Greetings fellow Bioneers!
Ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions have been warming our planet at an alarming rate for decades. Reducing or even eliminating carbon pollution won't fix the whole problem at this point—we need to be rapidly scaling solutions that actively draw down carbon dioxide. That is exactly what the proponents of carbon farming are managing to do, and they're working on taking it to scale. By sequestering carbon from the atmosphere back into the soil, it’s possible to not only repair overworked, neglected farm and range lands and benefit plant life, but to also reverse some of the damage we’ve already inflicted on our climate system. Learn more about the benefits of carbon farming in our special media collection.
In this week’s newsletter, you’ll hear from the leading researchers and advocates of carbon farming on its many benefits, and will see how it can be used to benefit people and the planet.
Don’t forget to purchase tickets to Bioneers 2018! Ticket prices will go up on October 1, so snag yours before the end of the month!
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The Big Question: It's Time For An Update
Climate change is one of the most troubling issues our planet is currently facing. Though the burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to our rapidly warming planet, it’s not the only culprit. What modern industry has released 135 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution? Hint: It got its rise in Mesopotamia. (Read to the bottom of this email to find the answer.)
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Wise Words
“We are working with a carbon-farm plan for a 40,000-acre ranch. This ranch can sequester enough carbon to offset the emissions of the wool production, so every pound of wool represents nine pounds of carbon sunk into the ground. If we implement the practices of the carbon-farm plan, we can have clothing with a net-negative carbon impact producing climate beneficial wool.”
—Rebecca Burgess, founder and executive director of Fibershed, on using carbon farming practices strategically to sequester carbon and relocalize economies through the production of consumer goods. Read more here. |
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| Managing the Soil for Carbon is Good for the Climate |
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Video to Watch: Curbing Climate Change From the Soil Up
Dr. Whendee Silver of UC Berkley is researching the bio-geochemical effects of climate change and human impacts on the environment, and the potential for mitigating these effects. Dr. Silver is working with the Marin Carbon Project to establish a scientific basis for carbon farming practices that if implemented globally could have a significant impact on mitigating climate change.
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Take Action: End Industrial Meat
In an effort to curb the harmful effects of industrially produced meat, the Center for Food Safety is encouraging people to take a stand and sign a pledge to cut personal meat consumption in half. The campaign’s goal is to address “the environmental, social, human health, and economic consequences of intensive animal production.” To do so, it’s raising awareness through the pledge by not only stressing the importance of eating less meat, but also by choosing humanely farmed meat and increasing the consumption of plant-based foods rich in protein. Ready to take the pledge for a greener, healthier diet (and planet!)? Find out more here. |
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Affect Change: Bioneers Youth Leadership Program
Jodie Geddes, a Bioneers youth presenter, is helping shift the focus of justice from punishment to healing. Her work with Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY), focuses on tapping into the capacity of fellow community members to hold space for and with each other. RJOY’S work in West Oakland Middle School has eliminated violence and expulsions and reduced suspension rates by 87 percent. Geddes will be leading the Tell Your Story workshop at the 2018 Bioneers Conference during which youth can share strategies aimed at interrupting tragic cycles of violence, incarceration, and wasted lives. Learn more about her work with RJOY in this interview.
The Youth Leadership Program offers many powerful learning and networking opportunities to young people. We give out more than 400 scholarships to young activists and leaders, prioritizing youth coming from communities on the front lines of climate crises. This is only possible with your support: To contribute to providing youth scholarships to Bioneers click here! |
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This Week on Bioneers Radio & Podcast
How does a virtue become a vice? How does a basic building block of life turn into a threat to life? And how do you turn that vice back into a virtue? In this half-hour we visit with two unlikely pathfinders who are helping to revolutionize farming. Calla Rose Ostrander and John Wick of the Marin Carbon Project are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back where it belongs: in the soil. In so doing, they’re also revitalizing the soil, conserving water, and building agricultural resilience. Scaling up these revolutionary regenerative methods can offset the climate destabilization, which that threatens to confound agriculture and endanger our food supply.
Subscribe to the Bioneers podcast now: iTunes | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube |
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Person to Know: Paul Muller
A partner at Full Belly Farm in California’s Capay Valley, Paul Muller has been farming organically for 33 years. Full Belly Farm is designed to maximize the layers of life per acre—plant, soil microbes, insects, and animals—while harvesting as much sunlight as possible and growing over 70 different fruit and vegetable crops. Here, Muller explains how Full Belly Farm is working to sequester soil carbon.
Most landscapes have been degraded by human use. We must now try to keep as much energy in the system as possible. In the last 150 years in this country, the knowledge of managing systems in a way that is scale appropriate to human beings who were intimately tied to a place has been diminished, and that has destroyed rural America. Who is going to manage carbon on the farm? The human component of that kind of management system has to be regenerated.
In the changing landscape of California agriculture, increasingly there are people who don’t actually farm the land, who are landlords and who hire someone else to farm. Oprah Winfrey owns a good deal of land in the Dixon area where she’s farming almonds. It’s doubtful that she does a lot of almond farming herself. TIAA-CREF is a large institutional retirement fund who is growing 25-30,000 acres of almonds. People like that need to develop the tools and the consciousness of stewardship. But they only see it as an investment. There are hundreds of thousands of acres being farmed by people who are only trying to maximize their return. Carbon doesn’t fit in that equation. What fits in that equation is how many nuts or how many tons of hay or whatever crop you are harvesting off of that piece of ground.
Modern farming systems are based on the plough. All the science and tools came from the notion that to turn the soil was the way you made agriculture productive, and that the best way to manage land is to keep it bare. The opportunity being missed is that bare land does not harvest sunlight. The bare field is not taking CO2 out of the air, the soil micro life is not being fed, life is not being supported in the soil. We have a lot of work to do to convince farmers that they’re losing money if the rainfall that hits bare ground doesn’t infiltrate because of poor soil structure due to lack of microbial life. Agriculture is a fairly violent form of livelihood, if you don’t think about all the life in the farming environment. We have to think about solving for a different pattern. We have to think about how we value carbon, how we measure it, how we begin to put that into the economic equation. Read more here. |
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In San Francisco from October 23 to 26, Social Capital Markets will host its annual conference on impact investing and social enterprise. The multi-day event will bring together innovators in finance, entrepreneurship, business, government, and philanthropy with interests in various social and environmental issues in an effort to merge money with meaning. Want to attend SOCAP18? Use code “MP_Bioneers” or purchase your tickets at this link for a discounted price. |
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Regenerative Agriculture goes far beyond organic standards by also placing a strong emphasis on practices that boost soil health. It enhances the soil’s capacity to capture carbon and thereby helps mitigate climate change. It restores biodiversity above and below the ground, creating resilient farming systems that support ecosystems. Doniga Markegard of Markegard Family Grass-Fed in Pescadero, CA, Tim LaSalle of Chico State’s Regenerative Agriculture program and Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Sebastopol, CA’s Singing Frogs Farm, will discuss this important issue at the 2018 Bioneers Conference. Find out more here. |
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The Big Question, Answered: It's Time For An Update
According to Rattan Lal, a soil scientist at Ohio State University, agricultural practices and animal husbandry have released an estimated 135 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Plowing, overgrazing, and clear-cutting have contributed to erosion and degradation of the soil, which in turn releases carbon into the atmosphere. These practices have remained popular since the rise of farming in Mesopotamia, which scientists have been able to track thanks to air samples trapped in ice cores from Greenland thousands of years ago. Read more at the New York Times. |
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