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Reversing desertification
A recent video presentation at TEDx Somerville Massachusetts by Seth Itzkan, with slides from his trip to Dibangombe, Zimbabwe.
Ocean currents
NASA recently put out a lovely video showing ocean currents over time. While human decisions may not affect ocean currents very much, human decisions certainly affect carbon and water cycling. While carbon and water cycling are difficult to see, as complete cycles, the ocean current video may serve as a kind of visual representation, with a similar kind of turbulence or fractal geography, if you will. Click the picture below for one version of the video.
Two stories
In my engagements with people and groups of people around the carbon cycle, I encounter beliefs that appear to be stages along a continuum. The following diagram and table is not intended to be a simple judgment of good/bad, but is an attempt to give context to ongoing shifts in beliefs by describing or signposting the endpoints of the shifts. This description is always rough and premature.
On earth, we have solar energy coming in and longwave radiation or heat going out.
Life is a passenger on a basically dead planet, with humans an aberration or disturbance. The biosphere does work, a lot of it. Life is the most potent geologic force. Input-output system. Greed and scarcity rule. Carbon and water cycling are emergent: the result of the decisions, choices, and metabolisms of trillions of self-motivated, autonomous organisms, most of them microbes. Creation was a long time ago, and the earth has been degraded since then. Creation is now. You can't unscramble an egg. A hen can unscramble an egg. The world, and life, consists of things, which we can divide into good and bad, and act accordingly. The world is primarily processes and relationships. How are they functioning? Structure of knowledge gives leadership to expert, concentrated power, often based on rules. Knowledge can be localized, flexible, adaptable. Manage against problems. Manage toward desired results. Try to achieve change by threats and predictions, and make people do the right thing. Change by creating new models that make the old ones obsolete. Let people do the right thing. Let's wreck the world slower (or faster). Time is a cost. Time is an opportunity to maintain and restore function.Lots of research in earth systems and biology tends to shift us toward the right but in many cases we continue to interpret things from the left side. The insights on the right are in many cases quite old, but these shifts are often slow to occur, and we can straddle the gaps for centuries.
It's not about right or wrong here, or blame. Where does the greatest opportunity lie?
Water
Recently I visited the site of the 1976 Teton Dam failure, a testimony to the failure of engineering and technology to control water. And driving down the Musselshell River in Montana, the evidence of this spring's catastrophic flood was everywhere. And the Montana grasslands are greener in August than many can remember.
With all the emphasis in the climate conversation on carbon, we sometimes forget that water vapor is the number one greenhouse gas. Without water vapor in the atmosphere, the earth would be a ball of ice even in summer, as Irish physicist John Tyndall recognized in 1859.
About a third of incoming solar energy is taken up by the evaporation of water, mostly from the oceans. Photosynthesis, which drives the carbon cycle, uses much less solar energy, much less than 1 percent of incoming solar. Yet this production of biomass, and the foodwebs and biodiversity it helps generate, is the primary factor for effective water cycles on land as these videos demonstrate. Without biomass to build and maintain them, and to slow water, our soils would wash into the sea even faster than some of them are now.
On transect
I built a fire in the stove the next morning, as it was about a degree above freezing at daylight in this mountain valley at 6200 feet.
Today I bought a ratchet strap in Arco and succeeded in tying the bike onto the front of the bus. A big improvement! Now I don't have to step around and over the bike inside the bus, or constantly shift it in and out.Reflections on energy
Near Arco, Idaho, I passed by the recent lava fields left by the passage of the North American plate over the hotspot that is now under Yellowstone National Park. The older flows have developed pockets of soil that support sagebrush, currant bushes, grasses, and forbs. Spider webs spread over pockets of apparently lifeless black lava, catching seeds, insects, and bits of organic material.
At night, I've been sleeping out of the bus under the thousands of stars, which like our sun are powered by nuclear fusion reactions that balance and counteract the forces of gravitational collapse. All life is ultimately powered by this energy.At midday today, a weather and other instrument panel at a roadside rest stop recorded 987 watts per square meter of incoming solar energy. I'm using some of this with a solar panel, but this energy capture is dwarfed by solar energy capture by plants. Though plants are much less "efficient" than even mediocre photovoltaic panels, they maintain and reproduce themselves and arise willy-nilly on soils that are able to absorb and retain some moisture.
Soil Carbon Challenge baseline tour 2011
The tour has begun, thanks to supporters and sponsors of the Soil Carbon Challenge! I've spent the last two months converting a used schoolbus into a mobile camper, and moving (and downsizing) into it. I will be on tour for the rest of 2011 in North America, doing baseline carbon plots and presentations/workshops about the carbon cycle, its importance to water, food security, and climate, and about the opportunity to turn atmospheric carbon into soil organic matter, which is fundamental to human civilization.
Southern Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas are first. I plan to go as far east as Vermont and Boston (October), and then head south in November, crossing the southern states westward during the winter, reaching California in March or so. Watch this space for updates and itinerary details.
If you or anyone you know is interested in baseline carbon plots or presentations/workshops on the soil carbon opportunity, please contact me. My contact information is at the bottom of the page. To learn more about the Soil Carbon Challenge, go here.
