Soil Carbon Coalitionhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/2024-03-19T11:04:14+00:00toward a shared intelligence on soil health and watershed functionThe trouble with carbon2024-02-11T21:39:01+00:002024-03-19T11:04:14+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/trouble-with-carbon/<p>Many states, including Oregon, have passed legislation with incentives for agricultural and forestry practices that are presumed to constitute "natural climate solutions." Oregon's Natural and Working Lands Proposal rightly recognizes soil health as a priority for Oregon's working lands.<br/><br/>Soil has long been understood as a more-or-less inert substance, a dance floor or stage for the more visible dramas of above-ground plants and crops, animals, roads, and buildings. Soil science became the categories, constituents, and properties of soil. But as some acute observers and thinkers a century ago realized, soil is also a "fountain of energy" to use Aldo Leopold's words. Enormous flows of matter and solar energy, mostly invisible, flow in and out of soil.<br/><br/>During a drought an engineer, thinking of energy only as the "energy sector" of the human economy, once wondered to me if the energy needed to desalinate seawater and pump it over the land could come from a yet-to-be-developed nuclear fusion reactor.<br/><br/>A wider view of energy understands that soil moisture—water in soil pores and cavities, water films coating soil particles—is a consequence of the sun's fusion reactor powering the evaporation and distribution (as vapor or droplets) of enormous volumes of water on earth, and consequent precipitation onto earth's surfaces, a quarter of which are soil. Globally, about a third of the sunlight energy reaching the surface does the work of evaporating water, over 400 horsepower per acre on average.<br/><br/>Movements of water, with water's enormous capacity to absorb, release, and move heat energy from sunlight, are the greatest influence on weather and climate. Water, ice, and water vapor can reflect the sun's energy, keep some of it from escaping (as a greenhouse gas), and move it with ocean currents, moist winds, and atmospheric turbulence. Water also responds to a warming climate by changing or intensifying these dynamics. The major risks to human civilization from a warming climate are water-related: drought (associated with groundwater declines, crop failures, failing agricultural communities, refugees, even famine); floods and severe storms; and changes in sea level and ocean currents. <br/><br/>Far below water cycling in its direct use of sunlight energy is the photosynthesis that drives carbon cycling. Photosynthesis—globally around one horsepower per acre, averaged across seas, ice sheets, and land—depends on water. Puny as it is compared to water cycling, this carbon cycle—the work of living organisms—is transformative for our planet because it does complex chemistry. Life's accomplishments include oxygenating the earth's atmosphere, growing spongy, water-holding soil out of rock, and contributing its remains and residues to earth's crust in the form of limestone, shale, chalk, and fossil fuels. More recently, human life's activities include large-scale oxidation or burning of this fossil carbon, as well as oxidation of carbon in trees and soil, adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. <br/><br/>In the 1920s Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky observed that life is the most powerful geologic force. But there was little practical context or use for that insight.<br/><br/>Climate change has delivered a practical context. Water cycling and carbon cycling are the two complementary legs on which climate change marches. The carbon leg has received the most attention. Understanding the carbon cycle mainly in terms of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—carbon pollution, carbon footprint—leads to a simplified understanding of carbon cycling as a kind of balance, where emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might be balanced or offset by carbon "sequestration" or "drawdown" in trees, soils, or rocks. Instead of the circle of life, carbon becomes a commodity.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" height="341" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/carbonbalance1.jpg" width="559"/></p>
<p>This balance amputates the enormous complexity of carbon cycling to fit into our habits of narrow problem-solving, to fit into our legal, economic, political, and social architecture. In today's world of rampant commodification, financialization, and enclosure of ecosystem "services" by big money and big environmental organizations, now abetted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, carbon "sequestration" has become a climate policy. Because fossil fuels are intrinsic to our economies and ways of life, most governments can't restrain emissions, so they are supporting markets for carbon "offsets" that seek to reconcile competing claims: 1) the claims of carbon "sequestration" on land parcels—the supply—with 2) the demand, which is the needs of individuals, businesses, and governments to claim they are reducing their carbon footprint or acting against climate change. <br/><br/>Neither claim is solid.<br/><br/>The movements of the various forms of carbon through plants, soils, atmosphere, and seas are sometimes turbulent, often obscure, and not easily measured or tracked, especially as they shift over time in response to myriad influences including the solubility of carbon dioxide in seawater, the ocean's biological carbon pump, complex dynamics of carbon in soil, and the susceptibility of biological carbon to oxidation through drought or fire. Even well-intentioned claims of sequestration or offsets rest on a rickety ladder of assumptions, ripe for profiteering, power grabs, and fraud. At either local or global scales, there is no way to tell if carbon sequestration is working to slow climate change.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/carbonbalance2.jpg" width="80%"/></p>
<p>Add-ons merely exacerbate the defects of the carbon balance fantasy. Meanwhile fossil fuel emissions—one of the most easily tracked movements of carbon—continue to rise. We know it's wrong but we may not know what else to do. <br/><br/>A faith or reliance on offsetting carbon emissions becomes a convenient substitute for remedying the large-scale removal of soil cover, forests, animals, and fish, for remedying soil compaction, roads and pavement, and for many kinds of subsidies for vast acreages of short-season annual crops that have compromised water cycling, along with its immense cooling potential. This substitution is especially convenient for national governments and international negotiations, where these larger issues of soil, water, and solar energy are awkwardly entwined with sovereignty, private property rights, corporate structures, water rights, and the rest of our legal, economic, social, and political architecture.<br/><br/>As Franklin Roosevelt's administration realized during the Dust Bowl, local governments, districts, and groups have considerable opportunity to enhance soil health, effective water cycling, the capture of liquid sunshine where it falls. While these may not constitute a complete climate solution, local efforts have the enormous advantage of self-motivation: the results of their efforts can be evaluated, they can learn what works, and there are real, substantial, measurable, and near-term benefits for local watersheds, groups, families, and individual land managers in working <strong>with</strong> the enormous power of the water cycle.</p>Monitoring solar energy2024-02-11T20:11:57+00:002024-03-19T08:01:13+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/monitoring-solar-energy/<div>In working on soilhealth.app, I continue to wonder what sort of visualizations of energy flow and change over time might be useful to producers.</div>
<div></div>
<div>Some of the usual concerns of applied soil and range science might be summarized as:<br/>
<ul>
<li>classifications (such as ecological site description, mollisols, alfisols, etc.)</li>
<li>categories (riparian, footslope)</li>
<li>species (medusahead, sage grouse, nematode species)</li>
<li>substances (water, carbon, plant-available nitrogen)</li>
<li>the effects of practices such as tillage, herbicides, seeding, or grazing regimes.</li>
</ul>
These concerns have resulted in many valuable practical insights and are ongoing concerns for many ag producers, agencies, and the input sector. However, these are the parts, and we also need wholes, given the increasing interest and understanding of ecosystem function, carbon and water cycling, and soil health as flows of sunlight energy. Contributing factors to this energetic or holistic view include the continued need for yield and efficiency in agriculture with the rising costs of inputs, concerns over biodiversity loss, and climate change.<br/><br/>The last few decades have brought an enormous increase in remote sensing: imagery from earth-orbiting satellites, airplanes, and drones, eyes in the sky. Also a quick rise in the availability of all that imagery, and the computational resources to process it into understandable shapes and forms. <br/><br/>There have been many attempts to adapt remote sensing to the traditional tasks of classifying, categorizing, and mapping the parts: the species, categories, substances, and the effects of practices in agriculture and forestry. This is a difficult task and many attempts have been made, with varying success or accuracy.<br/><br/>Gauging changes in solar energy flow is more straightforward. Remote sensing instruments capture electromagnetic radiation that is reflected from sunlight or emitted as infrared. They detect energy and its patterns. They offer a fairly direct view of earth as a recipient and transformer of sunlight energy: surface temperature, evaporation and transpiration, and the ratios of reflection and absorption of different wavelengths indicative of photosynthesis. </div>
<div></div>
<div><i>Median normalized difference vegetation index from Sentinel satellite in central Montana for 2022, processed with Google Earth Engine. Greener colors depict the duration and intensity of photosynthesis across the calendar year.</i></div>
<div></div>
<div><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/ndvimontana.jpg" width="100%"/></div>
<div></div>
<div><i>Time-series chart of energy flow on a pasture: <br/></i></div>
<div><i> </i></div>
<div><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/wp1.png" width="100%"/></div>
<div></div>
<div>In the case of earth-orbiting satellites, these views are often repeated at intervals of weeks or days, recording changes in these energy patterns over time. This makes satellite remote sensing an ideal means of understanding solar energy flow on multi-acre parcels of earth's surface, particularly in less-cloudy areas: it measures energy more-or-less directly, and patterns can be mapped as well as changes charted over time, such as differences in temperature, evaporation and transpiration, and photosynthesis---all closely related to the near-universal interest among agricultural producers in yields, productive efficiency, life satisfaction, problem detection, and profit, in wholes as well as parts.<br/><br/>Monitoring solar energy flow such as water and photosynthesis helps tell a bigger, richer story, complementing the monitoring of species and categories, perhaps giving a bass line to their melodies. It invites participation, shared learning, producer participation with data on yields, productive efficiency, and water infiltration, and the development of holistic contexts---for some, this is a basic principle of soil health. <br/><br/>Can monitoring and feedback steer management and policy, eventually? Can attention to solar energy flow help create a shared intelligence across society, and perhaps even lessen conflicts over categories, species, substances, or practices? What sorts of visualizations might help, and how can they be shared and interpreted?</div>Dave Chapman interviews me2023-09-01T14:04:42+00:002024-03-19T09:24:53+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/real-organic-interview/<p>Dave Chapman of the Real Organic movement interviewed me in February 2023.</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T7vh7sDDoSA?si=DwM4Dq1_rcC-RkxC" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>And the diagrams from the video are shown below.</p>
<p>1. Complex carbon cycle or circle of life</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/complex.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<hr/>
<p>2. The simplified view of the carbon cycle that encourages the problem-solving, solutioneering, do-gooder mindset:</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/simpleccycle.jpg" width="100%"/></p>Patterns for thinking2023-04-02T19:48:40+00:002024-03-19T08:00:39+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/patterns-for-thinking/<h4>Reverting to the pen for this piece on carbon offsets and ecosystem services</h4>
<p><a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/files/patterns_for_thinking.pdf">Download a pdf</a> of this comic.</p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking1.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking2.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking3.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking4.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking5.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking6.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p></p>
<div style="border: 3px solid #000;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/patterns_for_thinking7.jpg" width="95%"/></div>
<p>For links to Wall Street Consensus, ecosystem services critiques, see <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/commodifying-nature">blog post on commodifying nature</a></p>
<p><a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/files/patterns_for_thinking.pdf">Download a pdf</a> of this comic.</p>The shell game of carbon markets2023-02-10T01:12:16+00:002024-03-19T08:01:15+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/shell-game-of-carbon-markets/<p>Since the Soil Carbon Coalition began in 2008 I've sampled soils and measured soil carbon and soil carbon change at hundreds of locations across North America. My basic question was, given that Life, and the circle of life, was the most powerful and creative planetary force, how do we humans work <strong>with</strong> it, as part of it? I knew that soil carbon was a critical factor for human health and survival. After some research and experiments I figured measuring soil carbon was a simpler task than measuring water in the soil, which was the #1 issue on the land almost everywhere--too dry, too wet, water too dirty.</p>
<p>Are carbon offset markets good or bad? We humans are committed and addicted to these kinds of good/bad judgments, and we apply them with shifting frequencies to wolves, knapweed, grazing, dietary fat, and of course people, including ourselves. We may not be able to avoid making these judgments but we can at least add a learning/evidence question: how do carbon markets or offsets function in different or larger systems or contexts?</p>
<p>Another popular judgment question: are we doing the right thing? We can also add a learning and evidence question here: what are the results we're getting?</p>
<p>First, a bit of background on the carbon cycle or circle of life.</p>
<p></p>
<p><img alt="complex carbon cycle" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/complex.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p></p>
<p><em>The <strong>complex carbon cycle</strong>, simplified. There are minor (but significant!) flows of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere on the left from volcanoes and fossil fuel burning. The major flows and loops involve 1) the land-based biological cycle, with photosynthesis drawing in carbon from the atmosphere and respiration/combustion delivering it back, and 2) the solubility of carbon dioxide in the ocean, and the release of this dissolved carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere according to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_law">Henry's Law</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelle_factor">Revelle Factor</a>. </em></p>
<p><em>Both of these major flows are driven, and made complex, by the metabolisms and behaviors of photosynthesizers and microbes, which human actions influence. Any near-term "sequestration" or drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide into soils, trees, or rocks will be mostly compensated or buffered by the release of carbon dioxide from the oceans. Soil carbon and tree carbon have enormous benefits and use values for all forms of life including humans, but significant reduction of atmospheric carbon in our lifetimes is not one of them.<br/></em></p>
<p><em>On the right, a bigger picture: the carbon cycle or circle of life is nested within larger flows of sunlight energy, such as the enormous work of water cycling. In soils, complex carbon compounds produced by all kingdoms of life filter water and moderate wet and dry conditions and the much greater power of the water cycle.<br/></em></p>
<p>With the climate issue taking center stage, and the reluctance of governments to limit fossil fuel use, markets became a focus of attention. The following simplified model gave people an understanding of carbon cycling and climate as a problem, and made markets the self-evident way of offering a solution.</p>
<p></p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/simpleccycle.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p>Here the mysterious and multiple complex relationships of the circle of life are reduced to a <strong>simple balance problem</strong>. From complex loops and relationships driven by metabolisms of plants and microbes and the solubility of CO<sub>2</sub> in the oceans, the carbon cycle became a simple balance or stock-flow model with fossil fuel emissions on one side and sequestration, drawdown, or offsets on the other, with the balance measured or estimated in CO<sub>2</sub> tons or equivalent. This simple balance allows us to pretend that we are in a simple system, can understand and manipulate cause and effect, and can address the problem with market mechanisms.</p>
<p>A broker is the architect and creator of the exchange. The broker arranges a trade between a seller (typically people who are managing lands or forests, and who want or need investment in their management) and a buyer (such as a company whose operations or supply chain causes carbon emissions to the atmosphere). In order for the simple balance model to approximate realities on the ground, carbon markets became as complicated as our tax codes, with jargon-encrusted controversies over quality, verification, additionality, permanence, loopholes, and leakage still proliferating, along with acknowledged weaknesses and some accusations of fraud. If you are trying to sell a partially imaginary exchange value, the packaging will become complicated.</p>
<p>How are carbon markets functioning, and what results are they producing? It's not black and white. Answers differ, often considerably, depending on people's perspective and situation. Do they help solve a problem that you have? What are the risks?</p>
<p>For a <strong>seller</strong> of carbon credits or offsets such as a land steward needing investment and wanting help with improving management or even implementing recommended or required practices, payments through carbon markets can be a good thing. If the seller accrues carbon, or is estimated to have done so by a computer model, he or she stands to benefit not only from the use values of biological carbon (such as moderating wet and dry, filtering water, enhancing production, lowering input costs), but also from a portion of its exchange or market value. The seller also faces risks: a) loss of management flexibility with required practices, b) costs of compliance with contracts, and c) price uncertainty. These risks vary by program or broker.</p>
<p>For a <strong>broker</strong> who creates a carbon market, the benefits include profit from matching sellers and buyers. The risks include serious mismatch between supply and demand, such as what collapsed the Chicago Climate Exchange in 2010.</p>
<p>For <strong>all parties to the transaction</strong>, the risks include shifts in the opinion of various publics: do people continue to believe that offsets are a good thing, thus rewarding companies who buy them? Do they believe offsets are valid, honest, effective? The risks also include the increasing cost of quality assurance, design, and packaging of carbon offsets.</p>
<p>From the larger, more complex perspectives of the carbon cycle or circle of life, and of the human capacity to manage it for broadly inclusive benefits, carbon markets and offsets are a <strong>shell game</strong>, shuffling tons of carbon dioxide equivalents from air to plants to land to sea and back again. It's been described as selling the wind, privatizing the air, sky money. We've falsified the complex carbon cycle into an abstract balance problem for which commodification and carbon trading become the self-evident recipe.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/shellgame.jpg" width="50%"/></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><em>Where's the carbon? Air, land, or sea?</em></p>
<p>The shell game is a distraction, a scam, with no evidence or even prospect for near-term success in reducing atmospheric carbon. It helps perpetuate and even institutionalize a speculative bubble based only on the exchange value of an abstract ton of CO<sub>2</sub> equivalent, which continues to vary according to the successes of its boosters, detractors, defenders, and critics. The balance model of the carbon cycle model along with carbon markets undermines the ability of individual land stewards and society as a whole to manage the complexity of earth's biosphere, the air, the circle of life.</p>
<p>The realization is growing that the importance of soil and forest carbon lies less in the presumed subtraction from atmospheric carbon, but in their effects on the water cycle, moderating wet and dry as <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/walter-jehne-at-harvard/">Walter Jehne</a> and others have explained, and filtering water. While these benefits to water cycling are increasingly being acknowledged as co-benefits to carbon trading, the trading itself is still dependent on sales of carbon "offsets," and we're still sideways with both climate and soil health in most places.</p>
<p>We live in a world that our questions create. The many alternatives that don't depend on sale of offsets or "payments for ecosystem services" are better long-term strategies for growing our capacity to invest in land stewardship and soil health. The CSP or EQIP programs of NRCS for example, or community options such as some land trusts or cooperatives.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Below, a recent panel discussion hosted by Northeast Organic Farming Association of New Hampshire and Seacoast Permaculture. The panel addresses issues with current carbon market programs and the challenges of trying to monetize something as elusive as carbon "sequestration" or best practices in farming. Includes insights about Vermont’s efforts to encourage a regenerative relationship with the land through other types of payments for ecosystem (PES) mechanisms.</p>
<p>Panelists include:</p>
<p>Amy Antonucci: Seacoast Permaculture<br/>Cat Buxton: Grow More, Eat Less<br/>Julie Davenson: NOFA-NH<br/>Earl Hatley: LEAD Agency, Inc. <br/>Caroline Gordon: Rural Vermont <br/>Stephen Leslie: Cedar Mountain Farm and Cobb Hill Cheese</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YZkFFeB6H9w" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>Finally, some links:</p>
<p>articles and resources on carbon markets at the Indigenous Environmental Network: <a>https://www.ienearth.org/oppose-carbon-offset-scams-like-the-growing-climate-solutions-act/</a></p>
<p>John Bellamy Foster article: <a>https://monthlyreview.org/2022/04/01/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth/</a></p>
<p>Richard Norgaard's paper: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223043631_Ecosystem_Services_From_Eye-Opening_Metaphor_to_Complexity_Blinder">Ecosystem services: From eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder</a></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p></p>Cat Buxton2023-01-13T20:35:07+00:002024-03-19T07:27:47+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/cat-buxton/<p>Today Cat Buxton, leader and networker in Upper Valley of eastern Vermont (and board member of Soil Carbon Coalition) gave an inspiring presentation on what she's been up to and what she's learned: a big story of possibility.</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-S3Ptez__iA?start=221" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p></p>
<p>See also this booklet on Regeneration Corps:</p>
<p><a href="https://simplebooklet.com/regenerationcorpsin2022#page=1">https://simplebooklet.com/regenerationcorpsin2022#page=1</a></p>Matt Collins on place-based collaboratives2022-11-08T16:49:20+00:002024-03-18T17:42:10+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/place-based-collaboratives/<p>Here's a very significant and interesting talk by Matt Collins on place-based collaboratives. The topic is conflict prevention--wolves and bears vs livestock, strategies including guard dogs, fencing, fladry, carcass removal, range riders . .. but in many instances these strategies don't accord with existing social norms among ranchers.</p>
<p>Highly relevant to other areas or challenges such as monitoring.</p>
<p>He emphasizes the value of a bounded network, which allows important relationships to be fostered with some trust. And also the value of a "boundary-spanning network" (such as the Western Landowners Alliance) that can help spread the innovations, including that of a bounded network.</p>
<p>He talks about a "spiral of silence" in a community that can be broken when a "thought leader" models the acceptance of an innovation (e.g. a conflict prevention strategy). This serves as an "injunctive norm" that tells people that the innovation is now accepted, and breaks down the barriers to peer-to-peer interaction ... important for landowners to share what tools are working as well as with successes with other community members, which can help increase implementation in the group.</p>
<p>Matt talks fast as he only has 15 minutes to summarize his thesis. For my older ear, I slowed the playback to .75 in settings.</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ew9ZK24Y204" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>Pipelines versus platforms: Power and the politics of knowledge2022-09-15T18:40:53+00:002024-03-19T07:52:49+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/pipelines-versus-platforms-power-and-the-politics-of-knowledge/<p>I see three patterns unfolding:</p>
<ol>
<li>the widening circles of human catastrophe from large changes in water and carbon cycling</li>
<li>the widening failures of institutional solutions for these challenges</li>
<li>the widening movement in agriculture and natural resource management toward peer-to-peer, participatory, local learning groups.</li>
</ol>
<p>Is the age of miracle cures--of quick fixes, of institutional, top-down solutions for complex problems--on its way out? What patterns or possibilities are these widening ripples generating?<br/><br/>For agriculture in the U.S., the miracle cures of the 20th century include mechanization, pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, large irrigation projects, biotechnology, and the development of a distribution system for these technologies. These revolutionized agricultural production around the world, with a singular focus on yields and efficiency. Agricultural research and extension, along with the land-grant university system in the U.S. that trains agronomists almost everywhere, effectively created a monopoly on the creation and distribution of knowledge. Huge corporations such as Monsanto-Bayer, Syngenta, and Cargill came to control inputs such as seeds and chemicals, agricultural methods, and marketing. Many agricultural lenders followed suit. These corporations also funded a good deal of agricultural research.</p>
<p>There have been great successes with many of these miracle cures and short-term fixes, and even today they are continuing. They have forestalled famines, reduced pest pressure in some cases, and saved farms from failure. They have enabled some countries to feed the world by exporting cheap food, extending their technology pipelines, and concentrating profit and power for the input sectors such as machinery, equipment, fertilizer, seed, and chemicals. They have helped maintain amazingly high levels of production on degraded and degrading soils, with increasing drought and pest pressure.</p>
<p>The oft-used analogy here is that of a pipeline, where research and development creates innovations and technologies which are then delivered to "end users" or farmers via channels and programs that provide information and incentives for adoption. It is a one-way flow, from the creators and developers of knowledge and technology to the presumed end users, driven by carrots and sticks (external motivations). The metric for success is the rate of flow: the adoption of practices or technologies, the signups to incentive programs, the sale of inputs.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/pipeline1.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p>With simple or mainly mechanical systems, the one-way pipeline design has often worked, at least for a time. In complex domains such as ecosystems, it lacks good feedback or accountability. Researchers, input suppliers, and extension take charge of knowing, while farmers are responsible for doing. Knowing and doing, knowledge and practice, are thus poorly correlated. The practices and strategies the one-way pipeline has delivered produce long-term, cascading failures: large-scale damage to soil health, desertification and compaction, massive loss of biodiversity, increased risk of erosion, drought, fire, and flood, much higher input costs, water quality issues and algal blooms, declining food quality, disappearing aquifers, more virulent weeds and pests, rising risks to human health, farm failure and consolidation, social conflict, and the hollowing out of many rural communities.</p>
<p>Institutional responses to these problems in the U.S. include adding different nozzles and channels to the pipeline: programs to promote conservation, sustainable agriculture, and climate-smart agriculture, to help underserved producers, to idle marginal and erodible land, crop insurance subsidies to de-risk agricultural production on increasingly degraded soils in a changing climate, to address marketing and rural community issues, for farmer mental health issues, and for institutional research on all of this.</p>
<p>There is also competition. Heretics and innovators have long challenged the monopoly of the USDA-land grant university axis for example on the creation and dissemination of knowledge and advice. The default or self-evident way to promote change is to set up another one-way pipeline through which an organization or consultancy can deliver its knowledge, information, best practices, and advocacy to its constituents. (See Deborah Frieze's trenchant critique and alternatives <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/deborah-frieze-on-change/">here</a>.)</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/network0.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p>The Big Ag pipelines are still operating but there is increasing competition from sustainable, organic, or soil health movements and pipelines, which also compete with each other. Resistance and competition take many forms, including funding research to show that a rival movement's innovations don't work or can't be implemented, co-opting a movement's claims, various shades of greenwashing, and even partnership or combination.</p>
<p>Some heretics and innovators catalyze relationships between farmers, where similarly inclined or inspired farmers or ranchers begin to learn from each other, while still depending on pipelines for information, advice, or access to programs. This is the third pattern that is unfolding: the widening movement toward farmer-centered, peer-to-peer learning groups. This has been occurring for a long time, but in the last century the aforementioned institutional pipelines have displaced or sidelined a good deal of this activity.</p>
<p>Improving the productivity and soil health of a pasture or field is a complex challenge. As you might change the course of a fast-running stream by placing a log or rock in it, so the flow of sunlight energy through the pasture--photosynthesis, water cycling--means that small changes might produce large effects over time. Cause and effect may be entangled, like the chicken and the egg. There are lots of interacting variables, lots of unknowns, and some unknown unknowns.</p>
<p><img align="right" alt="one hand drawing another" height="177" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/drawinghands002.jpg" width="169"/></p>
<p>For knowing and doing, results and actions, to become correlated, the doers must also want to know--to accept the responsibility for their own education. This happens when farmers, ranchers, or land managers realize that there is a gap or discrepancy between their present situation, and what they recognize as needed, wanted, and possible. This gap can become a creative tension, an intrinsic motivation for learning that differs from the extrinsic motivations (carrots, sticks, and judgment) relied on by one-way pipelines.</p>
<p>While few seem to be abandoning the pipelines, the increasing popularity of farmer-to-farmer learning groups highlights the tension between top-down and bottom-up, between one-way pipelines and the must-have accountability of connected knowing/doing. Pipelines are still where the money and jobs are for educators, marketers, and consultants, and many farmers are either loyal, dependent, or both. Taking responsibility for your own learning in the face of complex challenges is scary and hard. Peer support is not everywhere to be found, and can be difficult to create and maintain. But a possible future pattern might be represented thus:</p>
<p><img alt="interdependent network" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/network1.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p>Aggregation has occurred, analogous to a process of soil aggregation. An institution (still somewhat rectangular) is now a participant in a learning network, with two-way exchange and internal accountability/feedback like the others--who may be individuals, or local groups of individuals. Internal accountability, the entanglement of knowing and doing at multiple scales, power sharing, the participatory co-creation of knowledge, as well as semi-permeable membranes that help protect against perverse incentives, are characteristic. It resembles an interdependent ecosystem, or a <em>social mycelium, </em>with two-way connecting strands, to use Didi Pershouse's term.</p>
<p>Such ecosystems are unlikely to be created by policy, but their evolution could be supported where there is some kind of start. Some organizations and institutions are trying to support peer-to-peer farmer networks, but there often remains a subtle collaboration between their own habits, skills, and capacities on the one hand, and on the other the trained expectations of many farmers to be told best practices, to respond to carrots and sticks, to be judged by experts. The power and acclaim that expert status confers continues to be addicting. The result is that people can postpone taking responsibility for their own learning. Knowing and doing remain separated, and monitoring or science is outsourced.</p>
<p>We're in the midst of an evolution, for which effective shortcuts are unlikely to appear. <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/why-learning-networks/">Three elements</a> that can support the connection between knowing and doing in the face of complex challenges:</p>
<ol>
<li>Group facilitation that is knowledgeable about the local situation, but sufficiently detached so that people can take responsibility for their own learning, their own progress. Facilitators <a href="https://managingwholes.com/pages/--consensus.htm/">learn</a> to be a guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.</li>
<li>Questions, including questions about evidence and trend in land function, that are relevant to people's intrinsic motivations, what they truly care about, and appropriate for complex challenges. Participants can pose their own questions, as well as methods of answering them.</li>
<li>An adaptable platform or framework (not a one-way pipeline!) for participatory community science that respects trust, relationships, locality, and the needs and goals of participants, and supplies a way of fostering a shared intelligence, a group memory, evidence including some detailed answers to some key questions, and a semi-permeable membrane for sharing. This is the design of <a href="https://soilhealth.app">soilhealth.app</a>.</li>
</ol>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/teapot.jpg" style="border: 2px solid;" width="100%"/></p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Institutional solutions . . . necessarily fail to solve the problems to which they are addressed because, by definition, they cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way---a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one's own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.</em> (Wendell Berry, <em>The Unsettling of America</em>, 1977)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It's not that institutions in themselves are bad. It's how many of them function today: extending and consolidating their pipelines, unaware and unskilled in alternatives.</p>
<h4>Some further reading:</h4>
<p>The Global Alliance for the Future of Food, a consortium of NGOs, has put out an excellent document called <em>The Politics of Knowledge.</em> <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/andhra-pradesh-successes/">Vijay Kumar from Andhra Pradesh</a> was among the contributors. It calls for "participatory, transdisciplinary research and action agendas," and offers many insights into the tension between bottom-up, farmer-centered learning efforts, and the top-down pipelines that have sometimes sought to suppress, negate, or replace them.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Agroecology requires an approach to knowledge that transcends compartmentalized, reductionist, market-led, and elitist knowledge systems in favour of bottom-up, people-led, holistic, and transdisciplinary approaches to knowledge and wisdom.</p>
<p>The co-creation, exchange, and mobilization of knowledge and evidence creates new entry points to systemic transformation and needs to be harnessed to facilitate action across food systems. <strong><em>Evidence on its own does not catalyze change</em></strong> due to structural barriers, such as short-term thinking, cheap food, export orientation, and narrow measures of success, that keep industrial food systems locked in place. Unlocking these structural barriers requires changing our research, education, and innovation systems.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are pdf and multimedia versions in English, Spanish, French here:</p>
<p><a href="https://futureoffood.org/insights/the-politics-of-knowledge-compendium/">https://futureoffood.org/insights/the-politics-of-knowledge-compendium/</a></p>
<p>See also</p>
<p><a href="https://managingwholes.com/pages/democracy-problem.htm/">Dan Yankelovich on the public learning curve</a></p>
<p></p>Deborah Frieze on change and localism2022-02-14T20:41:32+00:002024-03-19T01:34:12+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/deborah-frieze-on-change/<p>Deborah Frieze's remarkable TED talk on change.</p>
<p>"The way we're trying to change the world is not going to work, and it's never going to work. I'd like to offer a radical theory of change, based on my experience working around the world with people trying to solve our most pressing problems. My belief turns most of our efforts to fix our world on their heads."</p>
<p>"Here it is: you can't fundamentally change big systems. You can only abandon them and start over, or offer hospice to what's dying. By big systems, I mean education, healthcare, government, business, anything characterized by over-organization, standardization, regulation, and compliance. I'm saying you can't undo, fix, reverse engineer, re-direct, or re-assign these systems. That's because they're not machines, they're living systems."</p>
<p>Which of her four roles are you playing?</p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2jTdZSPBRRE" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>What I learned from the Soil Carbon Challenge2022-01-19T18:17:41+00:002024-03-18T21:32:52+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/what-i-learned-from-the-soil-carbon-challenge/<p>This nonprofit organization, the Soil Carbon Coalition, was inspired in part by Allan Yeomans's 2005 book, <em>Priority One: Together we can beat global warming, </em>which Abe Collins and I had been reading. Yeomans suggested that increased soil carbon could make a difference for climate. In 2007 Joel Brown of the NRCS gave a talk in Albuquerque in which he said that according to the published literature, good management by land stewards did not result in soil carbon increase, and that it was too difficult to measure anyhow. With that, I resolved to begin measuring soil carbon change on ranches and farms that were consciously aiming at greater soil health.<br/><br/>I had done plenty of reporting on land stewardship and plenty of rangeland monitoring. I studied research-grade, repeatable soil sampling and analysis methods and combined them with some rangeland transect methods I had learned from Charley Orchard of Land EKG. In 2011 I bought an old schoolbus, made it into living quarters, and for most of the next decade I traveled North America slowly, putting in hundreds of baseline transects and carbon measuring sites mainly on ranching operations that had some association with holistic planned grazing. I resampled over a hundred at intervals of 3-8 years. The question I was asking was: Where, when, and with whose management, was soil carbon changing over intervals of several years? I called this project the Soil Carbon Challenge.<br/><br/>A lot of data accumulated. What did it show, what did it mean?<br/><br/>In order for there to be meaning or learning, <strong>there needs to be a context, a purpose.</strong> My purpose in embarking on this project, the question behind the question, was 1) to see if measuring soil carbon change over time could provide relevant feedback or guidance to land stewards who were interested in soil health, and 2) to see what soil carbon change, if it were significant and widespread, might imply for climate policy that was narrowly focused on more technical rather than biological solutions. Everywhere I traveled, water was the main issue for people, whether it was floods or drought. I measured soil carbon because it was central to the flow of sunlight energy through soils, critically influential for soil function, and easier to measure change than measuring soil water. At no point did I advocate for the commodification of soil carbon into credit or offset schemes.<br/><br/>The soil carbon change data that I got on resampling baseline plots was noisy and variable, especially in the top layers (0-10 cm depth). There were some pockets of consistent change, such as a group of graziers in southeast Saskatchewan showing substantial increases, even down to the 40 cm depth that I often sampled to. But the majority of change data that I collected did not offer solid support to the hypothesis that holistic planned grazing or no-till, for example, in a few years would increase soil carbon in every circumstance or locale, or that soil carbon would faithfully reflect changes in forage production, soil cover, or diversity. <br/><br/>Many of the people on whose ranches I sampled did not know what to do with the data or results, or simply interpreted the data as a judgment: a high or increasing level of soil carbon indicated good management, and low or decreasing was bad. Measured soil carbon change, especially at one or two points, was not meaningful, useful, or in some cases timely feedback, and may not have contributed much to their learning and decision making as I had hoped it might. For the most part the ranches I sampled on were widely scattered, and there was little interaction between them or mutual support, little opportunity for discussion or the development of a shared intelligence or a community of practice. The "competition" framing or context that I suggested in 2010 did not help. <strong>The effort tended toward an information pipeline rather than a platform that enabled people to take responsibility for their own learning.</strong> For a while I posted the data on this website, but that did little to foster discussion or interpretation, or encourage people to add learning to judgment.<br/><br/>Nor did the noisiness and variability of the data I collected offer solid support for soil carbon increase as a strategy for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide and easing climate change--a strategy that was growing increasingly popular, with many people and organizations advocating for it, and which has resulted in new programs, policies, and markets to try and reward ranchers and farmers for increases (usually modeled rather than measured) in soil carbon.</p>
<p>So the Soil Carbon Challenge was at least a partial failure, in that it took aim at the problems and technical issues at the tip of the iceberg, and fostered judgment more than learning and new questions. I did take some lessons from this decade of travel, conversations, workshops, transects and soil sampling, sample processing and analysis, data entry, and associated reading and research into the history of the discovery of the carbon cycle, water cycle, and climate issues. Some of these lessons resonated with what I had learned, and then forgotten, in the trainings I took in holistic management and consensus building in the 1990s.</p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><img alt="iceberg" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/iceberg1.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p><em>Like many attempts at "solutioneering" the problems of soil health and climate, the Soil Carbon Challenge focused on the tip or immediately visible portion of the "iceberg," and was not designed around the center of gravity: human or people issues, paradigms and power, relationships and trust.</em></p>
<p><strong>What I learned (or saw from a new perspective, or rediscovered)</strong>:</p>
<h2>1. Energy is a context for all life</h2>
<p>and energy flow, from sunlight, is a pattern that connects all knowledge and activity. However, energy is an abstraction: we can only know it, sense it, or measure it by its results, the work it does, the changes it creates. Our planet is an open system largely run by sunlight energy. As I wrote <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/files/atlasbooklet.pdf">here</a>, "We are riding an enormous, incredibly complex, fractal eddying flow of sunlight energy used in many ways by interrelated communities of self-motivated living organisms whose metabolisms, behaviors, and relationships are increasingly influenced by our own." And, as Selman Waksman, Aldo Leopold, and others realized, soil is a major hub for sunlight energy flow.</p>
<h2>2. Learning networks</h2>
<p>are a context for the emergence of a community of practice, of a shared intelligence. These are social groupings where people share what they are learning, and are able to witness or share in the learning of others, and so gain an enriched perspective, with dialogue. It helps if these are participatory, ongoing, local, and include evidence as well as new questions. Some degree if trust is needed in order for judgments to ripen into learning, and listening is a key ingredient. Over the past year or so I have developed <a href="https://soilhealth.app" target="_blank">soilhealth.app</a> as a way of <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/why-learning-networks">supporting</a> learning networks around soil health and sunlight energy flow, and am seeking partnerships on that project.</p>
<p>It's not that measuring soil carbon is a bad or useless thing, but a good context or purpose is needed. We learn from <strong>differences.</strong> Here are 4 suggestions for learning, about different kinds of differences, all of which may surprise and spark your curiosity:</p>
<ol>
<li>To learn more about flows of sunlight energy, get an <strong>infrared heat gun</strong> ($15 and up) that measures or estimates radiant heat, and begin playing with it, pointing it at various stages of sky, soil, plants, and other surfaces and objects.</li>
<li>Use<strong> <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/infiltration">infiltration rings</a></strong> to gauge how well water infiltrates into various soil surfaces. Remember that soil moisture held in soil pores represents a huge capture of free sunlight energy.</li>
<li>Record <strong>change over time</strong> in some kind of indicator, quantity, or measurement you are interested in or curious about. <a href="https://cocorahs.org" target="_blank">Precipitation</a> or infiltration for example. For ranchers, animal days of grazing on a particular pasture for example, or <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/files/poundsofgain.xls">pounds of gain.</a> Repeatable observations need some kind of recording system.</li>
<li>Share your observations and learning with others in a <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/why-learning-networks"><strong>learning network</strong></a>. As two eyes helps you see depth, so do multiple perspectives enrich and deepen your learning.</li>
</ol>
<p></p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/know-it-with2.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>Why learning networks?2021-08-03T19:25:17+00:002024-03-19T00:49:02+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/why-learning-networks/<p>I've spent a dozen years reporting on ranchers, farmers, and groups in North America, and another dozen years measuring soil carbon change on 100+ ranches and farms. My experience is that:</p>
<ol>
<li>Everyone with some understanding of the connections between soil and water wants better soil health and watershed function. As a desired and needed direction, this is not controversial.<br/><br/></li>
<li>Those land managers who are doing the most for soil health and watershed function are <strong>internally motivated</strong>: by their love of their land, by living and working the way they want to, and by their growing curiosity about the complex relationships and feedbacks between the decisions and choices they make and the outcomes they observe, which can provide the all-important <strong>sense of possibility</strong>. Most are eager to share what they are learning, and empower others.</li>
</ol>
<p>Yet the self-evident 'best practice' approach for governmental, research, and advocacy groups remains <strong>external or extrinsic motivations: rewards and penalties, carrots and sticks.</strong> These are usually aimed at <strong>practices</strong> such as cover cropping or manure handling, and include incentives or cost shares for soil health practices and carbon "sequestration," market certifications, credit trading, "best practice" advice and technical assistance, policies, taxes, regulations, and buyouts, all backed by predictions, promises, or threats. </p>
<p>External motivations work well for increasing production in an input-output system where cause and effect are mostly linear. Higher corn prices result in more acres planted, more inputs applied.</p>
<p>But external motivations, along with the <a href="https://managingwholes.com/pages/democracy-problem.htm/" target="_blank">expert information model</a> that often informs them, have disadvantages, especially where internal incentives such as curiosity, love, feedback or active learning, or sense of possibility are weak or absent, and where causes and effects have mutually influential relationships (water cycling and carbon cycling for example) and form feedback systems and loops.</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="8" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img alt="one hand drawing another" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/drawinghands002.jpg" width="200"/></td>
<td>
<h3><strong>feedback</strong></h3>
<h5>can be much more than a grade from a school teacher or an evaluation; it can be a co-creation or co-production, a relationship, a possibility.</h5>
<h5><em>"Simple causal reasoning about a feedback system is difficult because the first system influences the second and the second system influences the first, leading to a circular argument. This makes reasoning based upon cause and effect tricky, and it is necessary to analyze the system as a whole."</em></h5>
<h5>—Karl Johan Åström and Richard M. Murray, <em>Feedback Systems: An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers</em></h5>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h4></h4>
<h4>In complex domains such as agriculture and ecosystem function, reliance on external motivations can:</h4>
<ol>
<li>create antagonism or dissonance between what we know or believe, and what we do. External incentives are typically rule-based programs rather than outcome-based explorations, and may kill off creativity, curiosity, experimentation, autonomy, and the acceptance of responsibility for one's actions and choices—all of which are crucial in dealing with changing, complex systems with multiple feedbacks. (Education researchers have long realized this.) The antagonism and conflict affects researchers and policymakers as well as producers who are the targets of the programs and incentives—eroding trust, integrity, and effectiveness, and producing resistance, backlash, and the belief that significant change requires stronger forcing, or is impossible.<br/><br/></li>
<li>substitute judgments, surveillance, categorization, and compliance—acres of soil health practices implemented, number of plans, contracts, or certifications signed—for real feedback on results. Without good feedback, procedures and "best management practices" displace principles and holistic understandings. Dysfunctional approaches may persist, and beneficial innovations may be resisted, ignored, or misapplied.<br/><br/></li>
<li>cost a lot for the results or outcomes achieved. Controversy persists over the effectiveness of incentivized practices such as buffer strips, no-till, rotational grazing, compost applications, or cover crops. When the incentives or cost shares disappear, so do the practices.<br/><br/></li>
<li>Maintain and support the habit of blaming individual choices for bad outcomes: your food choices for your health problems, your reliance on chemical inputs to pay off your farm operating loan, your individual "carbon footprint" for climate change. This helps distract people from the systemic issues and power relationships that drive these individual choices and enhance their convenience.</li>
</ol>
<p>In complex, feedback-driven domains such as soil health or regenerative agriculture, internal motivations are essential, which require participation and empowerment <em>with others.</em> Learning networks are an increasingly popular way of developing, articulating, sharing, adapting, and testing these intrinsic motivations and values. In some academic literature these are called "communities of practice" engaging in "transdisciplinary co-production of knowledge." They can take advantage of generations of advances in the theory and practice of people-centered learning.</p>
<blockquote>"We suggest that a more promising approach to scaling up RR [regenerative ranching] will involve government-led peer-to-peer learning programmes . . . . We have also proposed that, although top-down incentives such as carbon markets may help incentivize RR practices, more important is recognizing RR as a bottom-up movement that calls for in situ research involving producers in the co-production of knowledge . . . ."</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—</span>Hannah Gosnell, <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2020.0027" target="_blank">based on interviews</a> with 50+ Australian and U.S. ranchers</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"></p>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">But learning networks can be challenging:</h4>
<ul>
<li>Bottom up, spontaneous, indigenous. Learning networks begin with local conveners, connectors, champions, and local concerns, questions, and issues—all of which vary, and can be hard to maintain or scale, particularly from afar.<br/><br/></li>
<li>Without effective facilitation and leadership, people coming together around a common concern often remain focused on the quicker and easier judgment questions, problems, and positions rather than on the more difficult assets or strengths, and end up imitating and aligning with top-down rule-based programs of external motivations, academic definitions of "good science" with anonymized, decontextualized but uniform data, "education," and technical transfer. In terms of culture, beliefs, and skills, this is what most of us are familiar with and surrounded with. Effective facilitators with practical experience may be difficult to discover.<br/><br/></li>
<li>Reporting and evidence, ground-truthing questions and evidence, even recognition and evaluation of progress, can be more challenging for "soft," people-centered approaches, especially with the reporting tools and contexts used by nonparticipant evaluators, such as surveys. Learning networks require sharing and reporting platforms that: 1) support learning, feedback, and whole-system understanding, not just surveillance, judgment, advocacy, or information delivery; 2) can give good context to data, observations, and stories, and protect data privacy as well as offering some data and stories to a larger public; and 3) are adaptable and responsive to the needs and creativity of a group.</li>
</ul>
<p>It's not that external motivations are always wrong, or that internal motivations are always right. It's a <strong>relationship</strong> issue, with possibilities for complementarity and synergy as well as antagonism or dissonance. Where internal motivations are undeveloped, hidden, or unconscious, external motivations may form a pervasive monoculture without a working, participatory, learning and inquiring feedback loop, and thus a high tolerance for unseen risk.</p>
<p>Everyone wants better soil health and watershed function. Learning networks can help align external incentives such as peer pressure with internal incentives such as curiosity, learning, and a land ethic.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/pyramids.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="6" width="100%">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="50%"><em><strong>Problem-oriented</strong>: When dealing with complexity, this structure becomes risky. Positions, predictions, and advocacies may overshadow evidence. Fragmentation and resistance is guaranteed, and there is little accountability for results. Diversity of opinion or perspective becomes a threat.</em> <img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/balance001.jpg" width="100%"/>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i>Antagonism or "balance" between external and internal motivation</i></p>
</td>
<td width="50%"><em><strong>Opportunity-oriented</strong>: a diversity of framings and contexts, and wider participation by both people and land, become assets to a shared intelligence based on local evidence, with collaboration between internal and external motivations. <br/><br/></em>How can the structure on the left transform itself into the structure on the right?</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h4></h4>
<h4>Three legs of a learning network</h4>
<h5><strong><br/>1. Framing good questions</strong></h5>
<ul>
<li>Questions often begin with resource concerns or problems, including the need to form judgments, assign categories, and take positions. But good questions will also include deeper levels: understanding and observing underlying forces and processes (such as water cycling, carbon cycling, economics, change, conflict, and the relationships between them), and influencing them toward what people need and want.</li>
<li>Good questions are the ones the participants want to learn from and can own, and can be answered with participatory inquiry and evidence of results or outcomes such as measurements and observations over time.</li>
<li>Good questions are open-ended, can generate bigger and better questions, and can transform our understanding.</li>
</ul>
<p>As humans in society, we will always be concerned with judgments<span>—</span>our own and those of others. It's easy and tempting to stop there, but we can also add bigger questions, learning questions:</p>
<table border="1" cellpadding="8">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><strong>Judgment questions</strong></td>
<td><strong>Learning questions</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Am I doing the right thing?</td>
<td>What results am I getting?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Are we doing sustainable or regenerative practices?</td>
<td>Is our soil covered, do we have living roots for all of the growing season, and diversity of plants and animals? How might we find out?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>How do I kill this weed? How do I get rid of this person or group, or solve this problem?</td>
<td>What conditions or relationships can I begin to create, what position do I need to be in, so that this weed, person, group, or problem is no longer a problem?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Is it good or bad? (Cow, wolf, carbon dioxide, knapweed, etc.)</td>
<td>How does it function in the system as a whole, and how to find out?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Having identified best management practices, how should agencies or organizations increase producers' adoption of them?</td>
<td>Who are the caretakers of the land, the circle of life? What are the relationships between and among them? How to create situations and contexts in which caretakers learn from each other?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><em>add a judgment question here</em></td>
<td><em>add a learning question</em></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p></p>
<h5><strong>2. Facilitator-coordinators</strong></h5>
<p>These essential roles, which can be shared, require commitment, trust and familiarity with local people, skills, and experience in people-centered approaches, as well as some form of continued local support. Facilitator roles, which could be filled by employees, part-timers, contractors, or volunteers, include:</p>
<ul>
<li>creating, maintaining, and connecting a continuing variety of learning environments: events such as farm tours, pasture walks, and get-togethers and communications where learning is shared, as well as one-on-one sessions with participants around evidence and new questions;</li>
<li>enlarging judgment questions with learning questions, and connecting with people who can help answer them;</li>
<li>accompanying the caretakers: sharing leadership, blurring the boundary between teachers and students, helping people recognize and respect their own knowledge and experience, and that of others, in a new light;</li>
<li>curation and presentation of evidence, data, and stories;</li>
<li>addressing conflict around change, scarcity, power, diversity.</li>
</ul>
<h5><strong>3. Platform for questioning, reporting of evidence, and sharing</strong></h5>
<ul>
<li>helps connect questions and answers with evidence-based feedback;</li>
<li>provides appropriate ways of entering, displaying, and sharing data and stories among participants and stakeholders, with a variety of privacy options;</li>
<li>adds visibility, memory, repeatable observations, and some degree of permanence.</li>
</ul>
<p>In combination with good questions and effective facilitation, a questioning and reporting platform can help groups move beyond the information delivery and advocacy stage to active, evidence-based participatory learning and a shared intelligence. (This is the design of <a href="https://soilhealth.app" target="_blank">soilhealth.app</a>, a web app for learning networks; but online or digital is not the only answer here.)</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>Functioning learning networks can improve the relationships between external and internal motivations, and introduce learning, curiosity, creativity, autonomy, participation, real feedback, and integrity into the conflicts between external motivations and the backlash and resistance that emerges everywhere. So, two new questions:</p>
<p>How might learning networks, existing as well as potential, be better supported, for example through locally hired or supported facilitator/coordinators?</p>
<p>How might learning networks add participatory, evidence-based learning to ongoing efforts of information sharing, technical assistance, and advocacy?</p>
<hr/>
<p>See also:</p>
<p>Institution or association? A brief <a href="https://managingwholes.com/community-choice.htm/">comparison</a> from managingwholes.com</p>
<p>recent <a href="https://soilsforlife.org.au/power-of-groups/" target="_blank">Australian article</a> on learning groups or communities of practice</p>
<p>"Do civilizations fall because the soil fails to produce<span>—</span>or does a soil fail only when the people living on it no longer know how to manage their civilization?"</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—</span>Charles E. Kellogg, 1938</p>
<p>"<span>Underlying every single conflict is power—who gets it, who doesn't get it. You have to know how to balance power, to empower, to create an environment where I empower myself."</span></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—Bob Chadwick</span></p>
<p>"The Nation that destroys its soil destroys itself. . . . The [Standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law] provides for the organization of `soil conservation districts' as governmental subdivisions of the State . . . . <em>Such legislation is imperative to enable farmers to take the necessary cooperative action.</em>"</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—</span>Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1937 letter to state governors (emphasis added)</p>
<p><br/>"Subsidies and propaganda may evoke the farmer's aquiescence, but only enthusiasm and affection will evoke his skill."</p>
<p>"Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land. . . . In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial."</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—</span>Aldo Leopold</p>
<p><br/>"If you want to make small changes, change how you <em>do</em> things.<br/>If you want to make big changes, change how you <em>see</em> things."</p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><span>—</span>Don Campbell, Saskatchewan rancher and facilitator of learning networks</p>Commodifying and financializing nature2021-03-17T15:44:54+00:002024-03-19T00:49:04+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/commodifying-nature/<p>The rush continues to commodify soil carbon or other "ecosystem services" and trade these on some kind of markets. USDA is paving the way for Wall Street and large corporations to commodify soil carbon which will do little to mitigate climate change.</p>
<p><a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/shell-game-of-carbon-markets">The shell game of carbon markets</a></p>
<p>Editorial from the Guardian that provides links to some of their January 2023 reporting on carbon markets:</p>
<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/26/the-guardian-view-on-carbon-offsetting-a-model-with-dangerous-flaws">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/26/the-guardian-view-on-carbon-offsetting-a-model-with-dangerous-flaws</a></p>
<p>Are we asking the wrong questions? These two excellent videos suggest that we are.</p>
<p></p>
<h3>Divide and rule by Vandana Shiva</h3>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/f9lq-uBdxg8" width="560"></iframe></p>
<h3>Banking Nature</h3>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/y1EdZeRHgbM" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>See also:</p>
<p>Indigenous Environmental Network's trenchant responses to so-called climate finance, climate-smart agriculture, and nature-based solutions:</p>
<p> <a href="https://www.ienearth.org/cop27/">https://www.ienearth.org/cop27/</a></p>
<p>Richard Norgaard's 2009 paper, <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard-Norgaard/publication/223043631_Ecosystem_Services_From_Eye-Opening_Metaphor_to_Complexity_Blinder/links/59f8d6a4aca272607e2f6312/Ecosystem-Services-From-Eye-Opening-Metaphor-to-Complexity-Blinder.pdf" target="_blank">"Ecosystem services: from eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder"</a></p>
<p>Daniela Gabor, <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/wab8m/">The Wall Street Consensus</a></p>
<p>Abstract: The Wall Street Consensus is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around partnerships with global finance. The Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bank’s Maximising Finance for Development or the G20’s Infrastructure as an Asset Class all call on international development institutions and governments of poor countries to ‘escort capital’ – institutional investors and the managers of their trillions in assets – into investable development assets. For this, ten policy commandments aim to forge the de-risking state and accelerate the structural transformation of local financial systems towards market-based finance.</p>
<h3>John Bellamy Foster on resistance to the financialization of nature</h3>
<p><a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2022/04/01/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth/">https://monthlyreview.org/2022/04/01/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth/</a></p>
<h3>Wendy Brown on Cultures of Capital Enhancement:</h3>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XlLPxNdYYWo" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p>2 good TikTok videos on "green" finance</p>
<p><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@greenfinanceobservatory/video/7208922632115342597?lang=en" target="_blank">https://www.tiktok.com/@<wbr/>greenfinanceobservatory/video/<wbr/>7208922632115342597?lang=en</a></p>
<div></div>
<div><a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@greenfinanceobservatory/video/7208925633118735621?lang=en" target="_blank">https://www.tiktok.com/@<wbr/>greenfinanceobservatory/video/<wbr/>7208925633118735621?lang=en</a></div>Online presentation and discussion on soilhealth.app2021-01-15T17:26:30+00:002024-03-18T17:42:46+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/webinar-soilhealth.app/<h4>The recording of the session announced below is <a href="https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/play/d3HmQJWesMcYqMHWouDjKUNs_C1xsECY_g_v2pmwGi7kykOn3bzTWMrcJAD7OSaf37-BiVJNYX7urQ0.iZjB9vWgBkQeRKG6" target="_blank">now available here.</a></h4>
<p>What is nature, how does it work, and why? The physicist Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, wrote: "What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."<br/><br/>So our questions are key to the understandings we construct. Much ecological monitoring has and continues to be <strong>surveillance:</strong> categorizing species and practices in terms of compliance with rule-based systems of policy and regulation, resulting in one-way information pipelines. Since I began the Soil Carbon Challenge in 2010, I wanted to ask different questions: when, where, and with whom are the opportunities for slowing carbon and water cycling?<br/><br/>A shift is possible, from surveillance and compliance monitoring toward a participatory, evidence-based, localized, shared understanding of carbon cycling, water cycling, and even local economics—if we can ask better questions, and engage more people in asking and answering. This calls for a different design, with implications for diversity and power.<br/><br/>I will be doing an online showcase and discussion of <a data-cke-saved-href="https://soilhealth.app" href="https://soilhealth.app" target="_blank">soilhealth.app</a>. The session is on Wednesday, January 20 (7 am U.S. Pacific time, UTC-8) and you can sign up <a data-cke-saved-href="https://lali.teachable.com/p/monitoring-the-circle-of-life" href="https://lali.teachable.com/p/monitoring-the-circle-of-life" target="_blank">here</a>. If you are engaged in a local or regional effort of regeneration or restoration, this app has been designed to support your work, customizable to your local needs.</p>Andhra Pradesh successes2020-12-13T20:17:33+00:002024-03-19T00:49:06+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/andhra-pradesh-successes/<p>Vijay Kumar, Didi Pershouse, Walter Jehne, and others participated in a recent inspiring 3-hour webinar on the successes of farmers in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. This presentation <span>highlights local successes built on 1) the empowerment of women and small farmers, 2) Zero Budget Natural Farming or similar strategies, and 3) the recently adopted practice of pre-monsoon drought seeding, which enables a standing crop canopy, even a small one, to capture atmospheric water in the form of dew, particularly at night. The combination here has resulted in some farmers achieving yearlong green cover even in fairly arid regions, and in some cases a doubling of farmer's income.</span></p>
<h2><a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" dir="auto" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCusizWOkz5Q0-F_TX0vKiPA" spellcheck="false">Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming</a></h2>
<p><ytd-channel-name class="style-scope ytd-video-owner-renderer" id="channel-name" wrap-text=""></ytd-channel-name></p>
<div class="style-scope ytd-channel-name" id="container"><paper-tooltip class="style-scope ytd-channel-name" fit-to-visible-bounds="" role="tooltip" tabindex="-1"></paper-tooltip></div>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zUVuzD5V4PI" width="560"></iframe></p>Judy Schwartz: The Reindeer Chronicles2020-09-03T15:43:19+00:002024-03-19T07:44:54+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/reindeer-chronicles/<p><em>YES!</em> magazine recently published a <a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/02/climate-change-healing-tipping-point/">review</a> of Judy Schwartz's new book plus some interview excerpts:</p>
<h4 class="entry-title HeadingCls" itemprop="headline">We’re at a Tipping Point—Toward Healing the Climate</h4>
<div class="entry-content-top">
<div class="entry-subheading">If we focus on the best possible outcomes, journalist Judith D. Schwartz argues, together we can restore ecosystems.</div>
<hr class="horitonzal-line"/>
<div class="entry-post-meta-wrapper">
<div class="meta entry-writers">
<div class="author-small-title"><span>BY</span><span> </span><span class="author"><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/authors/breanna-draxler/">BREANNA DRAXLER</a></span></div>
</div>
<span> </span>
<div class="meta entry-minutes"><svg height="15" width="16" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><path d="M8.259 8.226a1.018 1.018 0 0 1-1.454 0c-.408-.408-1.15-1.735-2.461-3.914 2.178 1.31 3.506 2.072 3.915 2.462a1.018 1.018 0 0 1 0 1.452zm4.576 4.578a7.45 7.45 0 0 1-5.304 2.197 7.452 7.452 0 0 1-5.304-2.197A7.456 7.456 0 0 1 .03 7.5a7.45 7.45 0 0 1 2.198-5.304l1 1.002A6.046 6.046 0 0 0 1.447 7.5c0 1.625.633 3.154 1.781 4.302a6.043 6.043 0 0 0 4.303 1.782 6.037 6.037 0 0 0 4.302-1.782A6.043 6.043 0 0 0 13.615 7.5a6.043 6.043 0 0 0-1.782-4.302A6.036 6.036 0 0 0 8.24 1.456v1.759H6.823V-.002h.708c2.004 0 3.887.782 5.304 2.198A7.445 7.445 0 0 1 15.032 7.5a7.448 7.448 0 0 1-2.197 5.304z" fill="#7E9EAB" fill-rule="evenodd"></path></svg><span> </span><span class="span-reading-time rt-reading-time"><span class="rt-label rt-prefix"></span><span class="rt-time">8</span><span> </span><span class="rt-label rt-postfix"></span></span><span class="min-read">MIN READ</span></div>
<div class="meta entry-publish-date"><span class="date">SEP 2, 2020</span></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>Climate change is the undercurrent that drives and shapes our lives in countless ways. Journalist Judith D. Schwartz sees the term as shorthand. “It’s almost as if people think climate is this phenomenon, determined solely by CO2, as if we could turn a dial up or down,” she tells me over the phone. “We are missing so much.”</p>
<p>In her quest for climate solutions, Schwartz leans into the complexity of natural systems. As she and I talk, I come to imagine our climate as a beautiful series of overlapping Rube Goldberg-style cycles of carbon, water, nutrients, and energy. Those systems have been knocked out of alignment, sure, but as Schwartz sees it, repair is not impossible.</p>
<p>While mainstream environmentalism has historically pursued either preservation or conservation, Schwartz’s new book,<span> </span><em><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/02/norway-reindeer-herding-sami-culture/" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">The Reindeer Chronicles</a></em><span> </span>(Chelsea Green 2020) explores a third option: regeneration. She looks at community efforts to restore ecosystems the world over. “We’ve been trained to believe that finding solutions is a job for the experts,” she writes, but “Earth repair is a participatory sport: a grassroots response to evolving global crises.”</p>
<p>Schwartz is worried that climate change conversations center around terrifying projections. “What do you do with that? Cower under the bed?” She says collapse is unlikely to be a one-shot meteorite, and that gives us some leeway. If we assume we’re not always going to get things right, that leaves room for mistakes and the collective learning they bring. “We have so much more agency than we’ve been able to see,” she says.</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/02/climate-change-healing-tipping-point/">read more ....</a></p>
<p> </p>Soil‑microbe systems are self‑organising states2020-07-29T18:35:59+00:002024-03-19T11:04:10+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/soil-as-emergent-self-organizing-states/<blockquote type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<h3>by Susan Cousineau</h3>
<div>(Instagram @susan.cousineau)</div>
<div></div>
<div>Neal, A. L., Bacq-Labreuil, A., Zhang, X., Clark, I. M., Coleman, K., Mooney, S. J., Ritz, K., & Crawford, J. W. (2020). Soil as an extended composite phenotype of the microbial metagenome. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 10649. <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67631-0&source=gmail&ust=1596143219102000&usg=AFQjCNE-0_HkOTSpS1-lVVnGZTZbqX9zJA" href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-67631-0" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.<wbr/>1038/s41598-020-67631-0</a></div>
<div><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;"> </span></span></div>
<div><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">This paper was a really dense read, but in a nutshell establishes <strong>soil as a self-organizing system</strong> derived from the interplay of microbial genetics (not just the whole organisms) and soil characteristics, rather than a reducible, mechanical system of many parts. While that may at first glance seem kind of self-evident, here's the peer-reviewed science to back it up.</span></span></div>
<div><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;"> </span></span></div>
<div><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;"><span>The authors determined that the soil isn't just influenced by microbes; and microbial populations aren't just influenced by soil type, structure, soil organic matter, and so on.<br/><br/>Instead, <strong>soil is literally an emergent expression of the genetic composition of microbial populations that inhabit it.</strong> </span><span>That means that distinctive sets of alleles (versions of individual genes) are associated with, and in turn determine through positive feedbacks, different states of soil physical structure, specifically porosity, which is driven by organic carbon flux. </span><br/><br/></span>
<ul>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">Soil management practices (comparing fallow, conventional wheat cropping, and grassland conversion) result in emergence of distinct associations between physical structure and biological functions</span></span></li>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">These associations in turn determine the flux, resilience and efficiency of nutrient delivery to plants (including water).</span></span></li>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">Nutrients (e.g. fertilization) and physical interventions (e.g. tillage) influence physical structure, which determines the air–water balance (e.g. anoxia) in soil and transport rates.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<div><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;"><br/>So far, this all seems pretty familiar, right?<br/><br/>What the authors determined, though, through a combination of soil X-rays and CT scans (to visualize the size and connectivity of soil pores), chemical analyses, and metagenomics of the soil microbiome, is unique in that it shows distinct assemblages of <span>genes</span>, not just organisms, associated with different types of management. And that these assemblages don't just vary from one type of management to the next -- they are altogether distinct from one another.<br/><br/><span>They were able to show that. . .</span></span></div>
<ul>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">The quality of organic carbon inputs (e.g. plant-derived carbon), the prevalence of anaerobic microsites, and delivery of nutrients to microorganisms attached to soil surfaces -- all of which are in large part determined by soil porosity (structure), which is in turn driven by carbon content -- result in selective pressures upon the soil microbiome at the level of individual genes rather than entire organisms.</span></span></li>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">As a result, distinctive gene assemblages characterise each soil state, with increased gene abundances for cell motility and external enzymatic activity in depleted soils (fallow and arable), with low soil porosity; and increased abundances for bacterial-bacterial and bacterial-Eukaryotic interactions in grassland soil, with higher soil porosity.</span></span></li>
<li><span><span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;">The nature of the interactions provide evidence that soil behaves as an extended composite phenotype of the resident microbiome, responsive to the input and turnover of plant‑derived organic carbon.</span></span></li>
</ul>
<span color="#000000" style="color: #000000;"><br/><span>To quote:</span><br/><span>"We provide new evidence supporting the theory that soil‑microbe systems are self‑organising states with organic carbon acting as a critical determining parameter. This perspective leads us to propose carbon flux, rather than soil organic carbon content, as the critical factor in soil systems</span><span>."</span></span></div>
<div><span face="Droid Serif, Times New Roman, Times, serif" style="font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Times New Roman', Times, serif;"> </span></div>
<div><a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/files/pdf/Neal_et_al_2020.pdf" target="_blank">I've attached the PDF</a>, with my highlights. If you want a clean copy, and are behind a paywall, you can drop the DOI into Sci-Hub (currently<span> </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.sci-hub.tw&source=gmail&ust=1596143219102000&usg=AFQjCNHn-nZoCaDciMry4uzAw_3_uCMk0Q" href="http://www.sci-hub.tw/" target="_blank">www.sci-hub.tw</a><span> </span>works) and get the PDF. </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>Enabling good questions2020-06-25T14:27:26+00:002024-03-19T09:14:55+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/enabling-good-questions/<p>In discussions of regenerative agriculture, soil health, and climate change, it's common to encounter these kinds of questions:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">What's the best way to measure carbon sequestration in soils?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">What practices are best for sequestering carbon in soils?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">What are the best indicators of soil health?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">How can land managers be incentivized to sequester carbon?</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">How can we scale up regenerative agriculture?</p>
<p>Given the challenges most humans face, these questions are natural and expected. We're trained to be problem-solvers, which works pretty well in simple or obvious situations, such as fixing a broken door latch: we can trace cause and effect and assign blame. Past experience and expertise is valid, and best practices work well everywhere.</p>
<p>However, with the big issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, systemic racism, climate change, economic inequality, soil health and watershed function--we're not in the simple or obvious situations any more. David Snowden's <a href="https://cognitive-edge.com/" target="_blank">Cynefin framework</a> helps us ask the question, in what sort of situation or domain are we dealing with, and what might be the constraints and appropriate strategies?</p>
<p></p>
<p><img alt="" height="564" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/cynefin.png" width="573"/></p>
<p>The questions listed above tend to keep us in the problem-solving mode, on the right side, the more ordered side in the diagram above. They may limit our creativity. They may limit participation in the creative discovery of emergent practice, because the problem-solving questions tend to favor experts, and assume that only experts have valid answers. Then the experts become gatekeepers, guarding the problem definitions that fit their expertise, their solutions. </p>
<p>There is enormous momentum (and trillions of dollars of ongoing as well as sunk costs) behind problem-solving approaches to complex issues. Our habits and psychology, our training and education, our political, social, and economic institutions, our departments of agriculture--all contribute to and sustain this momentum. Monitoring landscape and ecosystem function becomes a kind of surveillance in service of rule-based and problem-solving systems of compliance, certification, prediction, or judgment.</p>
<p>Opportunity- and possibility-seeking has been the purpose and design of the <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/challenge">Soil Carbon Challenge</a>. But it lacks a local focus, which is critical to growing a shared intelligence on ecosystem function. I'm working to complete a first version of <a href="https://soilhealth.app" target="_blank">soilhealth.app</a> (estimated for July 2020). This will succeed <a href="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/atlasbiowork">atlasbiowork.com</a>: enabling good, opportunity- and possiiblity-seeking questions, but with locally-specific projects that can be configured differently so as to promote a shared intelligence on both ecosystem and economic function, and the partitioning of sunlight and human power.</p>
<p></p>
<table border="1px" height="210" width="667">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;"><strong>Common questions</strong></td>
<td style="padding: 5px;"><strong>better questions</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;">Am I doing the right thing?</td>
<td style="padding: 5px;">What results am I getting?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;">Is this species or practice good or bad?</td>
<td style="padding: 5px;">What work does it do, and how does it function in the larger system?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;">How do I kill this weed or get rid of this person?</td>
<td style="padding: 5px;">What conditions can I begin to create so that this weed or person is no longer a problem?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;">What best management practices are commonly associated with accomplishing X, and which appeal to me?</td>
<td style="padding: 5px;">What conditions might enable X to occur? What position do I need to be in, what behavior and belief do I need, for X to begin to occur?</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="padding: 5px;">How can we make this [leaky, ineffective] system more efficient? More benign?</td>
<td style="padding: 5px;">How might we create an <em>effective</em> system for what we need and want? What might be some safe-to-fail experiments that might show us the way?</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://soilhealth.app" target="_blank">soilhealth.app (a third generation data collection and visualization platform)</a></strong> will be free to use for projects with open data, but each project will require human facilitator/coordinator(s) to engage their community in sharing evidence-based monitoring data and facilitating participation and interpretation, the questions on the right. The purpose is to <strong>enable good questions, and engage more people in asking and answering them.</strong> Contact us if you're interested in starting or facilitating a local monitoring project.</p>
<h4>Complex relationships and a double pendulum</h4>
<p><span>Our systemic issues--racism, climate, economic inequality--involve complex relationships and the transfer of energy and power. The double pendulum offers a reflection:</span></p>
<p></p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ArziWk9KiFQ" width="560"></iframe></p>Abe Collins: hiring farmers to grow deep topsoil watersheds2020-03-19T20:52:40+00:002024-03-19T04:41:31+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/abe-collins-hiring-farmers-deep-topsoil-watersheds/<p>Abe Collins presented at the Grassfed Exchange in February 2018 on Landstream. A great presentation.</p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z1zU5NM2bVw" width="560"></iframe></p>Bioprecipitation2020-02-24T14:03:37+00:002024-03-19T05:35:24+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/bioprecipitation/<p>Bioprecipitation is about the influence of biology, such as the bacteria <em>Pseudomonas syringae</em>, on rainfall. An introductory video from Cindy Morris. Contains links and references at the end.</p>
<p></p>
<p><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gFyNMUY1zgA" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p></p>
<p>See also the <a href="http://w3.avignon.inra.fr/rainfallfeedback/index.html">Rainfall Feedback Maps</a> for the continental U.S., mapping the degree of reinforcing feedback in the records from long-term precipitation gauges.</p>Curiosity2020-02-02T21:15:55+00:002024-03-19T00:49:11+00:00Peter Donovanhttps://soilcarboncoalition.org/author/Peter_Donovan/https://soilcarboncoalition.org/curiosity/<p><img alt="" src="https://soilcarboncoalition.org/static/media/uploads/maninbox001.jpg" width="100%"/></p>
<p><em>Complexity is a challenge to our understanding. We all use cognitive shortcuts or user interfaces, recognizing familiar patterns, all of which are wrong and misrepresent reality. But which questions we ask, which patterns or mental models we recognize, choose, or construct, and how we use and adapt them, have lots to do with how well we are able to learn and work with the complex patterns of the world outside our boxes.</em></p>
<hr/>
<p>Some recent workshops in California have triggered some reflection on the differences between presenting information, and some larger changes.</p>
<p>We all have paradigms, assumptions, and beliefs by which we frame the world and frame our questions about it. These beliefs and paradigms may remain invisible, and they may not correspond to reality. But they have consequences--they inform our behaviors--and some may be more useful than others in moving toward what we need and want.</p>
<p>New frames, paradigms, beliefs cannot be imposed, or merely announced and accepted. When we wish to offer a potentially more useful way of seeing things to others, labeling their frames or beliefs as good or bad, true or false can resemble a surprise attack, frequently unwelcome. New frames can rarely be argued into place, even with evidence--though many of us try these high-stress methods.</p>
<p>We may have to open the gate of change by ourselves, via our own discovery, by revising or constructing our own mental models, even making major changes to the story we tell ourselves. Often we must discard beliefs in order to discover new ones. This may seem like betrayal, disloyalty, subversion, or loss of identity, and is often very difficult particularly if we have been trained to be right, to have the right answer, the best knowledge.</p>
<p>Creating an environment for belief shifts takes some skill and confidence, and often this environment requires a slower rhythm than a 2-hour meeting with a timed agenda of presenting information. One of the best guides I know of is Bob Chadwick's 2013 book, <em>Finding New Ground</em>. There is a shorter article at <a href="https://managingwholes.com/chadwick.htm">https://managingwholes.com/chadwick.htm</a></p>
<p>It may be better to introduce new ways of seeing things more gradually, using small examples, making sure that learning is participatory and responds to curiosity, allowing people to construct and revise mental models of how the world works as well as human processes of change.</p>
<p>Most informational and scientific presentation styles do not do this. There are alternatives, and our Soil Carbon Coalition and Rancher-to-Rancher facilitators try to introduce these different questioning and participatory environments to more traditional presentation formats. We know that people need a sense of personal discovery as well as some confirmation and evidence, from other people as well as from evidence they can see up close.</p>
<p>For example, we try not to classify species or practices as good or bad, which is often not a useful question. Instead, try asking how the species or practice functions in larger systems such as carbon or water cycling. Our purpose is to ask better and bigger questions, focusing on opportunities in addition to problem-solving, and involve more people in asking and answering these questions.</p>