Carbon is an essential component of air, water, and of all living things, as well as a component of many minerals. It’s like the Earth has a “Carbon Economy” - but when an economy becomes unbalanced..... health and life are in peril.
Welcome to our Carbon Sequestration blog. It is a work in progress, each post a continuously updated chapter of the eventual "Carbon Sequestration Workbook". The goal of the book is to explain in simple terms, the how and why of the carbon cycle, what climate change and global warming are, and what ordinary people can do to slow down the process, to minimize the suffering of our children and grandchildren as they adapt to changes that we now know are inevitable.
We’ve traveled all across glaciated North America over the past half century, describing and illustrating ecological communities to document conditions in anticipation of ecological change.
The poem that follows, was written by Fred 30 years ago on Haida Gwaii, as a response to climate change, when climatologists had just arrived at a consensus that drastic action had to be taken to combat greenhouse gas warming of the Earth. Its long title was borrowed from the article in Scientific American which announced the consensus:
We’ve traveled all across glaciated North America over the past half century, describing and illustrating ecological communities to document conditions in anticipation of ecological change.
The poem that follows, was written by Fred 30 years ago on Haida Gwaii, as a response to climate change, when climatologists had just arrived at a consensus that drastic action had to be taken to combat greenhouse gas warming of the Earth. Its long title was borrowed from the article in Scientific American which announced the consensus:
______________________________________________
Evidence suggests that production of carbon dioxide and methane from human activities has already begun to change the climate, and that radical steps must be taken to halt any further change
Reasoning from first principles bought the Hemlock,
All men are brothers hung upon the cross,
Grave Malthus prophesied,
And Father Darwin scanned the tangled bank.
“And yet it moves”— No Concord jail
Can hold the forests’ slashed succession or the loss
From grim satanic mills,
And coal and guns and butter all go blank.
Deny it, Slashers — all of it was true.
Your acid smoke is drifting low
The bodies of the trees you killed
have melted ice to flood your bedroom suites.
You cannot kill forever and take money for the dead —
For soil and for Auks, for Pigeons and for Buffalo.
The World is real and finite —
but still your bloated economics grows and cheats.
Able to think, perhaps, as well as we,
You turned our Science to your selfish gains
Muskrats without predators, you ate the World’s sweet marsh
and ran more madly as you stripped it —
Slave ships and black lung mines, Valdez and Stalingrad —
All summed into the greenhouse panes.
Thinking like men, you lived like Rotifers,
Small swirling heads filtering the Earth for money profit.
But now the World has warmed, the ozone thinned,
The sky has summarized your lives.
Your never-make-a-difference has come false.
So let us, wimps and dreamers, undo Earth’s disrepair,
Bind up your wounds with peat and flowers,
Sequester carbon as the forest thrives,
Living wood and leaf scour the skies,
And orchids bloom where seething Sphagnum purifies the air.
All men are brothers hung upon the cross,
Grave Malthus prophesied,
And Father Darwin scanned the tangled bank.
“And yet it moves”— No Concord jail
Can hold the forests’ slashed succession or the loss
From grim satanic mills,
And coal and guns and butter all go blank.
Deny it, Slashers — all of it was true.
Your acid smoke is drifting low
The bodies of the trees you killed
have melted ice to flood your bedroom suites.
You cannot kill forever and take money for the dead —
For soil and for Auks, for Pigeons and for Buffalo.
The World is real and finite —
but still your bloated economics grows and cheats.
Able to think, perhaps, as well as we,
You turned our Science to your selfish gains
Muskrats without predators, you ate the World’s sweet marsh
and ran more madly as you stripped it —
Slave ships and black lung mines, Valdez and Stalingrad —
All summed into the greenhouse panes.
Thinking like men, you lived like Rotifers,
Small swirling heads filtering the Earth for money profit.
But now the World has warmed, the ozone thinned,
The sky has summarized your lives.
Your never-make-a-difference has come false.
So let us, wimps and dreamers, undo Earth’s disrepair,
Bind up your wounds with peat and flowers,
Sequester carbon as the forest thrives,
Living wood and leaf scour the skies,
And orchids bloom where seething Sphagnum purifies the air.
(Schueler, Frederick W. 1991...Sea Wind5(1):4. The truth-tellers alluded to in the first stanza are Socrates, Jesus, Robert Malthus, Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and Henry David Thoreau)
______________________________________________________
Since those days, most of the discussion about combating climate change has been about reducing emissions from human activities. However, the other side of the campaign, as emphasized in our 1989 proposal, is scientifically known, but not broadly spoken of or applied. It recommends a global “carbon sequestration” policy of protecting and increasing biological communities which absorb carbon out of the atmosphere and deposit it into the organic soils beneath themselves.
Because our mentalities are mostly attuned to the short-term exigencies of day-to-day life, human memory is an unreliable guide to long-term changes in climate, which can only be studied in long stretches of records or data.
The Little Ice Age (1650-1850) is now thought to have been brought on by the regrowth of forests following the decimation of American nations by European conquest & diseases - so we have that example, and the challenge of replicating it without killing each other off.
Many proposals have been made for carbon sequestration on a global scale, ranging from massive reforestation to spreading iron salts in the high seas to trigger the growth of planktonic algae so the carbon they collect would sink to the ocean floor.
In accord with the 15 March 2019 global student strike against climate inaction, since nothing else seemed to be planned locally, we held a “Climate Change Flash Outdoor Seminar” at the parking lot beside the Oxford Mills dam, where we rehearsed ideas for dealing with climate change. This morphed into the idea for a book about kinds of carbon-sequestration activities possible for concerned citizens.
Comments and contributions are welcome!
__________________________________
Because our mentalities are mostly attuned to the short-term exigencies of day-to-day life, human memory is an unreliable guide to long-term changes in climate, which can only be studied in long stretches of records or data.
The Little Ice Age (1650-1850) is now thought to have been brought on by the regrowth of forests following the decimation of American nations by European conquest & diseases - so we have that example, and the challenge of replicating it without killing each other off.
Many proposals have been made for carbon sequestration on a global scale, ranging from massive reforestation to spreading iron salts in the high seas to trigger the growth of planktonic algae so the carbon they collect would sink to the ocean floor.
In accord with the 15 March 2019 global student strike against climate inaction, since nothing else seemed to be planned locally, we held a “Climate Change Flash Outdoor Seminar” at the parking lot beside the Oxford Mills dam, where we rehearsed ideas for dealing with climate change. This morphed into the idea for a book about kinds of carbon-sequestration activities possible for concerned citizens.
Comments and contributions are welcome!
__________________________________
This is our Table of Contents, for the blog posts that will follow:
CHAPTER 1: Mechanisms of Global Warming - percentage of global climate change to greenhouse and solar irradience – how methane and carbon dioxide keep infrared heat in the atmosphere – how plants absorb carbon
CHAPTER 2: Past Sequestrations – Ever since photosynthesis gave the Earth an oxygen atmosphere in the Precambrian, there have been fluctuations in the CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
CHAPTER 3: HOW TO increase the area of peatlands & other wetlands, raising their outlet sills 1 cm/year to promote the formation of organic soils & peat
CHAPTER 4: HOW TO replace lawns not needed for open-space human activity with stands of trees, favouring depleted native species
CHAPTER 5: HOW TO bias agricultural tillage towards practices that increase soil organic matter
CHAPTER 6: HOW TO manage roadsides, right-of-ways, and other open areas for deep-rooted native tall-grass prairie plants
CHAPTER 7: HOW TO direct runoff as much as possible into terrestrial & wetland communities, where the nutrients in drainage will grow biomass, rather than letting them into streams & lakes where they are pollutants
CHAPTER 8: HOW TO manage forests to promote characteristics of “oldgrowth”: large trees, coarse woody debris, organic soils, and a diverse community of forest-floor herbs and fungi
CHAPTER 9: Reduced Emissions - a summary of the other side of the problem, emphasising household contributions to the project.
CHAPTER 10: Conclusions
Some of these actions can be taken by individuals on their own land, while others will require various kinds of co-operation and co-ordination with municipalities, counties, county forests, schools, and higher levels of government. Carbon dioxide emissions from melting permafrost ought, of course, to be a major feature of Canadian political discourse, and if something comes up that might be done about this we'll add a chapter on permafrost, and maybe one on oceanic acidification.
Each of these chapters will be a post in this blog. We invite you to help us build and refine the book, by contributing comments.
Yours for health and balance,
Fred Schueler & Aleta Karstad
I look forward to each chapter!
ReplyDelete