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  • From: Darren Doherty <darren@permaculture.biz>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Carbon farming as solution to climate change?
  • Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2010 08:33:57 +1000

Thanks Toby,

No insult was felt from Rain's post: I am indeed glad that he voiced the
opinion that he did such that I could respond and that you could too
Toby....

Look from my perspective its a clear issue that we all have to take on in
every activity: the Permaculture Ethics provide this blueprint and for me I
take them very seriously...the Holistic Management Decision Making framework
only aids this process in determining for me (and many others) the way to
ensuring that they decisions we make around things like air travel, burning
brush, felling this tree or that, using cement, flail mowing, sowing or
grazing etc etc. effect positively the Primary Client (Gaia), its
inhabitants and their financial situations.

Of course I have been charged with being Carbon Negative (my preference of
semantry!) many times and I have done the math many times to prove that I
and my family emit far, far less carbon than we sequester: especially in
soil carbon but also in vegetation stores (of millions of trees actually -
about 2.5million or so at last count)....what concerns me is how much Carbon
send out of the mouths without returning it to the lithosphere (Carbon
positivity!) and that is the ultimate challenge to all of us in every
activity: that's being a conscious being in this day and age....

So moving on from the adversarial to the action-based process I commend to
all to get moving on working in whatever way you can from the policy level
through to the land on getting ourselves and Gaia back into some kind of
order: its the least we can all do to reply to our wholesale insult to
her....

All the best,

Darren

On 20 April 2010 08:11, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> wrote:

> Kudos to Darren for making a non-defensive and polite reply to Rain's
> insult (intended or not) to his work. I can't imagine someone as
> sophisticated and deeply experienced in permaculture as Darren ever
> suggesting that carbon farming is the one "cure" to be "marketed," or that
> it excuses continuing business as usual.
>
> I'd like to see us speak from a place of respect for the other people
> practicing permaculture here, instead of assuming that they are ignorant
> about very basic principles. Darren posts have been consistently of high
> quality here, so first hand observation ought to take precedence over
> 2nd-hand stories.
>
> And if Darren gives up air travel, there will be far fewer carbon farmers
> in the world, thus less sequestration. I'll bet that Darren's net carbon
> footprint, given all the countless thousands of trees planted through his
> work, and the number of people he's reached, is very far in the negative.
> I'll quote Larry Santoyo here: It's not your footprint that matters, it's
> your handprint.
>
> Let's keep the big picture in view.
>
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 19, 2010, at 11:32 AM, jamesdavid Sneed wrote:
>
> >
> > Rain, I have a couple thoughts on carbon renewal in our soils. It is a
> valid idea, but I've adapted it to my own patterns as a result of decades of
> food-growing from Oregon to Alaska.
> > First, I have grown cautious about using, on a global scale, any one
> "cure" for our long-term screw-ups. That's partially because a problem that
> is several thousand years in the making cannot be fixed in a decade or so of
> effort, and also because I have noticed that every time we use technology to
> fix what we've screwed up, we make it worse or create new problems. Also,
> there seems to be a tendency even in organic food production to want to do
> everything on a grand scale instead of as a garden.
> > The second thought is that instead of using a complex system that can be
> sold in workshops or books as the "cure", I found ways to incorporate the
> carbon usage into simple gardening. I use a woodstove, and instead of
> burning everything to fine ash, I clean out the stove when there is still a
> lot of charcoal present, and put it into the compost to feed the microbes.
> The potash with it doesn't seem to slow the microbes and worms a bit. The
> chunks of carbon are slowly consumed, a long-term supply of energy for
> microbes and the life forms that live upon them.
> > Many pre-metal native groups around the world used limited burning to
> prepare temporary fields, and they didn't garden them for more than a year
> or two afterward, so they didn't wear out the soil's supply of the nutrients
> that were released by the fire. Often these plots were less than a quarter
> acre, were gardened intensively for one to two year, and then allowed to
> regrow while they still had enough nutrients left to get things started,
> growing soft hardwoods that deposited many leaves, and then rotted
> themselves into the soil.
> > I spend a lot of time sitting in Nature and watching how Nature grows
> plants and animals. Our gardens should be a reflection of Nature, us in the
> garden and a garden within ourselves.
> >> Date: Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:52:04 -0700
> >> From: raincascadia@yahoo.com
> >> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> >> Subject: [permaculture] Carbon farming as solution to climate change?
> >>
> >> I recently talked to a fellow permaculturist that attended a
> presentation by Darren Dougherty on carbon farming as a solution to climate
> change. I doubt his perspective was representative of everyone who was
> present, but he was touting carbon farming as a cure-all, in the same vein
> as a technological fix that absolves us of the need to make radical social
> and personal lifestyle changes (like minimizing air travel). My
> understanding is that carbon farming has the potential to be a big part of
> the solution, but is limited mostly to temperate soils that are capable of
> storing carbon (without the more intensive charcoal method) and is still in
> the beginning stages of investigation. It would require the same level of
> political will that the other solutions would require in order to get
> landowners and farmers around the world to actually implement it, so really
> has no strategic advantage over the other solutions. In my opinion, almost
> all the changes
> >> that are needed to stop climate change have side benefits and should be
> pursued regardless of climate change, so carbon farming is not special in
> this regard. Could somebody give me a realistic assessment of the potential
> of carbon farming?
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Rain
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> http://venaurafarm.blogspot.com
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> >> And: http://www.richsoil.com
> >
> > _________________________________________________________________
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> > And: http://www.richsoil.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
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> Subscribe or unsubscribe here:
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> Google command to search archives:
> site: https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture searchstring
> More information:
> http://venaurafarm.blogspot.com
> permaculture forums http://www.permies.com/permaculture-forums
> And: http://www.richsoil.com
>



--
Hooroo,
Darren J. Doherty

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