Does the rhizosphere sleep at night? What are its pulses like? Its breaths?
Tag Archives: soil
The Problem is the Solution: Carbon, and the case of Life and Death
Permaculture Principle
The problem is the solution.
Hearing about carbon and the environment, many people think of atmospheric carbon as a green house gas. Right alongside that are all the long-term massive changes in the carbon cycle from fossil fuel extraction, processing, and use as fuels and plastics. Carbon is problematic, but it’s so much more. In fact it’s a lot of things, and it’s ubiquitous in life.
On Earth, all known living things have a carbon-based structure and system.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemistry
Even fossil fuels contain this fact, that carbon is the building block of life. Fossil fuels are not inherently bad, they are just part of life systems, dead for millions of years only to be brought to life briefly for a fast flash then a slow decay. A decay of life systems themselves, a stumbling toward high entropy and climate chaos. How do we reign in the chaos, how do we lower entropy on Earth as Life overall seems inclined to do?
The complexities around fossil fuels, from geology to economics and ecology to justice, exist in full form only at scales (i.e. a hyperobject) that are hard for us to grapple with. It is how we interact with the the systems fossil fuels are a part of, to either degrade or regenerate those very living systems and life itself. Carbon can be the quickly-lost exhaust of burned billion-year-old oil, or it can be rich black organic matter that gets better with time, revitalizing soil that sustains us and all life on Earth.
We live at a time where there is widespread disturbance all around us. The ground is open and waiting for seeds. We can bemoan the tragedies that nature has endured or we can cast seeds and plant a future.
Trees of Power by Akiva Silver of Twisted Tree Nursery near Ithaca, NY
We can and do influence the ecosystems around us more than any other species. That influence can come through reckless destruction, blind abandonment, or conscious intent.
Carbon’s role in life systems can give momentum to feedback loops of degradation or of restoration and regeneration. Carbon can serve a core role in feedback loops that produce goods in the present and get better over time: trees, soil, animals enjoying carbon while sequestering and storing it, all in mutual benefit enhancing the systems one and all exists in.
Enjoying carbon? Enjoying it as in making fulfilling, mutually beneficial use of it. And enjoying it while we still can, that is, considering how dire some environmental situations are becoming in large part due to imbalances in the carbon and other cycles. We need the tools to shift the carbon cycle into a more wholly beneficial setting. We know the tools: trees; carbon farming; regenerative, ecological lifestyles and landscapes. And we have the main building block of those tools, waiting to take f(x) one way or another: Carbon. For life systems, ecosystems; or for the degradation, destruction, and death of those systems?
For life systems, or for the death of those systems?
Where’s the carbon?
Is it regenerative or degenerative?
Is it diverse or a monoculture/monopoly?
?
An Agroforest Manifesto: the Prime Directive of Perma(nent Agri)culture
https://permies.com/t/59524/Prime-Goal-Permaculture#506066
We urgently need to act to reverse our direction of widespread, rapid & accelerating, deep degradation of Earth’s resources and processes we rely on for survival. Our response needs to be faster than that of governments, and we cannot rely on those invested in degrading ways as they will be an obstacle-or-worse until converted by being shown better ways that they can see from their greedy perspectives. We must act with the long-term care-taking mentality in which it is clear that helping that-which-helps-oneself is…helpful to oneself! We must do the simple and obvious – and fast – to mitigate and adapt as much as possible. We must do the most practical and broad scale – at the foundations of our wellbeing – to mitigate and adapt as much as possible. We must farm and support farms that are both producing what we need and conserving what we need: farms with diversity to increase resilience for farmers and societies; farms with trees to provide long-term value generation while reducing costs of crop nutrient- and risk- management; and a number of other scientifically-supportes, time-tested techniques currently in action but not on nearly a large enough scale. Farmers control the ecology of vast, vast tracts of land. We must act to reverse degredation, to regenerate livelihoods without insurmountable and unending debt, to regenerate landscapes with nutrients and healthy cycles rather than toxins and worsening margins. We must act while in this relatively peaceful period, for it is much easier to shift gears and start building (rather than losing) healthy topsoil on a farm than on the desert conventional farms leave in their wake.
‘The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.’
Ecological farm in France
Soil Health with Gabe Brown
Gabe Brown presents a few keys to soil health. He makes a lot of good points in this, about nutrient cycling and the importance of soil organic carbon, diversity and life.
“Nature’s currency is life”
Wonderful planting workday & garden lunch – Elderberry guild, L-shaped nut & fruit bed, perennial pollinator bed – Sat, Sept 8, 2018
Thankful for a wonderful day forest gardening with good company. Started the day with J picking up some friends K & Ez to go pickup plants at a perennial native pollinator plant sale. One of them got some trees, we got a bunch of herbaceous flowery plants.
Back at home we started out by planting some of the Fava beans our friend from Puerto Rico brought us as seeds. They were growing well indoors and now that it’s cooler we’ll plant them, hoping they flower before frost but not until the max temps drop below 80dF (that heat can kill their flower).
Then we began planting an L shaped series of trees and bushes along the south and east side of our garden. The shorter bushes – black and red currants – are on the east side which is toward the house, allowing us to see over them into the garden. On the south side is a hazelnut, and we’ll locate another one or two relatively close to pollinate it. These trees were potted and grown that way for approximately a year by me, having been almost a year old when I got them. The hazelnut was purchased from Twisted Tree Farm nursery and the blackcurrants propagated through Alchemical Nursery. These trees will hopefully be propagated into more generations of them once they’re healthy and hearty-sized in their permanent location.
Then we moved on to extend the elderberry/mint/strawberry guild/bed, with a patch of pollinator flowers. Around this time a friend arrived to join in and help out. We yanked out tons of mint and lemon balm and hung ’em to dry. We dug roots out of the ground then planted the pollinators, laid cardboard around them and covered it with mulch and some rocks we had. Can always use more mulch, and we were low on rocks.
We planted pollinators in the front yard too but not before having an amazing lunch. It started as an idea for a quick snack, a garden fresh cuke seseme salad, but it turned into a smorgasbord of that, Brazilian cheesy bread, garden fresh tomatoes with basil and fennel, roasted anchovies, shrimp fried rise, and an amazing chicken noodle soup our neighbor brought over (we just learned she’s a chef and owned her own restaurant, as we gave her garden fresh food! hopefully that’s a wonderful win win symbiotic relationship).
In the front we were able to reuse mulch already in a planting bed.
Overall we used 3:1 mix of native soil with compost/tree planting soil mix. Much of the excess native soil went in the heap compost to enhance it and get enhanced by it! Speaking of soil, we chopped and dropped some grasses and used that as mulch or added it to the heap compost. Looking forward to more chop and drop, and soil building!