the US. Caveats remain, serious ones, which I’ll get to in a bit; but the truth is, your lawn, my lawn, that of the business down the street or the corporate campus in a nearby suburb, serves as a carbon sink of modestly robust proportions.
