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With Grand Theft Auto 5, Rockstar has tried to reimagine the game in a number of ways:

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The Gameworld is beautiful, massive and diverse.

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You gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. If you ain’t gardening you ain’t gangsta.

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Get gangsta with your shovel, k? And let that be your weapon of choice.

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Y’know, the joy, the pride, and the honor in growing your own food.

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Can I get a show of hands for everyone in the audience who has heard of biochar before?

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Cool – give a little wave!

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So, dissecting the word “biochar” – it’s just ‘biological’ plus ‘charcoal.’ Put ‘em together and you get biochar.

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Biochar is charcoal that’s added to soil, and when you add biochar to soil, it sequesters carbon for on the order of a thousand years.

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Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land.

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They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed, several hundred million years later. How is that possible?

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It’s possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes,

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pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxylates,

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which makes the rocks crumble, and is the first step in the generation of soil.

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Generally what you see in green is not desertifying and what you see in brown is.

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These are by far, the greatest areas of the earth.

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About 2/3rds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying.

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But I have for you a very simple message,

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that offers more hope than you can imagine.

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Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert –

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South Central Los Angeles.

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Home of the drive-thru, and the drive-by.

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Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys!

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People are dying from curable diseases in South Central L.A.

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The obesity rate in my neighborhood is like 5 times higher than what it is in, say,

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Beverly Hills, which is like, probably, 8-10 miles away.

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How would you feel, if you had no access to healthy food?

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If every time you walk out your door,

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you see the ill effects of poor food on your neighborhood?

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So I figured that the problem is the solution.

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So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house.

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It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway,

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it’s like 150 feet by 10 feet.

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Thing is, its owned by the city, but you have to maintain it.

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So I’m like, “Cool! I can do whatever the hell I want!”

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So me and my group, LA Green Grounds, we got together,

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and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine.

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And the garden – it was beautiful. 
And then somebody complained. 


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The city came down on me. Ha!

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And basically gave me a citation saying 
I had to remove my garden. Come on, really?


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A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?

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And I was like, “Cool, bring it!”

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So the LA Times got hold of it, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org 


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and with 900 signatures we were a success. 
We had a victory on our hands.

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LA leads the United States in vacant lots that the City actually owns.

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They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. That’s 20 Central Parks.

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That’s enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants! Why in the hell would they not okay this?

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Biochar offers one piece of the puzzle.

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It has its roots in ancient Amazonian agricultural practices,

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where a brilliant group of entrepreneurs, about 7000 years ago, would bury charcoal in the soil for generations –

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rendering it so fertile to this day that people actually dig it up and sell it.

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They call these soils Terra Preta, which means ‘dark earth.’

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Amazonian soils are notoriously infertile,

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there’s so much life drawing off of them,

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that most of the nutrients that are in them are in the plants, not in the soil.

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So, it makes agriculture down there difficult.

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But the ancient Amazonians found the secret to rich soils.

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And they’re actually calling this The Secret of El Dorado.

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Back in the 1500s, when Spanish explorers went down into the Amazon,

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they came back explaining they’d found these 100,000-person towns

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with beautiful, agriculturally-engineered landscapes and large causeways between them.

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Explorers went back around forty years later and they found diddly squat;


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the natives had been wiped out by smallpox.

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But even modern anthropologists dismissed it as myth,

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because the Amazonian soils are so notoriously infertile

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that there’s no way they could have sustained that level of population.

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So they thought the explorers had just been lying to impress people.

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It wasn’t until the early 2000s that people started making the connection

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between all the places where the explorers had described finding civilizations,

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and all the places where this charcoal had been buried.

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So, the practice of adding charcoal to the soils was able

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to make the environment able to sustain larger populations

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than ever thought possible.

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And this ancient wisdom is coming back to life, via biochar.

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Biochar builds soil structure.

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This is a picture of biochar under a microscope.

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You can see it is very porous.

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One gram of biochar can have a surface area of up to 400 meters squared.

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It’s basically the same as taking something the size of a basketball court

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and folding it up into something the size of a sugar cube.

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This creates a home, it’s basically like a coral reef for soil;

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it creates a home for microorganisms and microrhizal fungi

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to come in and make their home in these little biochar apartments

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and they’ll stay there and build this structure for on the order of a thousand years.

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In addition, biochar also absorbs water, like a sponge.

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And it holds onto nutrients like a magnet,

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preventing them from leaching off into the ground water.

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All of this can lead to crop yield increases of 15 to 200%, depending on the original soil quality.

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Now I care a lot about pyrolysis.

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Pyrolysis is basically biomass plus heat minus oxygen,

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and you’re left with a very stable form of carbon that’s excellent for soils.

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Pyrolysis is how biochar comes into being,

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and biochar is what I have, for the time being, dedicated my life to.

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Biochar basically takes the fossil carbon emission cycle,

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which takes carbon out of the ground and into the air,

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and flips it around, and takes carbon out of the air –

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through the help of our plant friends –

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and puts it back into the ground.

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We have to put the carbon back, like good little kids with our toys,

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and biochar is the way to do it.

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And, studies show that if this were globally deployed,

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it could actually offset 12% of human greenhouse gas emissions annually.

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We have a long way to go from here to there, but – the potential is huge.

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I love a challenge and saving the earth is probably a good one.

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I’ve often wondered, if there was a United Organization Of Organisms,

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otherwise known as “UH OO” (uh oh),

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and every organism had a right to vote,

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would we be voted on the planet or off the planet?

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I want to present to you some micrological solutions based on mycelium.

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The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together,

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it’s extremely tenacious, it holds up to 30,000 times its mass.

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They’re the grand, molecular dis-assemblers of nature: the soil magicians.

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They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth.

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There is a multidirectional transfer of nutrients between plants mitigated by the mitigated by the mycelium,

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so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from Alder and Birch trees

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to Hemlocks, Cedars, and Douglas Firs.

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Mushrooms are very fast in their growth, Day 21, Day 23, Day 25.

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Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics,

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in fact, we’re more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom.

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We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium, it inhales oxygen, just like we do.

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But here is a mushroom that is past its prime. After they sporelate they do rot.

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The sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms

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are essential for the health of the forest

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that gives rise to the trees that create the debris fields

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that feed the mycelium.

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In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells.

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Fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide.

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This is photomicrographs:

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notice that as the mycelium grows

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it conquers territory and then it begins to net…

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microfiltration membranes.

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Microcavities form, and as they form the absorb water: these are little wells.

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And inside these wells, microbial communities begin to form.

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And so this spongy soil not only resists erosion

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but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.

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And I think that we need to be ecologically intelligent

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so we build the carbon banks on the planet.

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Renew the soils.

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These are a species that we need to join with.

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I think that engaging mycelium can help save the world.


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Fossil fuels – carbon, coal and gas –

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are, by no means, the only thing is causing climate change.

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Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,

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which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally.

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This happens only when we create too much bare ground.

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There’s no other cause.

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We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year.

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In those it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground, no matter what you do.

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And we have environments

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where we have months of humidity

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followed by months of dryness.

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That is where desertification is occurring.

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Now, we know that desertification is caused by livestock –

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overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare.

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Almost everybody knows this.

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We were once just as certain that the world was flat.

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We were wrong then and we are wrong again.

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These seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation –

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developed with very large numbers of grazing animals.

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With ferocious pack-hunting predators.

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Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds,

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and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals.

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Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food –

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and they have to keep moving.

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And it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants.

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This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.

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It has just come through four months of rain,

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and its now going into eight months of dry season.

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All of that grass needs to decay, biologically, 
before the next growing season. 


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And if it doesn’t, the grassland and the soil begin to die,

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leading to bare soil releasing carbon.

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To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire.

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But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon.

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Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry,

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what can we do to keep that healthy?

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We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more,

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without causing desertification and climate change.

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We cannot burn it

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without causing desertification and climate change.

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What are we going to do?

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There is only one option.

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I repeat to you:

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only one option left

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to climatologists and scientists. 


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And that is to do the unthinkable,

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and to use livestock –

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bunched and moving –

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as a proxy for former herds and predators

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and mimic nature.

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So on this bit of grassland we’ll do it,

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but just in the foreground.

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We’ll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature,

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and we’ve done so, and look at that.

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All of that grass is now covering the soil;

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has dung, urine and litter or mulch,

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and that soil is ready to hold, absorb and hold the rain

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to store carbon

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and we did that without using fire to damage the soil

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and the plants are free to grow.

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Let’s look at some results.

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This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe.

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They’re river is dry, despite the rain just having ended,

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And we have 150,000 people

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on almost permanent food aid.

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Now let’s go to our land, nearby, on the same day,

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with the same rainfall and look at that.

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Everything is now more productive,

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and we have virtually no fear of dry years.

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Let’s look at some more results.

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And we did that by holistic management and planned grazing.

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And that does address all of nature’s complexity,

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and our social,environmental and economic complexity.

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Climate change is an interconnectivity issue.

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It is our planetary system sounding a loud alarm

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to wake up and smell the interconnectivity coffee.

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The practice of adding charcoal to the soils

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was able to make the environment able to sustain

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larger populations than ever thought possible.

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We need to be ecologically intelligent so we build the carbon banks on the planet.

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... engaging mycelium can help save the world.