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  • From: "Steven & Margaret Eisenhauer" <eisenhauerdesign@earthlink.net>
  • To: "'permaculture'" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Carbon farming as solution to climate change?
  • Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2010 18:56:55 -0400

Hello,
I have been generating charcoal with my down draft gasification boiler and
composting with it. I will be amending our 10 acres of orchard and gardens
with it. I hope it will help with our heavy clay soils. With all the talk
of carbon farming it got me thinking about the last 1000 - 2000 years of
traditional farming that relied on the cycle of rotational cropping with the
grazing of sod as a fertility builder, resulting in the sequestration of
carbon as organic matter. Then add in all the charcoal sequestered as terra
preta over centuries or millennia. I wonder what the cumulative effect of
this carbon sequestration has had on climate over such a long period. I
gather that industrial farming has been running on the burning off of this
carbon resulting in depleted soils and lost fertility as well as wide spread
disease from under mineralized soils.



-----Original Message-----
From: permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:permaculture-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Cory
Sent: Thursday, April 22, 2010 10:59 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Carbon farming as solution to climate change?

Anybody working with Terra preta to sequester carbon/build soils? We're
experimenting with it in florida's semitropical sandy soils

Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 21, 2010, at 9:08 AM, Holger Hieronimi <holger@tierramor.org> wrote:

Hola-

Like every strategy in permaculture, the power lies in relationships and a
systemic perspective -

There always exists the danger of over-promotion one "solution" (f. ex. :
Carbon sequestering in soils by raising organic matter), if we don´t put it
in context with all the other proposals that permaculture offers- ethical
and design principles of PC provide an essential framework here, as Darren
points out-

I recently purchased "Priority One" by Alan Yeomans (often cited as one of
the basic books en relation to carbon farming) and am quite surprised &
intrigued by the authors insistence in nuclear energy and biofuels. He gets
even so far, that he denounces a conspiracy of Oil Companies and
Environmental Activists TOGETHER, against Nuclear Energy.

O.K, this guy is a nuclear physicist and probably defends his playground,
but it seems that the "big message" ("sequestering all excess CO2 in the
atmosphere with agriculture in 10 years") gets diluted and loses
considerable credibility and even relevance, if this means that we have to
build hundreds of nuclear power plants and cultivate biodiesel ...

Addressing climate change without considering resource constrains, is a well
explored strategy used by governments, corporations and other technocrats.
Its part of the problem.

Regards

holger








El 13:59, Darren Doherty escribió:
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




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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:
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And: http://www.richsoil.com





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