An excellent interview of Allan Savory by Jonathan Teller-Elsberg deals with the difference between reductionist research and process-oriented management, and brittle and nonbrittle environments. Posted here.

Attached below is a simple draft greenhouse gas calculator for grass and cattle producers, in Microsoft Excel format. This calculator differs from many in that it recognizes that soil, and soil biology, is a principal factor influencing the composition of the atmosphere. To judge or quantify such effects, site-specific measurements are needed, such as changes in soil carbon levels over time.

The promise of a calculator is that you can assess your consumption of resources, or your impact, and presumably be motivated to reduce it. However, the world is not just an input-output system, or collection of sinks and sources. There are complex interdependencies, flows, and cycles. When people say that it takes a village to raise a child, they do not mean that a village is destroyed for every child raised. There can be synergy, mutual benefit. Likewise for the water, solar energy, and carbon that goes into life processes. They are not destroyed.

However, there seems to be popular demand, and this draft calculator is a response to that demand, and an effort to enlarge perceptions of the interdependencies.

For most grass-based cattle producers, the major fluxes of greenhouse gases are likely to be methane from enteric fermentation, and changes in soil carbon levels.

The calculator comes preloaded with fictitious figures based on a 10,000 acre property, with 600 cow-calf pairs, that ships 800-pound yearlings.

Suggestions welcome.

Filmmaker John Liu has documented the World Bank's $500 million loess plateau watershed rehabilitation project since it began in 1995. He has made at least two compelling films about the project, including a 22-minute version was shown at the recent Copenhagen climate conference, and a more detailed 52-minute version.

Watch the films here: http://eemp.squarespace.com/film-channel/

Or watch the Lessons film on Youtube.

Thanks to Tony for the tip.

The UK Soil Association has a wide-ranging and thorough report on the potential of agriculture to increase soil carbon. Highly recommended as a broad overview of the soil carbon opportunity

http://www.soilassociation.org/Whyorganic/Climatefriendlyfoodandfarming/...

We are embarking on a mapping project for measured changes in soil carbon content over time. The purpose is not to aggregate "offsets" or to make broad predictions, but to show what's possible as verified by actual measurements.

There are many stories that are told about soil carbon, and what its possibilities are. Much conversation on this topic has substituted assumptions for observations. Repeated measurements at the same location appear to be rare.

There are only a few data points so far and we hope to collect, review, and add data as we can. If you have data you would like to include, or can suggest good data, please contact us, info at soilcarboncoalition dot org, or you may start with a data form attached below.

Carbon gains and losses are expressed in metric tons of carbon (not carbon dioxide) per hectare per year, or as annual percentage increase where bulk density measurements have not been taken.

The map

You may use the Google Earth version if you have Google Earth installed.

Otherwise use the Google Maps version.

The data points

You may view the data points in page format here, and even subscribe to an RSS feed.

Conversions

To convert carbon to CO₂, multiply by 3.67. For CO₂ to C, multiply by .273. (The molecular weight of CO₂ is 16 for each oxygen atom, and 12 for the carbon atom, so the ratio of CO₂ to C is 44:12.)

To convert hectares to acres, multiply by 2.47. To convert acres to hectares, multiply by .404.

To convert metric tons C per hectare to metric tons CO₂ per acre, multiply by 1.52. To convert tons CO₂ per acre to tons C per hectare, multiply by .658.

How To Take CO2 Out of the Sky, Timothy J LaSalle from CA Climate and Agriculture on Vimeo.

Allan Savory gave this talk in Ireland in November 2009. About 58 minutes.

Allan Savory - Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo.

It is often said that you can't unscramble an egg. An egg has a wholeness or integrity, a poised arrangement of membranes and layers. You cannot reverse the breaking, mixing, and cooking, even with the most advanced technology and equipment.

But a hen can. Feed her a scrambled egg or two, and she can lay a new, whole egg. It may not be instant, but expensive technology is not required. If the egg is fertile, it can become a new hen, who can unscramble more eggs, and so on.

It's important to remember the relationship here, and who has the power. The hen wants to eat it, and produce a new egg, for reasons that are hers, not ours. Like all the biosphere's organisms, she is self-motivated. Trying to force her may cause problems for both her and us. If we want the egg unscrambled, we invite her.

We've got a scrambled egg situation on a global scale: biodiversity loss, extensive land degradation, water shortages, acidifying oceans, and too much heat-trapping carbon in the atmosphere. But we've framed it in such a way that the hen isn't even in the picture.

Of all these large problems, it was perhaps inevitable that carbon in the atmosphere took center stage in the 1970s and after. The data about rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were clear. Physical sciences were dominant in climate questions, and the scope and variability of the biological carbon cycle were only beginning to emerge.

That transparent carbon dioxide gas absorbed and emitted long-wave radiation, thus trapping heat, had been discovered in the 1800s. By the 1960s it was clear that atmospheric carbon dioxide was increasing steadily. But it took another generation, as well as a massive and varied accumulation of evidence, before most scientists and the public began to accept the possibility that climate could change as a result of human activities, and that fossil fuel burning was the main driver.

Skeptics of anthropogenic global warming often attribute the power to change climate to solar output (astrophysics).

Most climate activists place the power for change with fossil fuel emissions (technology). But more are now recognizing that changing technology, such as emissions reductions, lacks near-term leverage on the whole system and on atmospheric carbon. Being proactive won't help much, because the system is too narrowly defined.

Reflecting more solar energy into space, or air capture of carbon using technology, is attractive to some because it corresponds to a widespread technical orientation, as well as frustration or impatience with the social, political, and leverage issues around emissions reductions. But these "geoengineering" possibilities are consistently accused of being band-aids. They do not address the causes of climate change, or the buildup of atmospheric carbon and other greenhouse gases.

The earth system, such as the biological carbon cycle, has been invisible or inscrutable as a source of change. But many are beginning to see the influence or potential influence of soil carbon or peat carbon, and forest carbon, and the tremendous power of carbon cycling.

We do not influence the biological carbon cycle as directly as we influence coal burning, but our influence is strong and immediate--though not as predictable and mechanical as international agreements, markets, or policy approaches seem to demand. The remaining divisions in science, for example into biological and physical sciences, haven't helped us understand the power of carbon cycling.

An excellent and trenchant summary of the principles underlying Masanobu Fukuoka's practice, which also describes biosphere process:

"Soil is created by living plants working with microorganisms, and by the plants' residues and the microorganisms' corpses after their death. Soil is drained of nutrients by cultivation, NOT by plants."

http://fukuokafarmingol.info/foverfound.html