Greenprint 1: Biochar (for the roots)

Greenprinting is a whole system design process for restoring planetary equilibrium within the limits of physical reality. This introduction weaves together documentary excerpts from scientists and activists' food and ecosystem-based solutions to demonstrate that diverse and complementary strategies are available to counter climate disruption.

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

The Gameworld is beautiful, massive and diverse.

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

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

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

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

Cool – give a little wave!

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I have for you a very simple message,

that offers more hope than you can imagine.

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

South Central Los Angeles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If every time you walk out your door,

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

So I figured that the problem is the solution.

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

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

it’s like 150 feet by 10 feet.

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

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

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

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

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

The city came down on me. Ha!

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

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

And I was like, “Cool, bring it!”

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

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

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

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

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

Biochar offers one piece of the puzzle.

It has its roots in ancient Amazonian agricultural practices,

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

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

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

Amazonian soils are notoriously infertile,

there’s so much life drawing off of them,

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

So, it makes agriculture down there difficult.

But the ancient Amazonians found the secret to rich soils.

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

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

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

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

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

the natives had been wiped out by smallpox.

But even modern anthropologists dismissed it as myth,

because the Amazonian soils are so notoriously infertile

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

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

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

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

and all the places where this charcoal had been buried.

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

to make the environment able to sustain larger populations

than ever thought possible.

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

Biochar builds soil structure.

This is a picture of biochar under a microscope.

You can see it is very porous.

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

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

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

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

it creates a home for microorganisms and microrhizal fungi

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

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

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

And it holds onto nutrients like a magnet,

preventing them from leaching off into the ground water.

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

Now I care a lot about pyrolysis.

Pyrolysis is basically biomass plus heat minus oxygen,

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

Pyrolysis is how biochar comes into being,

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

Biochar basically takes the fossil carbon emission cycle,

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

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

through the help of our plant friends –

and puts it back into the ground.

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

and biochar is the way to do it.

And, studies show that if this were globally deployed,

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

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

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

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

otherwise known as “UH OO” (uh oh),

and every organism had a right to vote,

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

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

The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together,

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

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

They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth.

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

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

to Hemlocks, Cedars, and Douglas Firs.

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

Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics,

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

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

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

The sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms

are essential for the health of the forest

that gives rise to the trees that create the debris fields

that feed the mycelium.

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

Fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide.

This is photomicrographs:

notice that as the mycelium grows

it conquers territory and then it begins to net…

microfiltration membranes.

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

And inside these wells, microbial communities begin to form.

And so this spongy soil not only resists erosion

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

And I think that we need to be ecologically intelligent

so we build the carbon banks on the planet.

Renew the soils.

These are a species that we need to join with.

I think that engaging mycelium can help save the world.

Fossil fuels – carbon, coal and gas –

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

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

which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally.

This happens only when we create too much bare ground.

There’s no other cause.

We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year.

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

And we have environments

where we have months of humidity

followed by months of dryness.

That is where desertification is occurring.

Now, we know that desertification is caused by livestock –

overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare.

Almost everybody knows this.

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

We were wrong then and we are wrong again.

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

developed with very large numbers of grazing animals.

With ferocious pack-hunting predators.

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

and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals.

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

and they have to keep moving.

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

This picture is a typical seasonal grassland.

It has just come through four months of rain,

and its now going into eight months of dry season.

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

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

leading to bare soil releasing carbon.

To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire.

But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon.

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

what can we do to keep that healthy?

We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more,

without causing desertification and climate change.

We cannot burn it

without causing desertification and climate change.

What are we going to do?

There is only one option.

I repeat to you:

only one option left

to climatologists and scientists.

And that is to do the unthinkable,

and to use livestock –

bunched and moving –

as a proxy for former herds and predators

and mimic nature.

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

but just in the foreground.

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

and we’ve done so, and look at that.

All of that grass is now covering the soil;

has dung, urine and litter or mulch,

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

to store carbon

and we did that without using fire to damage the soil

and the plants are free to grow.

Let’s look at some results.

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

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

And we have 150,000 people

on almost permanent food aid.

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

with the same rainfall and look at that.

Everything is now more productive,

and we have virtually no fear of dry years.

Let’s look at some more results.

And we did that by holistic management and planned grazing.

And that does address all of nature’s complexity,

and our social,environmental and economic complexity.

Climate change is an interconnectivity issue.

It is our planetary system sounding a loud alarm

to wake up and smell the interconnectivity coffee.

The practice of adding charcoal to the soils

was able to make the environment able to sustain

larger populations than ever thought possible.

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

... engaging mycelium can help save the world.