Testimony, CTUIR Carbon and Culture conference

A rewrite of what I said at the closing circle of a Carbon and Culture conference sponsored by the First Foods program of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation along with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on October 1, 2025 in Cove, Oregon.

My name is Peter Donovan, and I live in La Grande, Oregon. In my younger years I did forestry work and worked on sheep ranches on Snake and Salmon rivers and further east, as a packer and herder. Later I studied with Allan Savory, who helped foster a practical awareness of carbon cycling and water cycling, and the enormous role of energy flows in the relationships among living organisms. Nature wasn't just things or species as in a field guide, but complex, reciprocal processes. A hundred years ago the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky observed that life was the most powerful geologic force---a generalization that is taking a long time for Western science to make practical use of.

Later I did a lot of reporting on people trying to manage wholes of land, people, and money. I did rangeland monitoring, and started a nonprofit, the Soil Carbon Coalition. I traveled the continent in a converted school bus for a decade, measuring soil carbon and soil carbon change on ranches and farms using research-grade methods on small plots that I could return to and resample with precision. I knew that water, and water in the soil, was the number one issue almost everywhere, but I measured soil carbon because it was easier than measuring soil water, which changes so rapidly. This was not about the exchange value of soil carbon, but about its use value---forming soil aggregates that help the soil accept and retain water, and much else besides.

The results from hundreds of sample sites from California to Vermont, from northern Alberta to central Mexico, were noisy and inconclusive. Soil carbon could increase rapidly, for example 40 percent in 3 years to 16 inches, and also decline rapidly during dry years. What I thought was good management often did not increase soil carbon. During this time there was rising interest and excitement around soil carbon ``offsets'' or ``sequestration'' because of the climate issue.

In the 1970s the growing environmental movement in the United States was mainly about tangible, local things: save our natural area, save our trees, our stream, our fish and wildlife. A majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, considered themselves environmentalists. But by the 2000s, the climate issue had swallowed or pulled rank on a good chunk of the environmental movement. No longer just about tangible, local things, the climate issue is about invisible greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, the abstractions of thermodynamics, and the threat of global apocalypse.

For a million years, our human ancestors have been burning things. The oxidation of food and fuel, the
conversion of carbon compounds such as glucose, cellulose, soil organic matter, and later coal, oil, and natural gas into energy and carbon dioxide became the metabolism of human civilizations at all scales. As this oxidation exploded in intensity in the modern era, the resulting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant rising temperatures, sea level rise from melting ice and warmer water, and ocean acidification. Alongside this, the depletion of soil moisture by short-season annual cropping, tillage, deforestation, and desertification has contributed to an intensified water cycle (more droughts and floods) as well as more sea level rise (10 mm in the last 40 years, according to one study, is attributable to soil moisture loss alone, about two-thirds the estimated volume of Greenland's ice melting).

In posing a stiff challenge to the very metabolic basis of human civilization, the climate threat divided people. Governments, organizations, and individuals were not able to transform civilization's metabolism from within it. When people are powerless, and feel threatened, there is a natural tendency to deny or ignore the problem. The climate issue plays a large role in the political polarization we experience, with less than half of Americans now considering themselves environmentalists. Whether you vote Democrat of Republican has become highly predictive of your opinions on climate (and some other "sciency" issues besides). Climate change has become the ultimate wedge issue, with threats of apocalypse exacerbating denial, and vice versa.

Markets have galloped to the rescue, with the promise of reconciling supply (carbon "sequestration," "drawdown," or "removal") with the demand (carbon "offsets"). Big money, hedge funds, and various middlemen are on board, with some government assistance in stabilizing the markets.

Colonialism 2.0

But the carbon cycle doesn't work that way. There is not a simple balance between emissions of carbon dioxide and carbon "sequestration" in trees, soils, or rocks, much as the carbon markets would have you believe. Carbon is on the move in diverse ways, both fast and slow. Complexifying factors are that the prime movers of carbon are living organisms with all their diverse foodwebs, plus the solubility of carbon dioxide in freshwater and seawater. Both the market claims are shaky: the claim of long-term sequestration, and the claim that "offsetting" fossil fuel emissions might mitigate climate change.

Thomas Joseph of the Indigenous Environmental Network has given us valuable and true perspectives on the scam that carbon offsets or credits represent. These "nature-based solutions" have swayed academics and governments into carbon accounting and a solutioneering approaches based on the carbon balance ideas.

What is the gas responsible for most of the greenhouse or heat-trapping effect?

Water (vapor). Ten years ago, if you mentioned water as a greenhouse gas, you were labeled a climate denier.

To put this in context, let's imagine seven generations of sunlight. Our planet is pretty much a closed system for matter, but an open system for energy. Almost all of the immense energy flows to our earth come from the sun, and it leaves as heat radiated to space. We're in a flow, like a moving stream, where small changes can, over time, create larger changes.

7. The smallest I will call self-awareness, which as we know is powered by a cascade of sunlight energy. This is the awareness of how we know, becoming aware of the assumptions, beliefs, the stories we tell ourselves that may be invisible or hidden. It is a very slight use of sunlight energy, but has enormous leverage.

6. Consciousness, the knowing that we know, being a witness to our own experience, using language for example. The solar-derived energy that runs 8 billion human beliefs and behaviors is around 160 billion watts, over 20 times the power output of Grand Coulee dam, multiplied of course by its enormous leverage over the greater works of sunlight.

5. Respiration or oxidation, the knowing and behavior of living organisms, including plants, fungi, bacteria who respond in real time to temperature, salinity, pH, daylength, and hundreds of other factors. When oxidation occurs outside living cells we call it fire. All living organisms know, even if that knowing is not conscious or does not include a nervous system. Living organisms spend much of their energy passing on this knowing to future generations, encoded in genes and proteins, culture, instinct, behavior.

4. Photosynthesis, about 120 trillion watts worldwide, half of it occurs in the ocean. This is about 8 times all human use of fossil fuels, hydro, solar panels, wind, nukes, and biomass burning. Unlike our diesel engines, this work of sunlight is spread out, slow, quiet, and takes place at normal temperatures and pressures. We don't usually think of this as part of the energy sector of our economy.

3. Water cycling, driven by sunlight evaporating water into a lighter-than-air gas, which can form droplets in the atmosphere and release rain and snow. About a third of sunlight energy reaching the earth's surface evaporates water---400 horsepower per acre, about 400 times photosynthesis's average of 1 horsepower per acre. The water films coating soil particles and filling soil pores is embodied solar energy, quite literally liquid sunshine.

2. The other two-thirds of the sunlight reaching the earth's surface is absorbed as heat, mainly by the dark oceans. Because the earth is irregular and spins, this heat produces ocean currents and winds, which in combination with water cycling move heat, often from low latitudes to high.

1. At the top of the atmosphere, about 1800 horsepower per acre of sunlight arrives, or about 340 watts or half a horsepower per square meter, averaged over all seasons, day and night, all latitudes. About a third of this energy does no work on earth, and is directed back into space by clouds, ice and snow, reflective surfaces, dust, aerosols, and the atmosphere itself.

Because we're in a flow of energy, smaller uses of sunlight can change larger ones. The weak have some influence over the strong. Human beliefs and behaviors have changed the reflectivity of the earth by melting arctic ice, deforestation, and desertification. Photosynthesis, plant growth can transform water cycling on land, which in turn affects storms and heat domes.

Even if we are able to "sequester" billions of tons of carbon, most of us would not benefit. Climate warming would not cease. But the benefits of allowing soils to absorb and retain rainfall with cover, diversity, living roots, and lessening severe disturbance such as tillage or soil-destroying fire, thus improving local water cycling, are local: local streams and rivers, groundwater, fish, wildlife, roots, berries.

For the tribe's First Foods framework, the main value of carbon in soils and trees is its use value, which can improve the dynamics of water to considerable local benefit. Attention to water, rather than carbon, sets up self-motivation and care as the driving forces of change, rather than poorly targeted or perverse markets or incentives. New tools such as OpenET which model evapotranspiration at the Landsat pixel scale now make soil and water dynamics more visible.

Thomas Joseph pointed out that the real solutions to climate as well as other challenges are reciprocal relationships between people and land. This may seem backward to those who seek solutions that scale, that can be delivered through programs or pipelines set up by organizations and governments, and that typically cannot address the real causes of climate change or soil degradation, which are people issues and seldom technical issues. But reciprocal relationships do scale, person by person, community by community, if we know how to grow power from people's strengths and assets rather than merely from their problems.