Most of the proposed responses to climate change don't fundamentally address one of the largest sources and solutions to the situation: restoring soil through regenerative agriculture and grazing. Current agriculture is rapidly causing soil to lose carbon- and this is _fixable_

the numbers vary as the destruction of soils is so backgrounded that it has only recently been brought into international discussions. But the levels of carbon storage in living biological soils are enormous.

but it is reasonable to attribute 30-60 ppm of the problem to soil loss which opens up a big realization: the WAYS we've used oil is as big of an issue as the use itself. how have we used it? by combing over the world's carbon storage every April.

i know a lot of people have come to see Organics as a luxury but it's important to remember where the word comes from: a focus on the organic matter content of soil rather than applying salts and fertilizers which kill soil biology.

we used around half of the world's oil to tear apart and oxidize the carbon storage in the soil and, unlike a lot of the BIG PLANS out there to block the sun or fertilize oceans, fixing soil loss would be a way to direct our remaining oil energy to solve a TON of other problems:

if we were to focus our civilization onto restoring the basis of life: the storage and moderation of water, the capacity of landscapes to support complex grasslands and forests, then we can have a basis for a future.

Regenerative Agriculture is possible & understood: polycultures, agroforestry, silva-pastoralism, intention planned grazing: all can mimic and work with natural systems and restore the link between CO2, plant, fungi and bacteria, and soil storage. While feeding people. Right now.

This is the one change this is within our grasp that can happen on the scale of space (pretty larger areas) and time (in a time-frame of 10ish years) that can actually fix a number of problems that are about to be irreversible:

ocean dead zones, the breakdown of communities, lack of local resilience, lack of jobs, broken food system, famine, flooding, die-off of insects and the food-webs that need them, etc etc etc

since the start of the industrial revolution we have used around 944,000,000,000 barrels of crude oil. Which has the same amount of energy as 91,752,708 first atom bombs.

right now, at the peak, we use 87,421,000 barrels of oil a day, which has the energy of 8,500 atom bombs. every day we use that energy to forge metals, throw cars down the road, lift buildings, but also to rip apart the landscape.

taking apart soil has grown a large population but it also lead to the loss of more than 1/4 of all farmland over the past 50 years. and it's accellerating

what if we use that energy to stop erosion, improve infiltration, plant trees, innoculate subsoils with important microbes?

just to put in perspective the sheer energy part of the problem

(these are slides from a talk i gave last year)

Ruddiman has argued that agricultural climate change started 10k years ago

and we are ON TRACK for the catastrophic predictions of The Limits to Growth by Donella H. Meadows and others:

but the thing is, building soil back isn't impossible and with a coordinated effort, a lot can happen. in 1970 Earl Butz changed farm policy to subsidize corn production, agriculture is one of those things that can instantly redirect a huge amount of fuel energy into new goals.

and at the same time, it is something people can do on personal, local, regional, state levels as well: we don't have to wait for the power to change.

a simple thing is to start to find soil-improving ways to replace degenerative agriculture. One I suggest is to start seriously considering Chestnuts in urban and residential contexts as a carbohydrate source. Perrenial, carbon-storing, and able to produce as well as grains.

another is to rethink meat but not in the ways you think. right now, convention production is unsustainable pollutive & requires mass grain agriculture But when cows are managed in tight moving herds/they are able to be used for ecosystem repair. I have seen this with my own eyes

grassland & preditors coevoled w/ clumped herds of grazers hitting deep-rooted perrenial grass & moving on built the massive storages of carbon rich soil that allowed agricultural civilization to start Now we've used up what they made: it's time to restore it. not dimming the sun

we could be planning our cities, towns, and residences to spread and store water, improve soils, and also store carbon. I would recommend looking to the water systems of Italian hilltowns, the parks of Olmstead, and the soil-building keyline systems of PA Yeomans for inspiration,

if humans started put as much energy into the improvement of the foundational life support systems as we do for the high trophic levels of tech we wouldn't have half of the problems we have now.

because we would be net-producers and ecosystems would grow in our footprints. this is possible. we know how to do it.

so, yeah, we all have to build as much soil as possible over the next ten years. not all of us even realize there is a problem so we'll have to build soil for them too. We can do this.

To put it in perspective it will require taking all of our ag lands and raising the organic matter content of the top foot by about 9%. We can shatter and inoculate subsoils and rapidly improve them through compost teas, restoring grassland, and stopping microbe-killing ag

I was ranting about this in another thread too: https://twitter.com/buildsoil/status/1066730950602575875?s=21

So wow thanks for all the reads likes & retweets. I'd like to say that i've been working on these issues for years, though i'm taking a hiatus to study spatial data science to be more useful. Two years ago I was building a project to implement these ideas, and i still intend to.

a few years back i was interviewed a few times on @KBOO community radio along with @kristinohlson, @daniellerch and others. I explore some of the ideas here:
https://tinyurl.com/ya5afwpq , https://tinyurl.com/y8tv9thx , and https://tinyurl.com/ya863yuy .

I also still keep open my ongoing gofundme fundraiser that paid for a lot of my initial research. For every $5 I get I devote at least an hour of work toward my project. https://www.gofundme.com/theworldtree 

one VERY important piece to add. Most of the ideas and techniques we have in our toolkit were worked out by, the use-rights held by, and the knowledge taken from indigenous people. So when I give talks I spend a LOT of time on this slide:

well-meaning white people: "but we are trying to repair the planet. it's a good use"

if it's the technique that will work and the indigenous developers of the idea don't want to grant use-rights, then give them back the land