[FLPERMACULTURE] Jim Merkel to Speak at Home Green Home, Monday 12/10, 7pm

[Margaret McCasland]

I may see you at Jim's talk.

Also, did you see the great article on how permaculture can help
reverse global warming in the Ithaca Journal today? (It doesn't use
the term permaculture, but that's what it's describing.)  It's
actually from the CS Monitor; article and link below.

A dirty, more natural way to fight climate change
http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007712070306
Steven I. Apfelbaum and John Kimble / Commentary

Switch to compact fluorescent light bulbs and plant a tree — these are
the most popular strategies for mitigating climate change today.

Yet world leaders attending the climate-change summit in Bali,
Indonesia, should consider an alternative. It's one of the most
overlooked yet most effective and inexpensive strategies available:
Store carbon in the soil.

This is one way the earth has managed carbon since it began. The
earth's soil contains the second-largest quantity of carbon, where it
has been the most stable and least vulnerable to fires and climate
changes. (The largest amount is dissolved in oceans).

Planting trees sounds like a flawless solution: Trees absorb carbon,
after all. But it can actually be quite harmful, even dangerous. Soil
needs "riches" such as carbon, organic matter and mineral nutrients,
and they come in part from the "litter" left by plants that grow and
die annually on the land. By planting trees in soils that were created
by other, more productive plants (e.g., prairie and wetland plants
that used to occupy some of today's farmland), less litter is
produced. That means less carbon and organic matter are contributed to
the soil, causing it to deteriorate.
In some areas, planted trees can dewater the soil. They can also
release nitrogen and phosphorous in runoff that enters rivers, lakes
and estuaries and hurts water quality. More worrisome, some forested
areas are becoming more vulnerable to wildfires, because changing
precipitation patterns and the associated drying effects are creating
a tinderbox. These changes appear to be resulting in bigger and more
frequent fires (e.g., very recently in California).

Ecological lesson No. 1 is that we should plant trees only where the
soils will benefit from it.

The corollary, lesson No. 2, is not to plant trees where
inappropriate, for example, in farmland that used to be wetlands and
grasslands. Native, deep-rooted plants should be grown in those areas
instead, since they enrich the soil — with carbon, among other things
— more quickly.

Lesson No. 3 is that, in the face of drought and increased wildfires,
rebuilding soils is a safer strategy for storing carbon.

There are two ways to do this. First, restore conservation lands —
which are not used for farming — with deep-rooted grassland or wetland
plants, which sequester carbon more effectively than trees do. Second,
rebuild America's soil systems in farmland, where the soil's riches
have been depleted by intensive growing of crops. Few farmers are
going to give up their livelihood to fill their land with grassland
and wetland plants. But they can still help increase carbon soil
through techniques such as "no-till" farming, in which farm-seeding
equipment inserts crop seeds into slits cut into the soil. Tillage
farming, by contrast, involves plowing and disrupting the soil, which
releases carbon.

Scientific analyses show that recapturing atmospheric carbon into soil
and plant communities is the easiest and least expensive method for
mitigating climate change and that it provides many other economic,
cultural and ecological benefits. Restoring soils in currently farmed
land can rein in 10 to 15 percent of the annual carbon emissions
Americans create. Replanting native grasslands and restoring drained
wetlands can reduce up to another 20 percent.

These techniques can also produce usable bioenergy crops, food and
fiber supplies. This enables energy, food and commodities to be
produced locally, thus reducing transportation and distribution costs
and their associated carbon emissions.

Farmers have reported that no-till agricultural practices delivered
savings in just two to three years and increased crop yields by 10
percent. It also reduced fossil-fuel use for farm machinery by 90
percent.

Because it leaves leftover plant matter on the land, no-till
agriculture could add 1.3 inches of soil materials and organic matter
per acre over the next 50 years. The many feet of new soil would be a
sponge to hold back runoff and nutrients from entering rivers and
lakes and hurting potable water supplies. It would also help reduce
costly, damaging floods.

We need to follow nature's lead and put carbon where the earth has
securely stored it for millions of years — in the soils. Among many
other benefits, this will cleanse the atmosphere, taking a big bite
out of the existing greenhouse-gas loads.


Steven I. Apfelbaum is an ecologist with Applied Ecological Services,
Inc., in Brodhead, Wis. John Kimble is a retired soils scientist at
the National Soils Laboratory in Lincoln, Neb. This article originally
appeared in The Christian Science Monitor.

Originally published December 7, 2007


On 12/7/07, Michael Burns <michael at fingerlakespermaculture.org> wrote:
>  Pioneer of the Simplicity Movement Offers Talk About Living Equitably in a
> Global Culture
>