April 2012 update

The 2011-2012 Soil Carbon Challenge baseline tour has come full circle. I arrived back home in northeast Oregon's Wallowa County on the last day of March 2012, after 250 days on the road and 12,137 miles in the converted school bus as well as several side trips by car, plane, and train. It was a fantastic trip, and I'm deeply grateful to all those whom I visited for their participation and hospitality.

So far, over 60 people have participated in the Challenge, with baseline plots to measure soil carbon change, from California to Vermont, Mexico to Canada. I expect to be able to post the remaining baseline data on the map shortly. Here's a newspaper article about the last plot on this baseline tour.

Later this year I will be venturing out to do more baseline plots, monitoring demonstrations, and workshops. Advance notice, publicity, and scheduling are things I hope to improve.

Though the baseline tour has ended, the Challenge has forward momentum. It is open to additional participation, localization, and adoption. The monitoring and design are open-source and can be adapted and localized. As Joe Morris in California has recognized, the Challenge is a movement, or the beginnings of one.

Through the presentations and workshops I've done, it has become even clearer that there are multiple and diverse concepts of what carbon cycling does, and why it's important. For some, carbon cycling is an unfamiliar idea, one that they cannot describe, or understand in relation to the circle of life stages of birth, growth, reproduction, death, and decay. Others understood carbon to be bad, as some kind of pollution. Still others thought carbon was a hoax to rob people of free will and ensure world government.

Some were primarily interested in soil carbon for its potential carbon credits, or "offsets" to fossil fuel burning. Others see soil carbon, or carbon cycling, through specific tools and practices, such as no-till, biochar, keyline, composting, forestry, or cover cropping, and trying to evaluate the relative effectiveness of these tools. In general, people are focused on one or two of the "pieces," and often at various stages along some kind of path or journey, perhaps toward recognizing the carbon cycle as a whole, the circle of life, and what makes the world go round for living organisms such as ourselves.

Toward the end of the workshops I usually mentioned that our institutions and organizations were not well-suited for managing carbon cycling effectively. Then I ask, What are the reasons it is impossible for our institutions to manage the carbon cycle effectively?

Here are some of the answers I heard.

All these are beliefs, not facts. Even the last one--the lack of markets--is a belief, because increased soil carbon can be marketed internally to a garden, farm, or ranch in the form of lowered input costs and higher production, quality, and resilience.

If these are our beliefs, they can shift, especially if we're in motion, or part of a movement.

Congratulations to all those who have participated in the Challenge so far! I've been amazed by the diversity, by the commitment and interest, and the depth.