permaculture

[Jason Gerhardt <jasongerhardt@gmail.com>]

While I am neither a fan nor critic of biochar, I'd like to propose that as
permaculturists we stop bandwagoning techniques. Permaculturists are
supposed to be critical thinkers. I am grateful there are both sides being
voiced here for biochar from that perspective. I see more and more that
biochar and/or hugelkultur or whatever are becoming the new herb spiral,
and every permaculture site has to have an herb spiral, right? I teach that
Everything is Appropriate Somewhere Not Everywhere. Relative Location
doesn't seem strong enough, and I get annoyed by clients who come to me
after browsing the large permaculture websites and swear that hugelkulture
is a good idea in the desert. This technique bandwagoning is just going to
discourage more people and cost them more money. So let's be careful out
there how we represent permaculture design.

>From my experience and research in biochar it seems there is a strong doubt
that it is beneficial in cold climates.

I definitely see biochar becoming commercialized as the next panacea to our
problems. And I hope we can also see that all biochar isn't created
equally. A biochar salesman approached a large client of mine recently and
I had to sit through the whole presentation about a week ago and cringe the
entire time as it was snakeoiled to us as the only thing that will save
humanity and soils.

As to beetle kill and biochar, well, it's a lot more complex than solely
solving the carbon sequestration problem. Here on the Front Range of
Colorado we just experienced a 1,000 year rain event and had massive
flooding, partly due to devegetated slopes from pine beetle and wildfire.
If all those dead trees were removed, the flooding problem would be much
worse and practically permanent as all those trees are second growth
anyway, meaning there is very little left in the form of nutrients in those
soils to facilitate a third growth. So removing those trees and turning
them into biochar to apply to big ag lands (or sell in little baggies at
the hardware store) is just increasing erosion exponentially. I can
certainly think of better ways of sequestering carbon for ag lands than
that. That said biochar is an excellent solution somewhere, just not
everywhere.

Jason Gerhardt