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THE ANSWER IS GREEN!
PROMOTING PHOTOSYNTHESIS EVERYWHERE
THE ONLY VIABLE SOLUTION TO GLOBAL WARMINGAND CLIMATE DISASTERPREFACEThis paper does not represent original research. It is, instead, a‘connecting of dots’ of basic science in an attempt to reveal truths that shouldbe blindingly obvious but that are not generally recognized. It is also notpresented as a scientific research paper, accessible only to a few, but as a
general article with solid scientific underpinning, designed to be readable byany educated reader, in order to reach as many people as possible.
It is an attempt, grounded in that basic science, to make the case thata comprehensive strategy to increase photosynthetic activity is the only viableapproach to drawing down excess carbon from the atmosphere in the limited
time available to avert a global climatic disaster. It also presents the reasoning
for doing so in every ecosystem where significant levels of photosynthetic
activity occur, and lists the significant secondary benefits that can be expectedfrom implementing those strategies. By no means is this paper intended to be
a comprehensive blueprint; rather it aims to provide a badly needed ‘big
picture’. It is an attempt to cut through the fog of misconceptions and thehopelessness that characterize our current understanding of global warming
and our approaches to solving it.
ABSTRACTThe paper begins by briefly describing the danger of a global warming disasteron the scale of the Permian mass extinction (1). Next, it examines the
misconception that fossil fuel use is the sole or even main cause ofanthropogenic global warming (2). It proceeds to a review of basic soil andenvironmental science, and an examination of sources of Greenhouse Gas
emissions, followed by a sampling of NGO and stakeholder-led efforts torestore Soil Organic Carbon (SOC), (3), in order to demonstrate the viability
and effectiveness of the strategies outlined below (4). It concludes (5) bysummarizing the main points, and by pointing out that the ongoing changes inaverage temperature and rainfall patterns caused by global warming mean that
there is only a limited window of time to implement the photosynthetic CO2
drawdown strategies that are our only hope of salvation from climate disasteron a Permian scale.

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INTRODUCTION
Climate Change associated with Global Warming (GW) should be more
properly described as climate disaster. The magnitude and scope ofapproaching disasters associated with rising temperatures are becoming
steadily clearer and more terrifyingly existential.
Fossil fuel emissions are not the sole cause of GW, and possibly noteven the main cause. Land and Ocean Mismanagement over the course ofhuman history, and in particular over the previous two centuries (roughly, theindustrial era), and especially in the last few decades, has greatly reduced total
global photosynthetic activity AND, because of the resulting exponential
increase in oxidation of organic matter, facilitated the release of enormous
quantities of carbon stored in that organic matter to the atmosphere in the formof CO2.1 In addition, water vapor is a greenhouse gas and is the biggest overall
contributor to GW, and desertification and degradation through loss of organic
matter from agricultural lands, rangelands and forests have significantly
reduced the water absorption and retention capacity of those lands. This may
be a significant factor in the increasing build-up of water vapor in theatmosphere.
At present, the buildup of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) in the atmosphereis seen mainly as a fossil fuel emissions problem, with a mainly technologicalsolution focused principally on those emissions reductions. Given the amountof anthropogenic carbon already in the atmosphere, and the feedback loops
already being triggered (increased fires across the planet, melting of thepermafrost, release of methane hydrates from the seabed, reduced reflectionof sunlight associated with sea ice loss, etc.) reducing or even (improbably)
eliminating that fossil fuel use will only result in wrecking our climate system ata slightly slower pace. Most discussion of potential drawdown of CO2 alreadyin the atmospheric is also technological in nature (CCS, or carbon capture andstorage technology). But neither present nor foreseeable CCS technology can
economically remove CO2 and other GHG from the atmosphere, and in any
case CCS technologies cannot possibly capture enough carbon in the needed
time frame to avert disaster. And such strategies totally disregard the enormous
benefits of restoring organic carbon to the world’s soils and oceans. Thus,
although fossil fuel emissions reductions and transition to renewable energy
are essential in the long term, there is NO realistic fossil-fuel reduction strategy
NOR technological solution to GW within the time frame remaining to avoid1

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climatic disaster.
One viable solution does exist, and it consists of systematicallyaugmenting photosynthetic activity, through land and ocean management
strategies that mimic natural processes, in every ecosystem where significant
amounts of photosynthetic activity occur.2 Photosynthesis is the driver of the
carbon cycle, and converts carbon from the atmosphere to organic forms
contained within the soils and the waters of the planet, in a form beneficial tolife. Photosynthesis ‘moves’ carbon at a scale far outstripping, even now, any
human activity, and it moves it in the desirable direction. Land, Urban andOcean Management strategies to promote and increase photosynthetic
activity, if implemented in a timely fashion, will not only drawdown sufficientcarbon from the atmosphere in time to avert the worst of global climate disaster,
but are extremely desirable management options simply for their side benefits
alone. These include reversing desertification, increasing food production inboth rural and urban areas and in the oceans as well, promoting biodiversity,
increasing water retention and mitigating water shortages, revitalizing rural
economies, reducing heat-island problems in cities and making them morelivable, and in general restoring the natural beauty of the planet.

1) THE LOOMING CLIMATE DISASTERS

Prior to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (the Paristalks), the three living diplomats who had led previous U.N. climate changetalks claimed there is little chance the next climate treaty, if it is ever approved,
will prevent the world from overheating. "There is nothing that can be agreed
in 2015 that would be consistent with the 2 degrees," said Yvo de Boer, who
was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change in 2009, when attempts to reach a deal at a summit in
Copenhagen crumbled. "The only way that a 2015 agreement can achieve a
2-degree goal is to shut down the whole global economy.”3
If there is one defining characteristic of our responses to the existential
threat of runaway Global Warming, it is that we have consistently
underestimated its speed and scale. The history of our assessments of thescope of climate change is basically a history of those assessments being
continually revised upwards:

2
3

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• Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC

announces that the planet will see a one-degree Celsius temperature
increase due to climate change by 2100.

• Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C
increase by 2100.

• Mid-2009: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts a 3.5C increase by

2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on thisplanet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans would be destroyed, andassociated temperature swings would kill off many land plants. Humans
have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above baseline.

• October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an
updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060.

• November 2009: The Global Carbon Project, which monitors the global

carbon cycle, and the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report,
predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100.

• December 2010: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C
increase by 2050.

• 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy
Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C
increase by 2017.

• * November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C
increase by 2035.4

A briefing provided to the failed U.N. Conference of the Parties in
Copenhagen in 2009 provided this summary: “The long-term sea level that
corresponds to current CO2 concentration is about 23 meters above today’slevels, and the temperatures will be 6 degrees C or more higher. Theseestimates are based on real long-term climate records, not on models.” On
December 3rd, 2013, a study by 18 eminent scientists, including the former
head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, showedthat the long-held, internationally agreed upon target to limit rises in global
average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius was in error and far above the 1C
threshold that would need to be maintained in order to avoid the effects ofcatastrophic climate change. Given present trends, limiting rises to 2 C, letalone this newer perhaps more realistic limit of 1C, seems unlikely in theextreme. 5

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EXTINCTIONS
These disheartening facts can and do lead to serious pessimism. Are
we doomed, and if so, what will the effects of this catastrophic climate change
look like? The geologic record is very sobering: There have been five great
extinction events in the half billion years of animal life on this planet. Althoughmost people imagine that these events were all caused by asteroid strikes,
most evidence indicates 4 out of the 5 extinction events were actually causedby enormous spikes in greenhouse gases that led to global warming events.
The world is very aware of the danger of asteroid strikes; they are very
dramatic indeed and the stuff of many a movie.
But the geologic recordsuggests we should be far more concerned with global warming events.
The greatest of them all, the End-Permian extinction, also known as thePermian-Triassic mass extinction event, is widely considered to have been the
result of a catastrophic global warming event that played out over an
estimated period of 80,000 years. It is thought that 96% of marine organisms
went extinct, as did more that 70% of land vertebrates. It is also the largest,some say the only, mass extinction of insects and other terrestrial
invertebrates in the fossil record. It is known colloquially as the Great Dying.
Details are in some dispute, and there is a range of assessments as to thescope of the mass extinction and its timing, and of the mechanisms at work.
But there is broad agreement that the proximate cause of the End-Permian
extinction was a relatively rapid and very large surge in the greenhouse gases
CO2, and methane, triggered most probably by the enormous volcanic events
that produced the Siberian Traps. Not only would this vulcanism have injectedmassive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, but would likely have set hugecoal beds on fire, releasing yet more gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere.
Recent research shows that approximately half of the area covered by thebasalt flows of the eruptions was actually shallow seas that existed at the time.
This influx of lava would have resulted in enormous releases of methanetrapped in methane hydrates on the sea floors. This, in addition to all the CO
already released to the atmosphere, resulted in a runaway greenhouse effect,with average temperature increases of at least 6C at the equator ranging up
to 10C or more in arctic regions.
The resulting ocean acidification,

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temperature induced oceanic hypoxia, violent climate disruptions such as fire,
flood and storm events, etc. led to the Great Dying.

Graph from “The Siberian Traps and the End-Permian mass extinction: a critical review” by Andy Saunders
and Marc Reichow

The point of this discussion is that, largely as a result of human activities,
the world is presently in a situation analogous to the onset of the End-Permian
extinction event. Extinction rates now are one to two hundred times the
background extinction rate, equaling or exceeding the End-Permian event,and greenhouse gas concentrations are rising in fact far faster than they did
then. The scope of that mass extinction could very easily be repeated andon a far more rapid time scale, in our own lifetimes even. This should terrify
us into effective action to avoid the fate of Permian life.

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We are already seeing fiercer storms, with more severe floods occurring
more often, an increase in the frequency and intensity of fires, more droughts,
melting glaciers in the arctic, Antarctic and montane regions of the world, sealevel rise, the spread of infectious disease, rapidly increasing rates ofextinction, and other symptoms and warnings of the impact of global warming.
And the disasters are just beginning. Most of the statements in the following
paragraphs are adapted from one of the most sobering books ever written,“The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after Warming” by David Wallace Wells,
published in 2019. For incorrigible skeptics and climate denialists, extensive
notes substantiate the statements made therein.
Wildfire
Wildfires are already reaching terrifying proportions, and as thetemperature rises, they will become exponentially worse. Australia is suffering
disastrous fires, as is California, now on a yearly basis. Unprecedentedly, there
are wildfires in Greenland, and in Sweden north of the arctic circle. Smokefrom Siberian wildfires reaches the continental USA. In 1997, it is estimatedthat just the peat fires of Indonesia released over 2 billion metric tons of8carbon, over one-third of annual global emissions, and this episode wastopped by the Indonesian fires of 2015. Over 35,000 fires have been recorded
in Indonesia, and over 100,000 fires in the Amazon in 2019 and the carbon
emissions from these fires are huge as well. Wildfires are not only becoming
more destructive, they are a fearsome feedback loop, releasing ever-morecarbon to the atmosphere, and fast-forwarding global warming. Which in turncreates more wildfires.

Above: The Washington Post/Getty Images – The Woolsey fire burns above Malibu
Below: Daily Mail, UK - Flames rage across woodland during deadly California wildfires

FloodsAs the atmosphere warms, it can hold more moisture. Torrential rains,once in a hundred-year events, are now occurring several times a decade.
Some, such as Hurricane Harvey, have been described as once in 500-year
events. Inland flooding affected over 2 billion people and killed over 150,000
in the 20 years between 1995 and 2015, and the numbers can only rise alongwith the temperature. In July 2010, flooding on the Indus river in Pakistan
affected one fifth of the country, and over 20 million people. Houston, Texas
normally receives 1.264 mm of rain a year, but Hurricane Harvey, in 2017,
dropped more than a year’s worth of rain on the city in 48 hours, and about

9125 trillion liters on the US as a whole. It was the wettest hurricane in US
history, but this record is sure to be broken. New words are entering theJapanese vocabulary: it is now no longer torrential rain, but guerilla torrential
rain. As I write this, Nagano and the Kanto region are recovering from theflooding of Hagibis, one of the largest typhoons ever to hit Japan, and onethat hit just a month after another typhoon, Faxai, also made landfall in thesame general area in Japan, causing over 70 billion yen in economic losses.
The economic losses calculated so far for Hagibis, surely only a fraction of the
final total, already exceed 100 billion yen. A March 21, 2018 article in The
Guardian, citing a European science paper, stated that “Flooding and heavy
rains rise 50% worldwide in a decade . . .” and that “Such extreme weather
events are now happening four times more than in 1980”.

Coastal flooding, due to sea level rise from the melting of the world’s
ice, is already becoming noticeable, and due to get much worse. The West
Antarctic Ice Sheet has more than doubled its rate of loss in the last five years,
and has probably already passed a tipping point of collapse. In Greenland thesituation is similar; the ice sheet is losing nearly a billion tons of ice daily. The
last time the earth was four degrees warmer, there was no ice at the poles andthe seas were about 80 meters higher, which, if repeated, would acatastrophic loss of habitable land beyond comprehension. Even if we areable to limit temperature rise to about 2C, the sea level will eventually rise by
up to 2m. Vast amounts of land will be submerged regularly or completely byflooding: two thirds of Bangladesh, Miami Beach and much of south Florida,
the Maldives, Venice, etc. etc. Every beach we have ever swum at will
disappear, and the geologic processes to produce new sand will take many
millennia. A majority of the world’s cities are on the coast, and will be directly

10affected, among them Jakarta, Shanghai, Mumbai, Tokyo, Hong Kong,
London, New York and many more. According to the European Academies’
Science Advisory Council, flooding has quadrupled since 1980 and is
speeding up. The losses will be incalculable.
Drought

From: Global Changes in Drought conditions Under Different Levels of Warming” by Gustavo Nauman,
Lorenzo Alfieri et al. in Geophysical Research Letters, March 2018

Just as devastating will be cataclysmic droughts on much of the landthat remains. Australia and the American West are already struggling withprotracted drought, but it is due to get much worse. The more densely
populated parts of Africa, Southern Europe, much of the Middle East andIndia, and large areas in South America and China are expected to be strickenwith severe and prolonged drought. Food production will fall precipitously,
and famine, and consequent war, will become widespread. Already the
drought in Syria is regarded as a major cause of the disastrous war unfoldingin that unhappy country, a war that already has spawned a flood of refugees.
In a country with a pre-war population of about 22 million, half are now
refugees. There are over 6 million internally displaced refugees and over 5
million who have crossed international borders into countries ill-equipped toassimilate or care for them. The number of refugees from the coming natural
disasters, and the wars and famines they engender, will number in thehundreds of millions, overwhelming any capacity to care for them or resettle
them. The ensuing humanitarian disasters will be horrific beyond any inhuman history.
Ocean Death11

The oceans, at roughly 70% of the earth’s surface area, are the planet’s
predominant environment. The oceans feed us, providing nearly one fifth of
all our animal protein. They maintain our seasons and our regional climates.
Without the Gulf Stream, for example, London’s climate would be like
Iceland’s and Europe would be a much colder place. The phytoplankton livingin the oceans produces between 50 and 85% of atmospheric oxygen. And,through heat absorption on a massive scale, the oceans modulate the averagetemperature of the planet. The vastness of the oceans has made them seemimpervious to any human effect, but that is not the reality. ALL of the above
eco-system services of the oceans are endangered by climate change, as
described in the following four paragraphs.
Fish populations are already migrating hundreds of kilometers north andsouth from the equator, fleeing warmer waters. During the end-Permian great
extinction, cold-water species, the most significant as food sources, suffered
most because they ran out of colder water to flee to. Counter-intuitively, it was
the species of tropical seas, in our time deemed less commercially andnutritionally valuable, that had cooler waters to flee to and had some chanceof survival. The ongoing acidification of oceanic water due to increased
carbon dioxide absorption (think soda water) also means shell-forming
species are at serious risk. Already oyster farmers in the Pacific Northwest
are having trouble propagating oysters, and populations of the region’s
famous clams are declining as well. Ocean acidification will devastate
mollusks, probably arthropods too, and zooplankton in general. Larval stagesof all marine species are at serious risk. What does all this bode for the world’s
supply of seafood?
The world’s system of ocean currents is also vulnerable to a warming
world. As the Gulf Stream’s flow approaches Iceland, its water become cooler
and, through evaporation, saltier and thus denser. Huge quantities of thiscolder, denser, and thus heavier water plunge more than 4 kilometers to thedepths of the North Atlantic.
This phenomenon, named the Atlantic
Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), has been called the driver orconveyer belt for the whole world’s system of ocean currents, which is a major
factor creating and stabilizing our present world climate system. The danger
is that that water reaching the North Atlantic is getting warmer, and, with asteadily increasing influx of fresh meltwater from Greenland’s glaciers, lesssalty and thus less dense. Already there are signs that the AMOC is slowing
down. There have been sudden releases of unimaginably huge quantities of
meltwater in the world’s past, on the order of hundreds of cubic kilometers,
and there is a clear danger of such a glacial lake outburst emanating fromGreenland. This could actually stop the AMOC altogether. This would likely

12cause massive climate changes: ice-age conditions in Northern Europe; El
Niño events in the Pacific dwarfing any we have experienced so far, leading
to both droughts and catastrophic floods; and anoxic oceans. We have noway to predict the global climate consequences of such an event, except tosay two things: One, the consequences will be enormous, and, two, we will
be much happier and safer if we never have to find out.
The atmospheric increase in CO2 would have been much larger if theworld’s oceans had not been steadily absorbing a large portion ofanthropogenic emissions. This has slowed the onset of global warming, but
it also means that the oceans are growing more acidic. Past a certain
threshold, the consequences for coral reefs, for shell-building animals and forthe oceans’ plankton will be disastrous. This will affect not only our foodsupply and the rate of coastal erosion through loss of coral reef defenses, buteven the oxygen content of our atmosphere.
A combination of ocean
acidification and anoxic/hypoxic ocean conditions are thought to be the maincause of the huge marine extinctions of the end-Permian. And we’re looking
down the barrel of that gun again now.

Both: Shutterstock.com

It is claimed by some that increases in ocean floor geothermal activity
are the proximate cause of observed ocean warming.
But the direct
correlation of that ocean warming with the increase in atmospheric carbon
due to fossil fuel burning and to destructive land-management practices
makes that claim improbable in the extreme. It is far more likely, by orders ofmagnitude, that ocean warming is due to global warming caused by the

13massive transfer of carbon-containing greenhouse gases to the atmosphereas a result of human activities. This ocean warming means the oceans' ability
to modulate climate fluctuations is decreasing. It also means that marineorganisms will require more oxygen as a result of living in warmer water. This
will occur just as anoxic and hypoxic conditions induced by Global Warming
are on the increase. A recent study from Stanford University has proposedthat such a collision between decreasing oxygen levels and rising oxygen
demand was one of the major causes of the marine extinctions of the EndPermian.
Air Pollution
As if this weren’t enough disasters, we are facing increasingly
horrendous air pollution as Global Warming advances, from the dust stormsof the droughts to the smoke of the wildfires. The Air Quality Index categorizes
risk on a scale that tracks a range of pollutants. Warnings are first triggeredby readings of 51-100. At 201-300 the warnings include a “significant increase
in respiratory effects in the general population”. The high end is in the 301500 range, where the warnings are “serious aggravation of heart or lungdisease and premature mortality in persons with cardiopulmonary disease andthe elderly”, adding to that the recommendation that “Everyone should avoid
all outdoor exertion”. In 2013, Beijing doubled the high end of the scale,reaching a peak Air Quality Index of 993, as did New Delhi with 999 in 2017.
Also, in 2017, due to the California wildfires, the index around San Franciscosoared past 400 and almost hit 500 in Napa Country. In 2018 smoke fromwildfires made it unsafe for anyone around Seattle to breathe outside. One
study found that "exposure to smoke from the Indonesian wildfires of late1997 led to more that 15,600 child, infant, and fetal deaths . . .” These recordbreaking fires were topped in 2015, when 2.5m hectares burned, leading to a
US$16 billion loss, substantially larger than the economic losses inflicted by
the 2004 Tsunami even. 2019 is on track to match or even top 2015, with over
35,000 fires and air pollution levels classified as “hazardous”.
Air pollution is already a killer of millions yearly; one in six deaths
worldwide is attributable to it. It also results in a whole range of healthdamages in those that don’t die: cognitive declines, impacted cognitive
development in children, asthma, all kinds of cancers, strokes, heart disease,and more. Recent research has also linked air pollution to declines in memory
and attention span, and increases in autism spectrum disorders. These andrelated air pollution problems will only worsen as Global Warming advances.
Plagues

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The world will also see the resurgence of plagues and epidemics
comparable even to the Black Death of the Middle Ages, or the epidemics
that devasted the Aztec and Inca Empires, diseases introduced unwittingly by
the conquistadors (who had immunity to them) and that proved to be by far
their most effective weapon in the subjugation of the New World. These
plagues will come from two directions in all likelihood: First, and of more
immediate concern, as the world warms, the range of disease-carrying
insects, in particular mosquitos but also ticks and others, will spread north.
We will see ancient scourges such as malaria, yellow fever and dengue, andnewer diseases such as Zika, in areas where they have been previously
unheard of, such as New York and Berlin. Two, and far more unexpectedly,
known and unknown pathogens will possibly be released from melting ice atthe poles. This ice contains known and deadly pathogens such as the Spanish
Flu, bubonic plague, smallpox and anthrax, which could easily prove viable
once again when re-exposed to sunlight, air and potential victims. Already,one outbreak of anthrax has resulted from a reindeer carcass exposed bymelting ice. But more ancient ice is melting as well, and probably contains
microorganisms dating back to a time well before humans even existed on theplanet. Should any of these prove both viable and pathogenic, no person andno animal on the planet can possibly have any immunity to it. In effect, we
could be sandwiched between expanding sources of epidemic disease fromboth the tropics and the arctic and antarctic. The interconnected nature of ourglobalized world means that any outbreak of disease can very conceivably
spread around the world in mere days.

Heat Death

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The
IPCC
has
establishedamedianprediction of 4C in average
global temperature rise by
2100, should we continue
down the present emissions
path. At that point, whole
equatorial sections of the
globe will become literally
unlivable. Cities in India andthe Middle East would be so
hot that stepping outside insummer could be fatal.
Even at 2C warming, similar
scenarios will occur withfrequency.
The crucial
factor is something called“wet-bulb
temperature”.
This is a measurement of the combination of humidity and temperature, taken
by wrapping a thermometer bulb in wet gauze and swinging it in a circle
through the air. Basically, it indicates the potential for evaporative cooling.
Humans sweat, and dogs and birds pant, to take advantage of evaporative
cooling. But this becomes impossible when the wet-bulb temperature reaches
35C. At that point, evaporating sweat will not remove any heat energy andthus will not cool the skin, and humans begin dying just from the heat in amatter of hours, even in the shade. Currently, most regions reach a wet-bulb
maximum of 26 or 27C, which leaves us a margin of 8C or so. Hotter air canhold more humidity. A combination of extreme humidity and high heat isfrighteningly conceivable.
Already, in the Persian Gulf, wet-bulb
temperatures of almost 32C have been recorded. And even before we reachsuch disastrous levels, work will become difficult or impossible, and many will
die in the coming heat waves. The European heat wave of 2003 killed over
35,000, and in 2010, 55,000 died in Russia. Clearly, heat alone can bedisastrous beyond any conception we have today.
Feedback Loops
A warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, and since water vapor
is a greenhouse gas, this will lead to yet more warming. The warming of thearctic means more ice melts, which means the surface of the ocean is darker

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and reflects less heat back into space (a reduced albedo effect), and thus thearctic warms yet more.

Ocean Today: Arctic Sea Ice Sets Record Low – January 28, 2017

Higher temperatures lead to more wildfires, which leads to fewer trees
and less plant cover, and that leads to less carbon absorption and storage
through photosynthesis, which leads to higher carbon levels in theatmosphere and thus leading to yet higher temperatures.
Even without
wildfire and drought, higher temperatures have a negative effect on plant
growth, resulting in what is called “forest dieback” of vast areas of tropicaland temperate forest, with resulting reduced carbon absorption, and thus
more in the atmosphere, etc. etc. Droughts lead to famines lead to wars leadto floods of refugees, as we are seeing in Syria and also in Central America.
Climate disasters can overwhelm our response capabilities even when striking
singly, as seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Now the
likelihood is emerging that several climate related catastrophes could strike
simultaneously, or in close succession, and then again within a year or two.
Just this year, Japan saw two typhoons within a month of each other strike
Tokyo and nearby areas, with record-breaking floods, and initial estimates ofdamage exceeding 100 billion yen. In California, disastrous fires led todisastrous mud flows within months, when freakish monsoon-like rains
followed the drought. The resulting lush growth then dried out in the following
dry year, leaving huge stores of fuel that led to new major wildfires.

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The mother of all feedback loops would be the release of vast stores oforganic carbon built up over millions of years in the soils of the Arctic, anestimated 1,400 to 1850 peta-grams worth (one peta-gram is 1 billion metrictons or one gigaton). Most of this carbon is held in top soils than can easily
thaw within 10 feet of the surface. For comparison, an estimated 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted by all fossil-fuel burning and other humanactivities since 1850.
According to research scientist Charles Miller ofNASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the principal investigator of the
Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE),6 “Permafrost
soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures, as much as 1.5 to
2.5C in just the past 30 years . . .”. As the permafrost melts, it will release
these organic carbon deposits into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and/or
methane. The drier the arctic conditions created by Climate Change, themore will be released as carbon dioxide, the wetter, the more as methane.
This has enormous implications for Global Warming, because methane is amuch more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Over a hundredyear span it is 22 times more powerful, but up to 105 times more powerfulover a 20-year span. If wetter warming prevails, most of this stored organiccarbon will be released as methane, and the impact would be cataclysmical.
Methane is also stored in the form of methane hydrates, a kind of methane
sherbet, on the ocean floor mainly in the arctic, in staggering amounts:
between 1,000 and 10,000 gigatons.
A study published in Nature in July 20137 suggested a 50-gigaton “burp”
of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea ispossible at any time, with a greenhouse gas impact equivalent of at least 1,000
gigatons of carbon dioxide over a twenty-year span. Active and growing
methane vents up to 150 kilometers wide have been discovered in the arctic.
One scientist described the ocean as looking like a vast pool of seltzer water.
Between the summers of 2010 and 2011, scientists discovered methane vents
that grew from only 30 centimeters across to more than a kilometer wide, a
totally non-linear exponential 3,333% increase. It is in fact methane release
events like this that were the final blow leading to the End-Permian extinctions
described earlier in this article. The potential for a global climate disaster ona scale that would lead to the extinction of humanity along with most other lifeon earth is far more real and far nearer that just about anyone realizes. This
would be the final massive nail in our collective coffin, a planetary holocaust
and final solution on a scale to match the previous 5 great extinctions. Given
the exponentially increasing speed with which we are approaching it, a few
centuries versus the 80,000 years of the End-Permian, we could possibly be
triggering the greatest, most all-encompassing extinction of all, within
6
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decades even. The time frame for effective counter-measures is shrinking
rapidly. We must identify the mitigation strategies that can work and we must
act now.
2) SOURCES OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONSAs I write this in late 2019, the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign isalready heating up, with various Democrats vying to be the Democratic Party
contender for president in the general election. One of them is Bernie
Sanders, a progressive populist with a generally intelligent platform of ideas,
with a main focus on the staggering income disparity that has accumulated
over recent years. But he also has proposals for dealing with Global Warming
and they are among the most progressive of such proposals. He advocates
spending more than any other candidate (a total of US$16.3 trillion) and all of
it would come from the Federal government. He claims that most of thatmoney will be recouped in short order, and that the long-term economic andsocial benefits will far outstrip the outlays now. His claims are believable, and
it is a remarkable proposal in many ways. It would go a very long ways towards
reducing our fossil fuel emissions and their related pollution, and by extension
towards rectifying the skewed and highly destructive foreign policies and theextraordinary military expenditures of the United States, both aimed atsecuring a stable fossil fuel energy supply. So far, so wonderful! What is
discouragingly apparent is that his plan, the most progressive one out thereat the moment, deems the build-up of Greenhouse Gases in the atmosphereto be almost exclusively the result of fossil fuel burning. And thus, the answer
to also be almost exclusively based on reducing and eventually eliminatingthat reliance on fossil fuel.
Bernie Sanders is not alone. A cursory review of writings about Global
Warming and proposals for solutions is overwhelmingly focused on fossil fuelemissions. Not surprisingly, the general public, if it is concerned at all about
approaching doom, also thinks that any and all efforts to find a solution must
obviously and necessarily focus on reducing and eliminating fossil fuel use.
Unfortunately, that is not true. It is undeniable that fossil fuel emissions
are a very large part of the problem, and the goals of activists fighting to
reduce and eliminate them are worthy goals indeed, with many subsidiarybenefits as well. But what is not generally realized is that fossil fuels are only
part of the problem. They are, by far, not the only source of Greenhouse
Gases, and may not even be the main one. Destructive land management
policies over the ages, and particularly since the industrial revolution, have led
to loss of organic carbon from the world’s soils and oceans, and that carbon
went somewhere. It went into the atmosphere, resulting in carbon dioxide

19emissions on a scale that easily rivals fossil fuels. Tragically, this is not
generally recognized. As a result, also unrecognized is the reality thatsolution(s) to Global Warming must include fundamental revisions of land andocean management practices, in grazing and crop agriculture, in forestry, inurban development, and even in wildlife management in the oceans. In fact,
it is these solutions ONLY that can be implemented quickly enough tobegin drawing down carbon dioxide at the scale needed to reverse the
Global Warming trend. This will be discussed in detail in 3) below.
To recap, at present, the buildup of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) in theatmosphere is seen mainly as a fossil fuel emissions problem, with a mainly
technological solution focused principally on those emissions reductions.
Given the amount of anthropogenic carbon already in the atmosphere, and thefeedback loops already being triggered (increased wildfires across the planet,
melting of the permafrost, release of methane hydrates from the seabed,
reduced reflection of sunlight associated with sea ice loss, etc.) reducing oreven (improbably) eliminating that fossil fuel use will only result in wrecking our
climate system at a slightly slower pace. There is already enough carbon in theatmosphere to take us to an extra 2C warming and beyond. As discussed
above, that level of warming alone will bring disasters on a scale beyond any
humanity has endured so far. And that level of warming seriously risks
triggering the methane release feedback loops that would mean game over for
most life on the planet. It is too late to solve the problem just by reducing andgradually eliminating fossil fuel use. We need to also actively start drawing
down the carbon in the atmosphere. The question is, how to do it!
Most discussion of potential drawdown of CO2 already in the atmosphericis also technological in nature (CCS, or carbon capture and storage
technology) and a lot of it looks pretty expensive. But let’s be honest! This won’t
save us. Neither present nor foreseeable CCS technology can economicallyremove CO2 and other GHG from the atmosphere, and in any case CCS
technologies cannot possibly be deployed at the scale needed to capture
enough carbon in the needed time frame to avert disaster, even in the unlikely
event that more efficient and economical CCS technologies are unexpectedly
developed in the future. They can’t be built fast enough. Thus, although fossil
fuel emissions reductions and transition to renewable energy are essential in
the long term, there is NO realistic fossil-fuel reduction strategy NOR
technological CCS solution to Global Warming within the time frame remaining
to avoid climatic disaster.
Does this mean we are literally doomed to soon follow the dinosaurs, andthe other 99% of species that have ever lived but that are now extinct? Only if
we remain locked in our self-centered technological-fundamentalist way of20thinking. This is almost a religion, a way of thinking that says we can do it allby ourselves, and that technological answers are the only ones out there, andthat they can and will save us. Because we are that smart. This is the thinking
that, among other things, has held for over fifty years that we can solve theproblem of high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power. That solution still
remains fifty years in the future, which does not inspire much faith in the powerof modern technology to solve the exponentially building problem of Global
Warming. We need to free ourselves from our insane self-centered overconfidence, and look beyond modern human technology, with its limited historyof centuries. We need to look at “natural technology”, which has been evolving
now for several billion years. There is where we will find a solution, and it
involves working with other life on the planet. And that other life is green incolor.

3) NON-FOSSIL-FUEL GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS

An interesting article appeared in the New York Times on October 25th,
2019. Entitled “climate Change will cost even more than we think”, the main
thrust of the piece was that economists are badly underestimating the costs ofclimate change, something the authors described as "as bad or worse than"the underestimation of the effects and speed of climate change itself byscientists. They went on to analyze why this was so, and as I read theirconclusions, I realized that very similar mechanisms are behind theunderestimations of both scientists and economists. Let’s look at theeconomics first.
In the first place, economic estimates of risk are typically grounded inexperience, something statisticians term “stationarity”. But when conditions
change so much, as they indisputably are with climate change across theboard, that past experience is no longer a reliable guide, then stationarity nolonger applies and estimates become more and more uncertain. Alas,economists have by and large been approaching climate damages as
temporary perturbations “from the norm” instead of unprecedented, long-term,
and just beginning to worsen. They are taking little account of the fundamental
destruction we are facing, simply because it is so outside the realm of humanexperience. A second problem leading to those dangerous underestimations
stems from a failure to include some risks in the calculations because thoserisks can’t be properly quantified (or so it is assumed). The economists do not21

want to be accused of “making things up” and so they just leave those risks orfactors out. Just because something is not easily or perfectly quantifiable does
not mean it is not real and significant. The underestimations of economic
damage stemming from both these factors are doing great damage.
Government policy and the concerns of the public, which can have a large
influence on that government policy, are both largely grounded on theeconomic assessments of loss, and these are now turning out to be far fromreliable. Most people have a much harder time grappling with scientificexplanations than with economic figures, so basically, they go with those. The
alarming reality is thus hidden from view, and we are making irreversibly
disastrous mistakes.
Scientists may to some degree also be misled by stationarity, though by
and large nowhere near as badly as economists seem to have been. Scientists
are, however, missing key elements of the massive shift of carbon to theatmosphere, failing to recognize the scale of transfer of carbon, in the form ofbeneficial organic compounds in the soils and oceans of the planet, to carbon,
in the form of harmful greenhouse gases, in the atmosphere. And they aregoing astray not only because of their preconceptions and single-minded focus
on fossil fuel emissions, but also because the losses of soil organic carbon andorganic carbon from the oceans are so varied and hard to quantify. To repeat
from the above paragraph, they do not want to be accused of "making thingsup” and so they just leave that all out. And by badly skewing the results, thatis a recipe for disaster. We not only fail to understand a large part of the causeof Global Warming, but more importantly we cannot therefore come up witheffective solutions and mitigation strategies. Understanding where a major
portion of anthropogenic carbon in the atmosphere originated points the way
to effective solutions. And although curtailing fossil fuel consumption is needed,
the most effective immediate solutions instead involve regenerative agriculture
and ocean management practices.
Dr. Rattan Lal and worldwide losses of Soil Organic Carbon
One of the most prominent scientists to have made the connection
between the loss of soil organic carbon and the surge in greenhouse gases,
and to have seriously attempted to quantify it, is Dr. Rattan Lal, Distinguished
University Professor of Soil Science and the director of the Carbon
Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University. Dr. Lal is amember of the IPCC panel awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, and therecipient of many other awards including the 2019 Japan Prize. He has spent
his career studying Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) depletion, and established amethodology for establishing baselines to estimate that SOC loss. He does
this by comparing degraded soils with undisturbed forest soils nearby. His

22research has demonstrated that agricultural soils worldwide have lost
significant amounts of SOC, in the ranges of 50 to 80%. According to Dr. Lal,the world’s soils are like a bank account, and carbon is the currency. And weare currently near bankruptcy. His key insight is that re-sequestering SOC canboth restore degraded soils and, crucially, mitigate Global Warming. It is laidout comprehensively in a paper published in 2010.8
In that paper, the increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 280
ppm in 1750 to 367 ppm in 1999 (it is well over 410 ppm now in 2019) is
attributed to emissions from fossil fuel combustion estimated at 270 + 30 Pg C,
and land use change at 136 + 55 Pg C. Basically, Dr. Lal has declared thatthe land use change that he has been able to quantify accounts for about 1/3of the increase in atmospheric CO2. He estimated the global potential of SOC
sequestration and restoration of degraded and desertified soils at 0.6 to 1.2 Pg
C/y with a cumulative sink capacity of up to 60 Pg C. He stated that the SOC
sequestration is a cost-effective strategy for mitigating climate change during
the first several decades of the 21st century. He has estimated that thepotential of C sequestration in the terrestrial biosphere is estimated to beequivalent to a drawdown of 55 ppm of atmospheric CO2 over a century. This
could get us back down under 400 ppm and is very encouraging, but not really
good enough to save us now that we are approaching the end of the second
decade of the 21st century and have done far from enough to shift to a nonfossil fuel energy economy. I personally think that Dr. Lal, as a good scientist,is erring on the side of caution, both in his assessments of emissions from land
mismanagement, and of the potential of photosynthetic sequestration of carbon
to drawdown sufficient atmospheric carbon to begin reversing climate change,
when applied to not just to agriculture, but to every ecosystem on the earth’s
surface with significant photosynthetic activity. Arizona was largely grassland
about a century ago, and so was much of Australia. Both are now generally far
more barren. But there is no untouched adjacent forest land to establish a
SOC baseline, and so these lands are left out of the equations. So is thephytoplankton loss from the oceans. An article published on July 29, 2010 in
Scientific American is entitled: “Phytoplankton Population drops 40 percent
Since 1950” with, the author states, "implications for the marine food web andthe world’s carbon cycle”. Those implications haven’t been considered in theestimates of soil carbon loss, because they are in the ocean. But they certainly
represent a major amount of carbon shifted from organic form in the surface ofthe planet to the atmosphere, and an amount directly related to photosynthetic
activity. A rough and ready guess would basically double Dr. Lal’s estimatesof no-fossil fuel organic carbon lost to the atmosphere. This would mean thatthese losses (call them emissions) are least as large as those from fossil fuel,where the data is far more reliable. And this definitely points out the low8

23

hanging fruit when it comes to strategies to drawdown carbon. The exact
amount doesn’t matter anymore. I also think humanity has run out of time topainstakingly verify these kinds of conclusions experimentally before taking
decisive action.
Allan Savory, Reversing Global Warming throughHolistic management of the World’s Grasslands
An extraordinary figure making precisely this claim (of the potential ofphotosynthetic sequestration of carbon to drawdown sufficient atmosphericcarbon to begin reversing climate change) in regard to grasslands, is theecologist Allan Savory. Based on his long experience in wildlife managementin Zimbabwe, he developed a systems-thinking approach to rangeland
management that mimics the movement of large herds of wild herbivores as
they avoid predators and search out new pasture. He called it “Holistic
management”, and the results have been astonishing everywhere they havebeen applied, basically on every continent. His thinking is laid out mostaccessibly in his 2013 TED Talk, “How to green the desert and reverse climatechange”. In it, and in his writings, he makes the claim that applying holistic
management techniques to less than half of the world’s grasslands canquadruple livestock production, reverse desertification and, most importantly,
sequester enough carbon to reverse Global Warming, and within the needed
time frame of a decade or so. It is an extraordinary claim, and has been
subjected to criticism, but his pilot projects in various countries have produced
undeniable and amazing results. Others have replicated his rapid soilformation success as well, using his holistic range management techniques
combined with innovative crop farming approaches. Crucially, Savory has
developed a system of rangeland agronomy that is radically different from themore conventional agricultural practices that even enlightened scientists such
as Dr. Lal base their calculations and assumptions on. Thousands of cattle
ranchers worldwide are empirically applying his methods, and making profits
while simultaneously rebuilding soils and restoring their land at eye-popping
speeds. Included in this section are several images showing the results ofHolistic Management practice:

24

25

Image republished Courtesy of the Savory Institute

Basically, Allan Savory’s method boils down to “more roots, more carbon
in the soil and less in the atmosphere”. Why is this the case? A simplistic andalas almost universal conception of plants growing in soil has it that a plant’s
roots take up water and dissolved minerals from an inert mass of soil, andcombine that through photosynthesis to create the complex sugars that serve
as nutrients needed for plant growth. The plant’s energy becomes food forother living things, both directly and indirectly.
In time, the plant dies,
biodegrades and returns to the soil as organic matter. The plant’s relationshipwith the soil is basically conceived as a chemical reaction initiated by only one
biological player, the plant. The plant is seen as an organism that only takes
from the soil. The soil’s health is assessed by its 'nutrient status’. It is thismechanistic and mistaken assumption about what are in fact living soils that
underlies the use of chemical fertilizers as the go-to means of restoring thenutrients in the depleted soil and improving production. This high school
science version turns out to be simplistic in the extreme, and agricultural
practices based on it very destructive of humus (soil organic carbon) over time.
In reality, plants, working in concert with the soil microbiome, create soilorganic carbon and enhance the nutrient content of soils. And they do it far
faster and on a larger scale than is generally recognized. The plant’s
relationship with the living soil is a two-way street.

Dr. Christine Jones and Nature’s
sophisticated Version of Carbon Trading

26

Dr. Christine Jones, a noted Australian soils ecologist has, more thananyone, elucidated the crucial relationships between plants and the soil
microbiome. Early on in her career she realized that plant-soil dynamics
provided desperately needed answers to the dangerous build-up of
greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and also to the challenges of feeding
the world’s population. She coined the term ‘carbon pump’ to describe theprocess by which most flowering plants pump up to 40% of their nutrient
production down to their roots to feed the mycorrhizae, which, working with soil
microbes, in turn dissolve and transport soil nutrients back to the plant. She
called this interaction “the liquid carbon pathway”. Dr. Jones has worked
tirelessly to spread this understanding, and many ranchers and farmers are
profiting as a result, and simultaneously, as in the case with Allan Savory’s
methods, restoring soil fertility and water retention at amazing speed.
A closer look is needed to understand this far more complex reality of theplant’s relationship with the soil. First off, healthy soil is not inert but teemingwith life. There are hundreds of millions or even billions of microbes in a single
gram of healthy soil: bacteria, fungi, algae, protozoa and viruses. There is alsoa wide variety of nematodes, earthworms and insects in the soil. All of them
have a role to fulfill in the vibrant community that is that healthy soil. Perhaps
among the most crucial of those roles is that played by mycorrhizal fungi or
mycorrhizae, the fulcrum of the liquid carbon pathway. Over 80% of flowering
plants have a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizae (the name means root
fungus). Far from simply absorbing nutrients and water, the plant’s roots
actually feed the mycorrhizal fungi attached to their roots by sending down
complex sugars created through photosynthesis. A plant will send up to 40%of the nutrients it creates back down into the soil. This fact is key tounderstanding the role of plants as "carbon pumps” building humus (soilorganic carbon) from the bottom up.
The mycorrhizae, recipients of and utterly dependent on this influx ofcomplex sugars (the ‘liquid carbon’), use some for their own growth and someto nourish microorganisms in the soil around them. These in turn break downminerals in the soil and send them back through the mycorrhizae to the plant.
The process is still far from fully understood, but it is essential to healthy plant
growth. In effect, there is a subterranean 'carbon trading’ scheme so complex
and interconnected that it makes Wall Street’s derivatives trading look likechild’s play. And the mycorrhizal fungi are the stockbrokers that put the trades
together. The end result is the sequestration of large amounts of carbon deepin the soil in organic form. The process rapidly builds humus, in other words;
nutrient-rich, water-retentive healthy organic-carbon-rich soil.

27

It is worth looking at this in a little more detail, much of which is only justrecently being revealed. The mycorrhizae grow long filaments called hyphaeout into the soil in prodigious quantities; the filaments in one teaspoonful of soil
could cover about a kilometer. These filaments substantially extend the ‘reach’of the plant by proxy, and are coated with a sticky secretion called glomalin,
only discovered in 19969. Glomalin has been called ‘soil's superglue” and it issignificant for a couple of reasons. First, glomalin is mainly organic carbon andkeeps that carbon deep in the soil for decades, representing over 30 % of the
carbon in soils. And it binds soil particles together to create aggregates,clumps with spaces between and within them, that enable greater air
penetration and significantly higher water absorption, reversing the problemsof soil compaction associated with conventional plowing. This is also crucial
and I will touch on it again later. Here is an image of a plant’s root system with
its associated network of mycorrhizal hyphae. This is the carbon pump view ofa plant!

Source: Faslanyc - Complications with Complexity – November 7, 20109

28

To summarize, I quote from “Cows Save the Planet” by Judith D. Schwartz: To
understand the liquid carbon pathway, key to reversing Global Warming,
reversing desertification and improving the quantity and quality of foodproduction, “we need to revise our conceptualization of a plant. Rather than amostly green thing … that [just] pulls water and nutrients from the soil, Dr.
Jones would have us think of a two-way pump. The upward flow is water,
minerals, and other substances the plant needs; the downward flow is soluble
carbon (dissolved organic carbon) that seeps into and out through the plant’s
roots so as to feed other organisms in the soil. This downward carbon flow
stimulates the production of humus, the organic component of soil that is a
repository for carbon as well as the basis for fertility. The more carbon in thesoil . . . the more humus.”We have long thought that humus was solely created through the processof decay of plant matter. Dr. Jones is saying, and has demonstrated, that living
plants also create humus, the crucial component for soil fertility and water
retention, and, for the purposes of this discussion, carbon sequestration on ascale to actually drawdown the excess carbon in the atmosphere and begin theprocess of reversing disastrous Global Warming. Again, Dr. Jones, quoted
from “Cows Save the Planet’: "Under appropriate conditions, 30 to 40 percent
of carbon fixed in green leaves can be transferred to soil and rapidly humified,resulting in rates of soil carbon sequestration in the order of five to twenty tonsof CO2 per hectare per year . . . “. This all depends on the mycorrhizal
affiliations that benefit the plant by both providing nutrients, creating humus,
and building a loamy soft soil structure that enhances water retention.
Unfortunately, these appropriate conditions do not include the applicationof chemical fertilizers. Apparently, the easily available nitrogen and/or
phosphate in chemical fertilizers signal the plant to reduce the dissolved
organic carbon that it pumps to the symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi, essentiallystarving them. It seems probable that mycorrhizal fungi are also directly
inhibited by chemical fertilizers, and by herbicides, pesticides, and, being fungi,
without question severely impacted by fungicides.
Thus, synthetic
combinations of Agri-chemicals are very destructive to mycorrhizal health. The
biological processes that build soil carbon and humus get destroyed bychemical additives. So-called ‘fallow’ land, land left bare after plowing, is as
destructive. Basically, the mycorrhizal fungi are left to starve to death, as there
are no plants pumping down the liquid carbon compounds on which they
depend exclusively to survive. Combine that with the steady oxidation oforganic matter that occurs when the sun shines on bare earth for extended
periods of time, and one can see why this exceedingly common agricultural
practice is like leaving a large engine idling for months at a time, pumping out

29

CO2 all along. Leaving fields stripped of plant cover for extended periods oftime is among the last things we need to do in a Global Warming world!
A note needs to be inserted here regarding water vapor.
It is agreenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide, representing around 80 percent of total
greenhouse gas mass in the atmosphere and 90 percent of greenhouse gas
volume. Water vapor and clouds account for 66 to 85 percent of thegreenhouse effect, compared to a range of 9 to 26 percent for CO2.
Desertification and general loss of SOC means the absorptive capacity of soils
is degraded across wide areas of land. It seems quite possible that reversingthat desertification and restoring SOC will, besides significantly increasing
carbon sequestration, also reduce the amount of water vapor in theatmosphere to a certain degree, and in this way also contribute to reducing
the greenhouse effect. So, this can be another benefit of rebuilding healthyliving soils.
One problem standing in the way of a more general acceptance of thesetruths about topsoil regeneration and SOC restoration is that, with very few
exceptions, government and industry funded research is conducted onconventionally managed agricultural land. As seen above, between theapplications of agri-chemicals and the practice of tilling soil and leaving it bare,the mycorrhizal pathway of carbon sequestration and fertility building getsdecimated. Results of such research are inevitably skewed, inevitably showingthat continued use of agricultural chemicals is what works best. The otherproblem is that no one believes soil can be built that fast. The conventional andunfortunately unquestioned wisdom is that it takes centuries. But it can berebuilt very quickly, and there are numerous pioneer projects around the world
demonstrating this. Constraints of time and space do not allow me to list morethan a few, but they can be found easily on the internet. One example isWinona farm near Gulgong in New South Wales, run by a visionary farmer
named Colin Seis. His farm is Australia’s exhibit A for the method known as
pasture cropping, an ideal approach for rapidly building soil. Basically, insteadof tilling the soil bare, a cereal crop is sown into a plant cover of native grass
pasture, with only a very narrow band tilled for seeding the crop. This is as
opposed to Broadacre farming, which removes existing ground covercompletely, so that crops are sown on cleared fields. This damages soil
structure, interrupts mycorrhizal and microbial associations, and releases
stored carbon. In contrast, pasture cropping leaves all these positive qualities
intact. At maturity, the tufts of grain are seen emerging, not from brown earth,but from green pasture.
After two years Seis saw positive differences
emerging: better drought resistance, greater biodiversity, and, crucial for our
discussion, higher soil carbon levels. In ten years, a 200% increase in topsoil
was achieved.

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Basically, Seis and his collaborator, Daryll Cluff, used biomimicry torecreate the original and fertile community of native grasslands in which annual
and perennial plants coexist, each benefitting the other. This is striking andtremendously instructive. Allan Savory has had the same success restoring
rangeland and building topsoil by also using biomimicry of the wild grasslands
and continually moving herds of herbivores. We humans have been at this for
10,000 years at most; Mother Nature has refined her methods for billions ofyears. A little humility and respect, please! Our technological fundamentalist
hubris, secretly abetted by profit-blinded agrichemical corporations, will kill us
otherwise!
Discussions of Global Warming are heavy with references to carbon
dioxide, but, sadly, mentions of soil are almost non-existent. But the scienceis basic and should be obvious. As we have seen, topsoils are the carbon sinkwith the greatest potential, through photosynthesis, to rapidly sequester
atmospheric carbon at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity to begin toreverse and eventually eliminate Global Warming. Tragically, each year someseventy-five billion tons of soil are lost, enough to cover an area larger thanAustralia. According to Cornell soil scientist David Pimentel, 90% of ourcropland is losing soil to wind and water erosion thirteen times faster than new
soil is being formed. Dr. Jones says that "Every ton of carbon lost from soil
adds 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.” Multiply that by 75 billion
tons of lost soil! “Conversely, every one ton increase in soil organic carbon is3.67 tons of carbon dioxide sequestered from the atmosphere”. Drawdown,
plain and simple.
Although the conventional wisdom is that it takes centuries to build
topsoil, examples abound where farmers and ranchers, using biomimicry andan understanding of the liquid carbon pathway and the crucial function of
mycorrhizal fungi, have built topsoil, and thus sequestered carbon, withastonishing speed. Seis and Cluff, above, are just one example. Another israncher Gene Goven in North Dakota, who started with hardpan and built six
inches of topsoil (15 + cm) in one season! Then there is Allan Yeomans: Using
the Keyline plow system (strikingly similar to pasture cropping describedabove) his father and he developed, and combining it with planned high-density
grazing (holistic management, basically) Allan Yeomans reported producing 4
inches of humus-rich soil in three years, starting with bare sandy ground.
Farmer and activist Abe Collins combined use of the Keyline plow with Holistic
Planned Grazing in northern Vermont and says that in one year they went fromeight inches of topsoil on top of gray clay to sixteen inches of topsoil.
Unfortunately, all this anecdotal evidence is not easily accepted in theacademic community and in government agencies, in part because of

31

intellectual inertia and in part because the vested interests of agrichemicals
rightly see this enlightened approach as an existential threat to their business.
In response, an organization called the Soil Carbon Challenge has been
formed, to assemble ‘hard data’ to back up the anecdotal evidence. And none
too soon. The world needs to move quickly on these insights! The existential
threat to the agrichemical business is a threat to their profit margins. The
existential threat of Global Warming is a threat to life on earth, humans very
definitely included.

4) THE PHOTOSYNTHETIC SOLUTION TO
GLOBAL WARMING
Globally, photosynthesis moves about 9 times more carbon molecules
than all human activity, including the burning of fossil fuels.10 And it moves
them in the right direction: out of the atmosphere and, converted into organiccarbon, into the soils and oceans of the planet, where it can remainsequestered for varying lengths of time, some of them aeons. This fact alone
should make it obvious that our first choice, when attempting to begin theprocess of drawing down excess carbon from the atmosphere, should be themaximizing of photosynthetic activity in every ecosystem on earth where it
occurs. Based on the above statistic, increasing photosynthetic production on
the planet by roughly 10% should be enough to reverse global warming. When
we begin to consider these strategies for the various ecosystems, it also
becomes quickly apparent that the side benefits alone of maximizing
photosynthetic activity in these ecosystems is a more than sufficient reason to
begin implementing them as soon as possible, regardless of their contribution
to reversing Global Warming.
Standing in the way of salvation are arrayed intellectual inertia (areluctance to change), entrenched commercial interests and power structures,and the reactionary suspicion of ignorance when confronted with knowledge.
Strategies will be needed to cope with all of these. Demonstrating immediate
economic benefits (soil reliance to flooding, elimination of costly fertilizers andthe labor needed to apply them, increased livestock and crop production, thehigher prices commanded by organically produced food, etc.) can be moreconvincing for many than long-term climate benefits. It is not, however, theintent of this discussion, to consider these strategies other than to point out thatthey will be needed.
1032

Implementing this photosynthetic solution to Global Warming will require
fundamental changes to management strategies in the following land
categories and in the ocean as well:a)Grasslands and Drylands

Grasslands, perhaps better described as Drylands, comprise over
40% of the world’s land area. They also include 44% of land undercultivation. But each year over 12 million hectares of productive land areturning into desert. 11 In ten years, that would represent a South Africa’s
worth of land lost to desertification. Desertification was described by Judith
D. Schwartz in ‘Cows Save the Planet’ as “land that becomes dirt with life
neither on nor within it”. In fact, as discussed previously and also following,
the crucial point is the lack of life not so much on as within the soils ofdeserts. By this I mean soil microbial life essential to the bio-sequestrationof carbon because of its symbiotic relationship with most plants. At present
over 1.5 billion people depend on drylands worldwide, and this ongoingstaggering loss is a recipe for a snowballing humanitarian disaster on an
unprecedented scale. It is important to understand that desertification in ourtime is generally not due to natural causes, but the result of an anthropogenic
process: land mismanagement practices over time that disrupt the drylands
ecosystem life cycles of both plants and animals adapted to those drylands.
Examples include over-cultivation (too much plowing), poor livestock
management resulting in over-grazing (not moving livestock regularly
enough), deforestation, poor irrigation practice and more. Land degradation
does not only happen in drylands, but they are the least resilient to disruption,
the closest to the tipping point into desert.
To briefly outline the anthropogenic spiral into desertification ofdrylands, (paraphrased from ‘Cows save the Planet’), mismanagement aslisted above leads to degraded soils that lose some of their original plant
cover. These soils consequently lose some more of their capacity to storeorganic carbon, and thus lose even more of their plant cover. The barer the
ground, the more it absorbs heat, both directly from the sun, and by loss ofthe ‘air conditioning’ effect of evapotranspiration cooling provided by thatplant cover. Loss over a small area increases heat absorption that affects the
microclimate; over most of Australia, North Africa, the North American West,etc., it affects the planetary climate. More heat, more water loss, and thus
the soils become even less livable for the soil microorganisms that provide
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plants with nutrients in exchange for the organic carbon the plants pumpdown to feed them. The plant cover loss is continuously exacerbated as aresult. The range of plants that can survive these conditions becomesincreasingly limited, and this leads inevitably to biodiversity loss, including
the insects and birds that pollinate flowers and that spread seeds, leading toyet more plant cover loss. The sparser the vegetation, the less protection
from winds or episodic heavy rains. This leads to yet more erosion, and evenfurther loss of plant cover. All through this process, the remaining organiccarbon in the soils, increasingly exposed to the heat of the sun, continues
oxidizing, and emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and worsening
further the greenhouse effect behind Global Warming. It is a vicious
downward spiral, increasingly self-sustaining the more land mismanagement
continues.
As described in the preceding paragraph, the three ongoing evils ofdesertification, biodiversity loss, and climate change are so intertwined thatthey are just different aspects of the same macro-problem. Life’s biologicalcycles have been greatly disrupted, and no solution to Global Warming ispossible without remedial action to those disruptions. Alas, not only does
the world remain largely fixated on Fossil Fuels as the problem, but also fails
to recognize as aspects of Global Warming the fundamental
interconnectedness of desertification and biodiversity loss, and the social
disruptions of famine and war they result in. As a tragic result, because
causes are not completely understood, effective solutions cannot be
formulated. Desertification is indisputably a major cause of global warming,
but this is not generally understood. Even less appreciated is the potential of
Grasslands restoration to reverse Global Warming in the short time frame
remaining for effective action.
The man who, more than any other, has elucidated the process ofdesertification, and, crucially, developed the new management strategies toreverse it, is the wildlife ecologist Allan Savory, described earlier in this
discussion.
He is one of the three pivotal figures underlining thephotosynthetic solution to Climate Change. Savory is a polarizing figure. His
improbable sounding claims are expressed in plain language rather thanheavily annotated, dense and exceedingly cautious academic prose. These
claims, that holistic management can reverse Global Warming while
simultaneously reversing desertification AND increasing livestock production
by up to 400%, fly in the face of many entrenched preconceptions aboutboth proper agricultural practice and the causes of desertification, andfurthermore, seriously threaten the business models of agri-chemical
corporations. Predictably, Savory’s claims provoke many footnote-loaded

34

articles challenging his conclusions and claiming to prove him wrong. By
and large, though, those who disparage him have little or nothing in the wayof practical experience and/or success to show in the struggle against
desertification or climate change in general. Savory, however, does. He
honed impressive tracking and observation skills, and also his capacity forstrategy thinking, during his youth as a wildlife manager and a tracking
combat unit commander. He has spent a lifetime applying his unique skill setof proficiency in the wild, scientific rigor, and strategic military thinking, tothe long-term observation of desertification, has searched almost
obsessively for writings that explain it, and has devoted his life and financial
resources to experimental approaches to reverse that desertification andrestore the lands and way of life he loves. The results are astonishing andinspiring, and give hope at a time when it is in very short supply. Today morethan ten thousand land managers are implementing Savory’s Holistic
Planned Grazing on more that 16 million hectares of drylands, and this landis being reborn in the eye-popping space of mere years, all while consistently
out-producing neighboring lands.
Recognition is slowly coming for Savory, as it has for revolutionary
thinkers throughout history. However, even back in 2003, he was awarded
Australia’s Banksia International Award “for the person or organization doing
the most for the environment on a global scale”. In 2010 his Zimbabwe
nonprofit, Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM) not only won the
Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize, awarded to a project with “significant
potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems”, but also received a$4.8 million grant from the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) to expand its work in Africa. He is among the finalists
for the $25 million prize offered by entrepreneur Richard Branson for the mosteffective technology to drawdown excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Joel Salatin, famous farmer/author and proponent of grass-fed beef, has said
that Allan Savory will go down in history as the greatest ecologist who everlived. Savory’s claims may sound improbable to people locked in outdated
preconceptions and limited understanding of the plant/soil microbiome
symbiosis, but his results, in Africa, America, Australia and elsewhere, arenothing short of astonishing, and may in fact offer humanity its best hope forovercoming the existential climate crisis looming ever closer.
Savory’s seminal understanding is twofold. First, that land can beclassified on what he calls a “brittleness” scale. Basically, the drier, the more
“brittle” or prone to desertification. Land that alternates between dry and wet
seasons is also brittle despite heavy rainfall during the wet season, because
the soil dries out during the dry season. The drier the soil, the greater the35

reduction in soil microbial activity, which, because of its symbiotic
relationship with plants, is crucial for healthy plant cover and resulting biosequestration of carbon. Tree cover requires a minimum of 600 mm of annual
rainfall and land with less than that or with extended annual dry seasons
becomes either savannah or pure grassland. These grasslands, by definition,lie on the brittle end of the scale. Savory's second crucial insight, and asimportant, is the realization that grasslands, herbivores and pack predators
evolved in concert, and their natural interactions are crucial for the health of
those grasslands. It is these interactions that take the place of reduced soil
microbe activity in drier times and thus keep grasslands flourishing. Pack
predators keep the herds of herbivores constantly moving and also drive
them to bunch up in defensive groupings. By virtue of being in constantmotion, the herbivores do not overgraze any one spot, and their urine anddung is dispersed widely. And especially when bunching up in defensive
postures (when they also tend to urinate and defecate in preparation forflight) and when stampeding, they trample the ground sufficiently to basicallycultivate it, and drive in both seeds and their own manure, and further,pockmark the ground with their hooves, driving in seeds and creating
depressions that aid water retention and absorption. But they don’t remain
in any one place long enough to trample the soil so much that it would
become compacted.
A grass plant, annual or perennial, that has beengrazed back only somewhat, as the result of herbivores moving on under
predator pressure, will not die but will prune back its own now excessive
roots, in this manner also adding organic matter to the soil. Fertilized andcultivated by the moving herds, it grows back stronger than before. A
corollary understanding, helpful in understanding the function of theherbivores’ manure, is that the microbial decay function, impaired in the dry
season, is compensated for by the digestion in the ruminant herbivores’ guts.
Lands in wetter climates benefit by being allowed to remain fallow. But thebrittle drier lands actually degrade as fast without herbivores, as withherbivores in an unnatural pattern of constrained movement. The only
drylands that flourish are those with natural movements of wild herbivores,
or those where livestock is moved to mimic those natural movements. Land
managers and bureaucrats whose understanding of livestock agriculture has
been based on strategies developed in wetter lands fail to grasp this. It has
become clear that the damage occurs at both ends: either too few or no
herbivores on the one hand, or herbivores that do not move or are not moved
around enough on the other. Imitate natural patterns that evolved over untold
millennia, and the grasslands flourish (yet again a demonstration of theenduring value of biomimicry!).
Savory’s contention is that this process can happen quite quickly, asboth annual and perennial grasses grow far more quickly than trees, and that36

therefore grasslands hold the greatest potential to sequester carbon andreverse Global Warming. Over 40% of the world’s land surface consists ofthese brittle drylands, and according to his calculations based on his pilot
projects, if this process were to be implemented over approximately half thatarea, it would sequester enough carbon in just a few years to basically returnatmospheric carbon dioxide to pre-industrial levels. And it would reverse
desertification and significantly increase food production at the same time.
pilot projects around the world have shown it is possible. Foremost among
them is Savory’s own 2600-hectare Dimbangombe Ranch in Zimbabwe, butalso include places such as the Winona Ranch in Australia, Gene Coven’sranch in North Dakota and many other places. They all easily out-produce,in both quantity and quality, neighboring lands that are conventionallymanaged, show far greater water absorption capacity (a sign of carbon-richwell-aerated soils), and have far greater biodiversity. This should be all the
proof we need, easily trumping any number of footnote-rich refutations of
Savory’s claims, that have no real-time projects demonstrating their validity.
Grasslands restoration, using the biomimicry of Holistic Grazing, has thepotential to be the greatest game changer in reversing desertification and
Global Warming.

b)

Agricultural Lands (Crop Lands)

The world’s total land area is approximately 13.4 billion hectares,of which roughly 11%, or 1.5 billion hectares, is cultivated or under permanent
crops. This cropland is covered by only a very thin layer of topsoil (usually
between 12 and 25 cm at best), and this thin layer is literally all that stands
between humanity and starvation. But the world is losing about 1% of its
topsoil every year to erosion, mostly cause by agriculture. The USA is losing
soil at a rate 10 times faster than the soil replenishment rate, and China andIndia 30 to 40 times faster.12 One can imagine that the situation is as dire inEurope, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Australia; everywhere,
basically. The world has lost between 50 to 80% of its Soil Organic Carbon(SOC) over the last century or so.13 The relationship between SOC loss andsoil loss through erosion is not often considered, but it is very real. Obviously
the SOC in the topsoil washed away is mostly lost, but what isn’t so obvious
is that the loss of SOC through various kinds of land mismanagement is oneof the main causes of that erosion in the first place!

12
13

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Even less taken into account is where all that carbon went; in fact, itwent directly to the atmosphere, oxidized into carbon dioxide as a result of
bad agricultural practices.
This sounds like something out of a lessenlightened past, but it can easily be seen in the countryside now, anytime,
anywhere on earth. I can look out of my window as I write this, and see
plowed fields lying bare under the sun. In many cases, agricultural land is leftbare for half the year or more, and often during the hottest and/or driest timesof the year. We are so accustomed to seeing soils left like this that we don’teven question it. But the organic matter in that soil (the SOC), unshielded fromthe direct sun by plant cover and bereft of the cooling effect of
evapotranspiration that plant cover also provided, is steadily oxidizing out of
the soil. In effect, plowed land left bare is like leaving an engine idling formonths on end, pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Few people would
approve of that, but nobody thinks anything is wrong with leaving soil bare forextended periods of time.
Soil temperature is critical.14 At around 20C, 100% of moisture is used
for growth, but at only 37C, 85% is lost to evaporation and transpiration andonly 15% remains to support plant growth. Anyone who has walked barefootin summer knows how hot bare ground can get (think beach sand), far hotter
than the air’s ambient temperature. At 45C (not unusual in summer) some soil
bacteria start dying. For comparison, rooftops, which can serve as a proxyfor bare ground, can easily get much hotter than this even as far north as say
Chicago, reaching temperatures well over 60C. At 54C, 100% of moisture islost through evaporation and transpiration. And at 60C, soil bacteria die. Of
course, the hotter and drier the soil gets, the more SOC (think humus here)oxidizes out as carbon dioxide. Hello Global Warming.
What prevents soil from heating up and drying out? Quite simply, plant
cover first and foremost, but also plant residue cover, like straw or dry leaves.
Plants shade the soil, and the cooling effect of evapotranspiration is far moresignificant than most people realize. Vegetated land is generally cooler thanambient air, but bare earth can exceed ambient air temperatures by up to an
astonishing 50C (see the discussion and illustration on green roofs in thesubsequent section on urban areas).
None of this is difficult to understand, and yet nowhere is it taken into
account. Current agricultural practices are highly destructive. This should be
obvious, and it has become obvious to a few enlightened and motivatedindividuals, now engaged in finding better ways. In a rapidly warming world,
where hunger is also a growing problem, we can no longer afford theseantiquated and highly destructive agricultural practices.
14

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In the section devoted to Dr. Christine Jones, we already looked at how
SOC is formed, and briefly considered why its loss is so connected to erosion
and loss of productivity. But a quick review is useful here. Living soil is notjust a matrix to hold the plant in place, from which the plant takes water andnutrients in a one-way interaction. Living soil is an amazing symbiotic net,
mindboggling in its complexity and biodiversity. It is estimated that over 95%
of life forms exist within the soils of the planet. To understand this symbiotic
net, one needs to start with the cornerstone symbiotic relationship between
about 80% of flowering plants and mycorrhizal bacteria. The mycorrhizal
bacteria act like the stockbrokers of the soil carbon economy. Plants pumpdown to the mycorrhizae up to 40% of their nutrient production (a huge
proportion!) in the form of simple sugars. Dr. Christine Jones has called this‘liquid carbon’ and described plants as ‘carbon pumps’. Both theseformulations are extremely useful to help us change our understanding ofplants and the soil, and their lynchpin function in a healthy carbon cycle. The
mycorrhizae in turn use some of these simple sugars for their own growth andsustenance. Part of that involves growing a profusion of long thin tendrils
called hyphae whose combined length can be astonishing. An essential
feature of the hyphae is that they are coated with a sticky secretion called
glomalin (only discovered in the late 90’s). Glomalin in its own right serves tocreate crumbly soil with a cake-like texture; its stickiness clumps mineral soil
particles into ‘aggregates’. These aggregates create spaces in what would
otherwise become highly compact non-absorbent soil, and enable air andwater to percolate down into the resulting rich crumbly soil. The higher theamount of SOC in the soil, the greater its water retention capability, andglomalin-created aggregates are the reason why. But the glomalin-coatedhyphae actually evolved to serve another function: one, the nourishment of ahost of soil bacteria and other microorganisms, the third major component of
the symbiotic net, and two, the collection and transport of the mineral nutrientsthat these microorganisms provide back to the mycorrhizae and on to theplant. The mycorrhizae pass on a good share of the carbon they receive fromthe plant to these microorganism symbionts. These then labor to dissolve
minerals out of the non-organic components of soil: iron, magnesium, zinc,copper, phosphates, etc. These mineral nutrients are relayed through thehyphae, nourishing all living things along the way, back up to the plant, whichcannot survive without them.
This, in a handful of words, is the soil symbiotic net. It is the definitionof healthy soil, so crucial to the plant cover that provides our food, much of
our oxygen, cooling, and - for the purposes of this discussion – anindispensable sequestering function in a healthy global carbon cycle.

39

To say this is not generally understood is a massive understatement.
Modern industrial agriculture is, along with the mega-corporations thatparasitize it and us, built on the simplistic conception that soil is just a matrix
to root a plant in, not a living meta-organism. The plant/soil relationship is seen
as a one-way transaction. Plants simply take nutrients from the soil (which
exist there through some miraculous reason no one bothers to understand)and, giving nothing in return except some eventual dead plant matter,
eventually deplete it. This necessitates ‘inputs’, in the form of chemicalfertilizers, to remediate that loss. To be fair to modern industrial agriculture,these misconceptions predate it, and have been a part of destructive
agricultural practice, such as broad-ground plowing (which removes plant
cover completely) and slash-and-burn agriculture, for a very long time. Whatchanged was the industrial-scale efficiency, enabled by the power of fossil
fuels and the Haber-Bosch process to fix nitrogen from the air in the form ofammonia. Both are recent developments, made within the previous two
centuries. Fossil fuels make possible ever-larger farm machinery, and theHaber-Bosch process removes the biologically available nitrogen limitation to
growth by pulling more out of the air, creating chemical fertilizers. Armed withthese two capabilities, we have run amok. And we have been hypnotized byour short-term successes, such as the so-called ‘Green Revolution’. To
chemical fertilizers we have added pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, andnow we are genetically modifying plants so that they, and only they, canwithstand massive applications of herbicides like glyphosate (Monsanto’sRoundup) and 2,4-D. These two are now being applied in a combination called
Enlist Duo, because weeds are rapidly evolving a resistance to glyphosate
alone. With this modern armamentarium we can ‘feed the World’, as its
proponents never tire of proclaiming. Paradoxically, these industrial
agricultural practices do in fact turn the plant/soil into a one-way interaction,with plants simply taking nutrients from the soil and depleting it, mainly
because the soil symbiotic net has been decimated. Chemical inputs are thenrequired. Experiments on land degraded like this become a self-fulfilling
prophecy. It appears to be the only thing that works, because everything thatis done destroys the soil microbiome that would provide the true remedialaction. Unfortunately, this soil is more dead dirt than soil, poor in nutrients,
low in resistance to drought and flooding, and a proximate cause of Global
Warming because of its wholesale loss of SOC. Not the answer we really want.
How sustainable is this modern fossil-fuel and chemical dependent
agriculture? That is beyond the scope of this discussion, but common sense
would indicate we should be very worried. More importantly, for our
discussion, what happens to SOC and to the soil symbiotic net that creates it
and dissolves essential nutrients out of the mineral portion of the soil? The
short answer is that, in various ways, modern industrial agriculture destroys

40

this soil symbiotic net. First, plowing: it strips the land of plant cover and also
brings up more underground SOC to expose to the oxidizing heat of the sun.
Loss of SOC means the soil compacts more, leading to reduced water
absorption and more runoff. Soil compaction is exacerbated by heavier andheavier farm machinery, used to plow yet deeper into the soil to counter theincreasing compaction of the soil. This brings up yet more SOC to be oxidized
away. We have already discussed the destruction of soil microbiota when soil
is left bare as a result. It is a vicious cycle, almost designed to take out the
SOC. And that is without even considering the impacts of the chemical inputs
that are also a large feature of industrial agriculture. In the first place, theapplication of chemical fertilizer tricks plants into deciding they no longer needto send down so much liquid carbon. They can still grow, but they do develop
a lack of many essential nutrients. Chemical fertilizers cannot possibly provide
the range of dissolved mineral nutrients the soil symbiotic net provides. Moreworrying is that the soil symbiotic net gets starved as a result of chemicalfertilizer application and begins to die back, beginning with the mycorrhizae.
When that happens, we are losing the engine of natural soil fertility along withthe crucial carbon bio-sequestration function of healthy soil.
Herbicides require several paragraphs of their own. Both Glyphosate
and 2,4-D have been implicated in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (a blood cancer)
and sarcoma (a soft tissue cancer). 2,4-D was a component in the infamous
Agent Orange defoliant used during the Vietnam War, and linked to birthdefects and other health disorders in the Vietnamese population and in
returning American veterans alike. Simplistic short-term exposure studies
have claimed that these herbicides are harmless to mammalian cells. But nostudies exist that examine their impact on our crucial gut microbiome, whichcurrent research is finding to be more and more important to our health. And
no studies really exist to examine the impact of these pesticides on the soil
symbiotic net. A worrisome parallel exists here: in both cases a healthyflourishing microbiome is essential to systemic health, ours and that of the soilthat gives us life. A large portion of that microbiome is fungi and bacteria. What
impact do herbicides and fungicides have on them? In all probability, theeffects are devastating. By definition, it is what these agrochemicals were
designed to do. But scientific investigation in this area tends to be suddenly
de-funded, and the credibility of any studies that do make it out is aggressively
attacked. The researchers conducting them find themselves suddenly
unemployed. All sucked into the black hole of protecting colossal corporate
profits.
Glyphosate use has increased over 600 times in recent decades. Autism
rates have risen during the same period from about 1 in 1000 to a staggering
1 in 30, a 3000% increase, and that’s just the cases that are diagnosed. We41have seen huge increases in the incidence of gastro-intestinal disorders such
as Crohn’s disease and irritable bowel syndrome as well. No mechanism has
yet been identified to explain this anomalous and tragic increase. But one
perhaps exists if we consider the enteric nervous system, our so-called
second brain. The network lining our intestines contains over 500 million brainneurons, and is responsible for the secretion of over 50% the dopamine and
80% of the serotonin our body requires. It does not take a large jump of theimagination to imagines that shifts in the balance of our gut microbiome could
lead to chronic inflammation of the bowel and adversely impact the functionof these neurons. A lack of dopamine is implicated in Parkinson’s Disease,and serotonin and dopamine deficiencies could well be the root cause ofautism spectrum disorders. Could chronic herbicide exposure be theproximate cause of the bewildering and overwhelming increase in autism
related disorders and the epidemic of bowel disease? Glyphosate has been
detected in many of the foods we all eat, and in our bodies as well. And, toreturn to our discussion, what is the impact on the analogous soil microbiome,
so crucial to a healthy carbon cycle? It can’t be good. Almost as a side note,a final insult, is the fact that glyphosate chelates mineral nutrients andprobably greatly reduces their bioavailability. In this way also glyphosate
impacts plant growth and reduces the nutrient content of our foods.
To sum it all up, it seems almost certain that the impacts of chemicalfertilizers and of pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are devastating to thesoil symbiotic net. This correspondingly diminishes the carbon sequestration
capability of healthy soil and leads to its degradation. When this alreadyvulnerable soil is plowed, breaking up the soil structure and exposing more
SOC to the sun, and when this soil is left bare for extended periods, often
during the hottest times of the year, carbon pours out of the soil and into theatmosphere.
But soils can, when managed appropriately, rebound in amazingly shortperiods of time. Dinbangombe in Zimbabwe, Winona Ranch in Australia, Gene
Goven’s flourishing ranch in North Dakota, the Quivira Coalition in New
Mexico, and indeed the more than ten thousand land managers implementing
Allan Savory’s Holistic Grazing on more than 16 million hectares world-wide
are all testament to this. Allan Yeomans, combining use of the minimallydisruptive Keyline plow his father invented with planned high-density grazing,has reported producing over 10 cm of humus rich topsoil in three years,
starting with bare sandy ground. Daryll Cluff and Colin Seis in Australia
developed a system they called “pasture cropping”, which involves minimal
plowing and seeding grain crops directly into a pasture cover of native grass
perennials. This mimics the original biological community of native grassland,a mix of annuals and perennials that benefit each other. Within years, drought

42

resistance improved, biodiversity increased, and over ten years, the depth of
topsoil more than quadrupled, going from around 10 cm to an astonishing 45
cm, and their degraded land fully remediated. A routine internet search for‘topsoil formation’ will yield the conventional understanding that it takes
centuries. These magnificent pioneers are showing it can take mere years,
decades at most.
The side benefits alone make these changes in cropland management
worthwhile: increased topsoil formation, greater water absorption andconsequent drought and flood resistance, increased biodiversity, reduced
expenses for chemical agricultural ‘inputs’ and for the equipment and fuelcosts of conventional mechanical plowing, greater nutrient content in foods,
increased livestock and crop productivity, and less labor required. Oh, and let
us not forget joy! A walk over these lands, such as on Gene Goven’s ranch inNorth Dakota, is a walk through living flourishing land. It makes you feel alive
and give you hope and joy, with butterflies and birdsong everywhere. Contrast
that with the dry, sterile, inert and spiritually deadening masses of dirt
symptomatic of industrial farming. These are just the side benefits. Given theexistential Climate Crisis we are confronting, these seemingly revolutionary
but actually biomimicking agricultural practices can and will be part of oursalvation. The reason they will help save us, here as in all other land categories
where photosynthesis occurs, is that the photosynthetic solution to Global
Warming is the only one that can be scaled fast enough and economicallyenough to draw down and re-sequester enough of the atmospheric carbon
causing Global Warming in the time frame we have left.

c)

Forests

Forests comprised 30.5% of the land area of the planet in 2015,
according to the most recent Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data.
This is down from 31.6% in 1990, and represents a 3% drop. The real figures
are likely worse. Deforestation has been a feature of human life for thousandsof years. The kosa or yellowish aeolian dust that cloaks Japan in an ochre hazein the early spring originates mainly in the Loess Plateau in China. It probably
began to blow away when forests there were cut down during the Bronze Agefor charcoal fuel to smelt that metal. In North America, about half the forestsin the eastern part of the continent were cut down between the 1600s and thelate 1800s. Deforestation is ongoing: The Union of Concerned Scientists
estimates that an area the size of Switzerland (38,300 km2) is lost to
desertification each year. Other estimates are greater: A 2017 report byscientists at the University of Maryland showed that the tropics lost about
158,000 km2 of forest in that year. This is about the size of Bangladesh. Most

43

current deforestation is, in fact occurring in the tropics. What are we losing
when we lose the forests? What is this loss doing to Global Warming, and how
can forests contribute to the drawdown of atmospheric carbon needed toreverse it? In other words, what ecosystem services provided by forests arebeing destroyed, and how can forest management practices restore them?
Answers are needed.
Forests are a harbor of biodiversity, home to 80% of terrestrial
biodiversity (This figure does not include the biodiversity of subterranean life
forms, which comprise up to 95% of total planetary biodiversity). Forests also
provide many resources: timber, food, medicine and fuel. More recently, they
have come to be seen as a major source of carbon sequestration, a bulwark
against Global Warming. They are obviously a carbon sink; enormous
amounts of carbon are locked up in trees. But there is considerable
controversy over the role of forests in mitigating Global Warming. Forests athigh latitudes have a much lower albedo effect than open snow-covered
ground and ice, for instance. The darker land surface of coniferous forests
reflects far less light, and thus heat, back out into space. Additionally, a Yale
study by atmospheric scientist Nadine Unger found that forests emit volatileorganic compounds, such as isoprene, that contribute to Global Warming.
Another study, by Ecologist Sunitha Pangala, found that trees in the Amazon
emit methane, a powerful GHG. She reported that trees account for aroundhalf of the Amazon’s total methane emissions. This is a staggering amount.
So, there appear to be uncertainties over the over-all effectiveness of forests
to mitigate Global Warming.
However, all these discussions are like the fable of the blind men andthe elephant. Everyone is looking at a different part, and forms a different
picture of what the animal looks like. All are right in a very limited way, but noone sees the elephant. To really understand the ecosystem services that
forests provide, a focus on the overall picture is needed, not an obsession
with one aspect. Forests are all different: boreal vs. tropical, deciduous vs.
coniferous, rainforest vs. dryland forest, etc. In terms of their mitigating effecton Global Warming, they do, however, share several things in common. One,
their wood does lock up carbon over biologic time. Two, through what is called
the ‘biotic pump’ of evapotranspiration, they are a crucial component in theworld’s large water cycle, operating often at continental scales.
Three,
through their part in the soil symbiotic net, they pump carbon exudates (the‘liquid carbon’ described by Dr. Christine Jones) deep into the soil. The firstof these three is obvious and well-known. The second, the ‘biotic pump’ which
sends moisture far inland, is only now becoming apparent, thanks to theefforts of Russian physicists Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov. The

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third one, carbon sequestration as a result of the symbiotic relationship ofliving trees and the subterranean microbiome, is almost universally ignored.
Since carbon sequestration in wood, etc. is well understood, let’s
consider the Biotic Pump first. According to a 2018 FAO report, three quartersof the Earth’s freshwater comes from forested watersheds. Over half the world
population relies on those forested watersheds for drinking water, and forwater used in agriculture and industry. It is obvious that forests play a crucialrole in the large water cycle. It is probable that without them, most rain would
simply fall near the coasts of the oceans, from which the water vapor
originates. Forests act like conveyer belts, moving rain in cycles inland.
Makarieva and Gorshkov are perhaps the first to identify and truly
comprehend the scale of this effect. As they describe it, the high rate ofevapotranspiration in forests enriches the water vapor in the atmosphereabove them. This moist air ascends and cools, causing the water vapor tocondense. This produces a partial vacuum as the water vapor condenses outof the air, which creates a pressure gradient. This is the crucial point. That
pressure gradient results in more moist air being sucked in from the ocean,creating an air flow. It is estimated that in the Amazon, water falls on rain
forest, is evapotranspirated back to the atmosphere, and falls again, moving
farther inland each time. The cycle repeats at least seven times before themoisture-laden air comes up against the eastern flanks of the Andes. There,
it is forced very high into the atmosphere, and the resulting heavy
condensation produces some of the highest amounts of rainfall on the planet.
This is the ‘conveyer belt’ of water, the biotic pump function of forests. Whenlarge areas of forest are cleared or burnt off, the biotic pump and thus theocean-to-land winds weaken. The rain-making process stalls. Unprecedented
drought in Russia in recent years is, according to Makarieva and Gorshkov,
linked to accelerated deforestation in western Russia. In 2019, there havebeen more that 80,000 fires in the Amazon, due in large part to the reactionary
benighted policies of president Jair Bolsonaro. Experts have estimated that if
over 20% of that rain forest is lost, the whole area will inevitably transition tosavanna, and the rain forest will largely disappear. What the experts are talking
about is the loss of the Amazonian biotic pump that provides the ‘rain’ inrainforests.
Earlier in this paper, we have seen how crucial moisture is to the soil
microbiome. First, it ensures a healthy plant cover, which both protects thesoil from heat, and pumps down huge amounts of organic carbon to feed themicroorganisms below. Second, as the soil dries, microbial function declines.
Too dry and too hot, and microbial life dies. Perhaps the main contention ofthis paper is that the soil symbiotic net, the symbiotic relationship among
plants, mycorrhizae and soil microbes, is the most significant biological45

mechanism for the biosequestration of carbon in the soils of the planet. And
that managing for photosynthesis by using it is only viable strategy we haveat present to draw down sufficient atmospheric carbon to avert the worst
consequences of global warming. We need to urgently fast forward thisbiosequestration process, and anything that damages it must be avoided at
all costs. On this point alone, healthy forests are a crucial component in thefight against global warming. Their carbon storage is partly understood, but
their lynchpin macro-role in the large water cycle needs to be more clearly
comprehended, and forest management policy adapted accordingly.
The third commonality that all forests share is their contribution to what
Dr. Christine Jones has called ‘the liquid carbon pathway’. To repeat the point,
this is the symbiotic relationship between plants and the soil microbiome that
results in plants pumping vast quantities of organic carbon deep into the soil.
This fundamental function is almost universally ignored, for forests as well as
for grasslands and crop plants. Calculations on the Global Warming
Mitigation potential of forests must take into account this large-scalebiosequestration of carbon. At present, universally, they do not, andappropriate forest management policy cannot be established or implemented
as a result.
All forests provide this ecosystem carbon sequestration function, but
not all in equal amounts. Conifers tend to have wide-spreading shallow rootsystems. In contrast, the root system of a deciduous tree can be large anddeep enough to basically be an underground mirror image of the tree above.
If we imagine the extent to which the hyphae of mycorrhizae multiply that, we
get a more accurate picture of the scale of a deciduous tree’s carbon pump.
Empirically, we can assume with confidence that a deciduous forest will pumpmore organic carbon into the ground to nourish its symbionts, and pump thatcarbon considerably deeper. The deeper the organic carbon, the more secure
its biosequestration, and the resulting topsoil will be thicker, richer, and retain
more water. In other regards as well, deciduous forests may tend to performbetter at mitigation. They lose their leaves in winter, and thus reduce thealbedo cooling effect of snow less than coniferous forests would. The fallen
leaves form a thick cushy carpet on the forest floor, decaying into rich topsoil
at rates far higher than coniferous forests do. The leaves of coniferous trees
fall less often and less regularly, and have a high resin content which retards
decay. No farmer gathers pine needles for their fields, but deciduous leaves
are prized for compost. A healthy deciduous forest can easily form acentimeter of topsoil a year, but in a coniferous forest, that might take a
century. Deciduous forests are higher in biodiversity, and their soils havesignificantly higher water retention performance as well. Unfortunately, inJapan and elsewhere, forest management policy is mainly focused on

46

monoculture coniferous tree farming, with consequent loss of biodiversity, andof carbon storage and water retention capabilities.
Tropical forests also store vast amounts of carbon, an estimated 250
billion tons, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Due to rapid bacterial decay,
nutrient cycling is fast in tropical forests, and the red clay jungle soils generally
tend to be shallow and poor. The carbon, therefore, is sequestered in the trees
and other plants more than in the soil microbiome. Aboriginal dwellers of the
Amazon understood this empirically. They are known to have enriched theirforest soils by adding biochar, often in large quantities. Even now, deposits ofthis terra preta or black soil can be found throughout the Amazon, and areevidence of human habitation and land cultivation on a scale previously
unimagined. It can be said that the rapid and lush growth of tropical rainforests
makes up for the low level of carbon sequestration in most jungle soils, butthat the rapid decay when those trees die means the carbon is notsequestered that long. However, one exception to this general rule is thetropical peatlands. These are tropical forests where organic matter isprotected from rapid oxidation by permanent submersion in swamp-like
conditions. These peatlands only cover about 0.25% of the world’s land area,
but are estimated to contain between 50 and 70 billion tons of carbon (about
3% of global SOC). They are vulnerable to deforestation. When the forest
cover is cleared, the peat dries out and oxidizes rapidly. It even burns, and theair quality in many parts of Indonesia in recent years is often very bad as aresult of the burning peat. Obviously, all that sequestered carbon goes to theatmosphere. If most of the peatland organic carbon were to oxidize, thatwould result in a 50 gigaton jump in carbon emissions. For comparison, global
anthropogenic carbon emissions were a bit under 10 gigatons in 2014.
To summarize, deciduous forests sequester more carbon through thesoil symbiotic net than either tropical or boreal evergreen forests. Deciduous
forest soils are richer and hold more carbon. But all forests provide Global
Warming Mitigation inputs. All biosequester carbon in their trees. And perhaps
most importantly, through their biotic pump function, all forests are crucial
links in the world’s large water cycle. A stable moisture cycling system is as
important to halting and reversing Global Warming as carbon biosequestration
itself, for the later cannot take place without adequate moisture. Global forest
management strategies must take this into account. That should include
halting deforestation and maximizing species diversity in any and allreforestation projects.
The Miyawaki Method can serve as a role model. Akira Miyawaki, a Blue
Planet Award-wining botanist, has developed a method of reforestation orafforestation that is a soil, air, water, and climate remediating process. He

47developed his method through the study of sacred Shinto shrine forests.
These fragments of forest all over Japan are time capsules of Japan’s original
indigenous forest. Miyawaki realized that they were naturally layered in fourmain categories: main tree species, sub-species, shrubs, and groundcovering herbs. His approach is modelled on that, and consists of taking
between 50 and 100 local plant species from the above four categories andplanting them as seedlings in a random mix mimicking natural distribution.
They are planted very densely, 20 to 30 times denser than commercial tree
plantings. As a result of the stiff competition, they tend to grow very rapidly,
about 10 times faster. The site is watered, weeded, and monitored for two to
three years until it is stabilized, and then left to flourish on its own without
further interference. Miyawaki has planted over 40 million trees in this way, in
15 different countries, including Japan. But that figure doesn’t begin to tell
the whole story. He has restored forest ecosystems, complete with plant andanimal biodiversity, and with renewed carbon biosequestration capabilities as
well.
A recognition of the role forests play in the global climate, of the uniquecharacteristics of the various types of forests, of the value of biodiversity, andof the power of the natural world to regenerate itself quickly under the rightconditions, all are needed to formulate the kinds of forest management andrestoration strategies that can succeed. Akira Miyawaki’s afforestation efforts
are one shining example. When these are implemented on a large scale,forests can play an indispensable role in the photosynthetic solution to
Climate Change.
d)Urban Areas

Estimates of total global urban land area vary rather widely, ranging
from .2% up to 3%. Compared to the areas occupied by forests, grasslands
and croplands, it may not seem like much. But urban areas have an outsized
impact because of all the resources needed and all the waste generated by
the huge numbers of people who live in them. The scale of carbon emissions
from urban areas makes them prime targets for every possible mitigation
strategy. According to a September 18, 2012 article in Scientific American,
more than half of the world’s expected nine billion people will live in giant
urban expanses by 2030. Some estimates say up to 80% of the world’s
population will be urban dwellers by that year. Cities will spill over into thesurrounding countryside, occupying an estimated additional 1.2 million km2
by 2030, roughly tripling in size to over 1.6 million km2. I remember the
Kathmandu valley in Nepal in 1988 with large expanses of countrysidesurrounding the city. When I went back in 2018 and viewed the valley from thehill of the famous Swayambhunath temple, the valley was a sea of buildings

48

in every direction. As I moved through that urban sprawl, very little of it was
beautiful. The same can be said for a majority of the cities on the planet: noisy
and crowded, with polluted air and water, and generally noticeably hotter thansurrounding areas. This last phenomenon even has a name: The urban heatisland effect.
It is not a new phenomenon; it was first documented in the 1830s. And
it is not hard to understand why it occurs. The plant cover in modern cities
can be lower than in many deserts. Pavement and buildings are everywhere,
and none of those surfaces is water absorbent. What they absorb and store
is heat from the sun. Rooftop temperatures can easily top 60C. Energy
consumption for cooling soars. The heat soaks in and the water runs off. Thissituation needs to be reversed: the water soaks in and the heat reflects off andis removed through evaporative cooling! It can be surprisingly easy to do. All
that is needed is a little imagination and some ingenuity. It is a question ofgreening the roofs and walls, and making reflective those surfaces that aren’t.
Evapotranspiration from the green roof or wall has a significant cooling effect,in addition to the direct shade provided and the insulation from the layer ofsoil. According to the American EPA, green roofs generally remain at ambient
air temperature or even a bit cooler, while their bare counterparts can soar up
to 40C or more above ambient air temperature (see illustration). Green roofs
are already being installed in cities all over the world. With its world-classhorticultural skills, Japan should be at the forefront of this green revolution!

49

Source: Reducing Urban Heat Islands: Compendium of Strategies

Estimates of reductions in summer energy demands for cooling range
from 20% all the way up to 75%. What is clear is that the energy savings are
significant. Implemented across a city, green roofs would reduce and eveneliminate the urban heat island effect. They have many other benefits too:rooftop vegetation and soil work like sponges, absorbing and filtering waterthat would otherwise run off through gutters, wash through polluted streets
and overload wastewater treatment plants. They also beautify cities, improvebiodiversity, and provide areas for city dwellers to relax, and even to growfood. Green roofs can also last twice as long as conventional ones, for the soil
and plant cover protect the roof material from harsh weather and UV radiation.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming 25% of urban land surface
could be greened, arrives at a figure of 400,000 km2 of new plant cover in
2030. Imagine the energy savings from reduced air conditioning, and fromreductions in water demand and in costs for treating wastewater! And, on topof all the emissions reductions related to cooling and wastewater treatment,
green roofs also do their bit to drawdown and biosequester atmosphericcarbon, which at over 40 million hectares would not be insignificant.

50Internet screen grabs, provenance unascertainable

In a kind of a side note, pavements and sidewalks should be made ofwater-absorbent concrete and asphalt. This will go a long way towards
replenishing groundwater, watering city gardens, reducing flood danger, andeasing the burden on wastewater treatment plants. As it stands, city
wastewater treatment plants are often overwhelmed by cloudbursts, and caneven be forced to discharge large amounts of untreated sewage on suchoccasions. Water that drains through permeable concrete or asphalt alsofilters out myriad pollutants that accumulate on roadways and rooftops, andthat would otherwise wash into nearby bodies of water and add to theirpollution burden. There are already a number of products on the market. A
new cement product called Topmix Permeable can absorb up to 1,000 litersof water per minute per square meter. Porous Asphalt systems have beenaround since the 1970s.
Good ideas are not what is lacking. What islacking is the will to overcome human inertia and implement them!

51

e)

OceansPhytoplankton in the oceans are responsible for generating at least half
the oxygen in the atmosphere through photosynthesis. They capture about 37
billion metric tons of CO2 in the process, about 40% of all CO2 produced. The
IMF article cited here15 estimates that this would be the equivalent to the CO2
captured by 1.7 trillion trees – four Amazon forests’ worth. A large portion ofthis captured CO2 sinks to the ocean bottom through several mechanisms andis thus sequestered. First, much dead phytoplankton gradually sinks to thebottom, as demonstrated by large geological deposits of diatomaceous earth
worldwide. Second, zooplankton that graze on the phytoplankton near thesurface during dark hours, migrate downwards to avoid predators during
daylight. Their fecal pellets, and those of animals that prey on them, excreted
at depth, transport carbon fixed by phytoplankton near the surface down toabyssal depths. Third, the bodies of larger animals that prey on zooplankton(some sharks and rays, penguins, and most notably whales) sink to the bottom
when they die. This whole process is called the ‘biological pump’ and it
operates at such a scale that without it, almost twice as much CO2 would
remain in the atmosphere. Clearly, positive and negative human impacts on
this biological pump must be taken into consideration as a significant part ofthe photosynthetic solution to Global Warming. The scale of phytoplankton
impact on the carbon cycle is briefly described above, but the scale ofzooplankton impacts, and that of megafauna, particularly whales, needs moreelaboration.
The zooplankton vertical migration is called the diel vertical migration(DVM). It is possibly the largest natural daily movement of biomass on theplanet. The zooplankton is preyed upon by diverse predators as it moves up
and down in the sea water, and the resulting chains of predation and fecalpellet production move carbon and other elements deeper and deeper, fairly
rapidly. In this way DVM is a major factor in the ‘biological pump’, or the
biologically mediated sequestration of CO2 down to the ocean depths. 16For
the purposes of this discussion, the focus will be on krill. Strictly speaking, krill
are classed as zooplankton only in their egg and larval stages, when they lack
locomotion. This type of zooplankton is called meroplankton. Krill are perhaps
the most abundant animal on the planet. It is estimated that peak populationsof krill reach up to 6 billion tons just in Antarctic waters. Krill swarms can beseen from space. Their cumulative shuttling of carbon to the ocean depths,

15
16

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where it is sequestered, is huge in scale. They are also the primary food of thegreat baleen whales.
Whales work to sequester carbon in several ways. First and foremost,they are crucial for the abundant growth of phytoplankton. This point cannot
be stressed strongly enough. The diving movements of whales stir up nutrientsand help bring them to the surface. Whales also excrete, and at the surface,in what are euphemistically termed “fecal plumes”. These fecal plumes arerich in nitrogen and in iron, both elements crucial to plankton growth.
Wherever whales are found, so are large concentrations of phytoplankton andof the zooplankton that feed on them. Whales cycle nutrients, in other words.
Without a healthy population of whales, plankton levels would be severely
impacted. Abundant plankton, thanks to the whales, means significant CO2
biosequestration. And, as a side benefit, also rich fisheries, as these are
directly or indirectly dependent on the total planktonic biomass. Whales alsofunction as carbon sinks, both during their long lifetimes, and also when theydie. This is because their bodies generally descend to the sea floor.
The world’s population of great whales is only about 25% of what it wasprior to the industrial whaling of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The present
population of Blue whales, the largest animal to have ever lived, is only 3% or
so of historical levels. Andrew Pershing, a research scientist working with the
University of Maine and the Gulf of Maine Marine Research Institute, makes
this loss of carbon biosequestration capacity easier to comprehend: “A
century of whaling equates to the burning of more than 28 million hectares offorest or 28,000 SUVs driving for 100 years.” It should be obvious that a verysignificant portion of carbon biosequestration begins with the photosynthetic
activity of oceanic phytoplankton. It continues with the carbon movement
provided by zooplankton. And it is sustained by an abundant and thriving
population of great whales. Whales are an essential component of a large andthriving biomass of oceanic plankton. This is the biological carbon pump.
What are the threats to this essential healthy population of whales?
Much has been made of the activities of nations that persist in whaling, despite
a general ban. Japan is chief among them. Actual numbers of whales taken
by Japan, Iceland and other whaling nations are small compared to historicalcatches. The indirect impact of these whaling activities is likely to be muchgreater. Whales have extraordinary hearing because they depend on it, theway we depend on vision. They can hear sounds, especially low frequency
sounds, over astonishing distances. The distress calls of hunted whales canpossibly be heard by other whales hundreds of kilometers away, andundoubtedly stress and even terrorize these highly intelligent creatures. This
brings us to a threat to the world’s whales probably far greater than whaling.

53

That is acoustic pollution, which is increasing exponentially in the world’s
oceans. It is not just ships’ motors. The most damaging forms of acoustic
pollution are sonic booms in the range of hundreds of decibels. These areextensively used both for seabed oil exploration and by the US and othernavies to hunt for the submarines of potential enemies. These sonic booms
can be deafening, and a deaf whale, functionally blind, is a dead whale.
Whales that are far enough away that their hearing is not permanently
destroyed are still terrorized by the overwhelming sound and flee in panic.
There is even evidence that this panic overrides their instinctive timing ofascent from deep dives, and they wind up suffering the bends, just as humandivers do. Whales also have to deal with pollution of a more insidious kind:the bioconcentration of persistent organic pollutants, such as dioxin, PBCs,
organic mercury, etc. By virtue of being at the top of the food chain,concentrations of these potential endocrine disruptors and carcinogens have
now reached hazardous levels in the bodies of whales, far exceeding safety
limits set by governments. As a side note, this situation should make us think
twice before consuming whale meat, whatever other opinions we may havefor or against commercial whaling! The long-term impact of this chemical
pollution on the health of the world’s whale population is yet unknown, but it
can’t be good.
What is obvious from the above paragraphs is how essential a large
healthy population of whales is to the global carbon cycle. It is also clear how
they continue to be adversely impacted by human activities even long after
the end of the large-scale industrial whaling that nearly drove them toextinction. A discussion of managing the oceans for photosynthesis, tomitigate Global Warming, is almost by definition a discussion on how toprotect great whales and foster their population recovery.

5) CONCLUSION
The potential for catastrophic change in the planet’s climate is very real,
particularly if feedback loops that release methane locked in the permafrost
and in methane hydrates are triggered on a large scale. 4 out the past 5 mass
extinction events in geologic history can arguably be attributed, wholly or insignificant part, to the effects of global warming triggered by runaway
greenhouse effects. The most disastrous of these was the end-Permian mass

54

extinction, when over 90% of species became extinct. We are already seeing
significant impacts of the current global warming trend. These include
prolonged droughts and devastating wildfires, more destructive storms,
heavier rainfall and more frequent and destructive floods, melting ice at thepoles and in the mountains, sea level rise, insect infestations, significant shifts
north and south of animal and plant species, and a skyrocketing extinction
rate. All of these are happening at a far faster rate than even during the endPermian mass extinction, and represent an existential threat to humanity.
The need for urgent action is getting clearer by the day. Unlike previous
mass extinction events related to runaway greenhouse effects, the current
crisis is primarily the result of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.
We are causing it. The urgent action needed is two-fold: one, reduce thesources of those anthropogenic emissions and two, initiate a global campaign
to drawdown the excessive carbon in the atmosphere, in every way possible.
However, the global community, with very few exceptions, is only focused on
reducing carbon emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. This isproblematic for several reasons. One, we are failing to do so; emissions fromfossil fuels have increased significantly over recent decades, instead of being
reduced. Two, even if we were to miraculously eliminate fossil fuel emissions
overnight, the ‘legacy carbon’ already in the atmosphere virtually ensures atleast 2C of warming. There are no technological means of drawing down
sufficient carbon that can be implemented fast enough (let alone economicallyenough) to be effective in avoiding widespread climatic disaster and evenpossibly triggering the apocalyptic release of the vast amounts of methanestored in permafrost and oceanic methane hydrates. Three, and mostimportantly, anthropogenic emissions are not just the result of burning fossil
fuels. Other sources of anthropogenic emissions exist, and, though generally
ignored, are as or even more significant in causing global warming.
This discussion is focused on this third problem, the lack of recognitionof the scale and importance of non-fossil fuel emissions. An increasing bodyof evidence indicates that emissions resulting from destructive land and ocean
management over time can rival and even possibly exceed those of fossil fuelemissions. These various forms of mismanagement, discussed above, haveresulted in the mass release of carbon previously bio-sequestered in organic
matter, and simultaneously have greatly reduced the capacity of the biosphereto continue bio-sequestering carbon in beneficial organic forms. It should be
obvious that no effective strategy is possible to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, and to drawdown from the atmosphere excessive carbon in theform of CO2, without a recognition of this fact. In fact, the only realistic
strategy to slow down and subsequently reverse global warming, in the timeframe available, is the harnessing of the potential of photosynthesis to55

biosequester carbon. Globally, photosynthesis, on a daily basis, moves
roughly nine times as many carbon atoms as all human activity, and it moves
them in the right direction: into organic forms where carbon is beneficial tolife. If we could enhance photosynthetic activity to where it moves ten times
as many carbon atoms, we would solve global warming. In other words, tosave the planet, we are talking about a mere 10% or so increase inphotosynthetic production. Surely that seems doable.
Three figures, more than any others, have advanced this understanding.
First is Dr. Rattan Lal, at Ohio State University, who pioneered methods tomeasure the loss of soil organic carbon. His research and that of others
established that world soils have lost between 50 and 80% of their soil organiccarbon, mostly in the past two centuries. This is a staggering amount.
Significantly, Dr. Lal has also clearly stated that restoring soil organic carbon
is a viable strategy to limit climate change. But his claims probably do not go
far enough. Because his methods of estimating soil carbon loss are limited inapplication, and don’t take into account losses from wild rangelands, urban
areas, forests, or the oceans, the total amount of organic carbon lost to theatmosphere is, in all probability, far higher. Consequently, strategies torestore that organic carbon through photosynthetic sequestration can have acorrespondingly greater impact. The second figure is the wildlife andgrasslands restoration ecologist Allan Savory. Savory has pioneered a methodof livestock and rangeland management he termed ‘Holistic Range
Management’ that can reverse desertification, all while restoring rangelandand multiplying by several times the livestock numbers that can be sustainablygrazed on a given area of rangeland. Savory has claimed that if his methods
were to be implemented on half the world’s grasslands, atmospheric carbon
levels could be reduced to pre-industrial levels in a few decades. His pilot
projects and those of his emulators certainly have shown that amazing
recoveries of degraded land are possible in a short time. The third figure is
Dr. Christine Jones, noted Australian soils ecologist. She has helped elucidate
and worked to further the understanding of the crucial relationships between
plants and the soil microbiome. These relationships work to bio-sequester
carbon in vast quantities and at speeds that are not yet generally recognized.
She coined the expressions ‘carbon pump’ and ‘liquid carbon pathway’, which
encapsulate those relationships and provide useful new terminology to help
build understanding of the workings of bio-sequestration of carbon. She has
worked tirelessly to advance the recognition that plants are not just takers of
nourishment from inert soil, but that plants give back to the soil in significant
quantity. This two-way interaction among plants, mycorrhizal fungi andmicrobes forms a soil symbiotic net that works to actively bio-sequester
carbon in astonishing amounts, enriching the soil and improving its water

56

retention capacity in the process. This understanding helps underpin Savory’s
claim that grasslands can reverse climate change.
Many have derided Savory’s claims as wildly improbable and, without
providing any real counterproof, dismissed his tangible results. But he is not
the only one making these sorts of claims or achieving these types of results.
With regards to forests, ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at Swiss
university ETH claim in a study published in 2019 that an additional 1.2 trillion
trees can be planted worldwide without impinging on agricultural lands, thus
locking up hundreds of gigatons of carbon, or at least 10 years ofanthropogenic emissions at our current rate. In regard to agricultural lands,
research conducted at the New Mexico State University Institute for
Sustainable Agricultural Research by David C. Johnson and his colleagues
found that with a method of soil management they developed that maximizes
healthy fungi and bacteria in soil, “you can grow more crops faster, better andwith less water. . . The carbon sequestration is the icing on the cake.” They
have stated that “The rates of biomass production we are currently observing
in [their] system have the capability to capture enough CO2 (120+ tons per
hectare) to offset all anthropogenic CO2 emissions on less than 11% of world
cropland.” These two studies are making the same argument as Savory, thaton properly managed lands, enhanced photosynthetic activity can by itself
eliminate anthropogenic emissions. It behooves us to implement all thesestrategies to the extent possible. The methods and strategies that these andmany other visionaries are pioneering have, without exception, very desirable
side benefits: reversing desertification, improving agricultural production,enhancing flood and drought prevention, cooling our cities, rebuilding social
cohesion, restoring ocean fisheries, restoring biodiversity, and more. Theseside benefits make those strategies worth implementing by themselves, even
without the major benefit of mitigating and even reversing global warming.
This demonstrates, as well, how interconnected and related to climate change
all these other problems are.
An important point regarding all these claims needs to be made here:
Even in our age of exalting scientific certainty, the overwhelming majority ofdecisions are based on empirical knowledge. In other words, ‘It works, so
let’s do it, and figure out why later’. And so it has to be with our response to
global warming. For too long, the demands for absolute proof of theanthropogenic cause of global warming, and of the effectiveness of any
strategy to deal with it, have just served as an excuse to do nothing. The
clear and already present danger of global warming is bearing down on us sofast that we do not have the luxury of demonstrating the scientific validity of astrategy completely beyond all doubt before beginning to implement it. If it isworking, we have to empirically accept and implement it. No other possible

57

realistic solutions to our climate emergency have been found, and time isrunning out. The astonishing results being achieved worldwide by managing
for photosynthesis, on grasslands, agricultural lands, forests and urban areas,and potentially the oceans, are already sufficient empiric proof that ouranswers lie here, and that even just their side benefits make implementing
them worthwhile.
It might be useful to frame the discussion in economic terms. Dr.
Christine Jones has called carbon the currency for most transactions within
and between living things. According to ecologist John Todd, “Humanity has
always been carbon based. The carbon that supported us through most of
history was slow carbon embodied in trees, other plants, and animals. Since
the Industrial Revolution we have shifted to using fast carbon in the form of oil
and natural gas. Fast carbon is finite and non-renewable”. Put differently, we
are now operating on an ‘oxidizing’ economy, undoing the photosynthesis of
the past through burning and the photosynthesis of the present throughdestructive land management. Pollution, wars, destroyed social fabric, andthe uber-crisis of global warming are the disastrous results. To save ourselves
and make the world green and blooming with life again, we have to ditch theoxidizing economy and return to a slow carbon photosynthesis economy. To
promote the land management strategies that can accomplish this, we will
also have to alter our economic order and put a proper value on both the fast
carbon of death (make people pay to use it) and the rich life-giving organic
slow carbon of life (reward people for building it). Therefore, we will need torethink our presently flawed economic management parameters along with
our land management parameters to succeed.
The time to implement our only realistic hope, the photosynthetic
solution to climate change is running out. Global warming will, if unchecked,
remove the places on earth where the solution can be implemented. Rainbands will move north and south, creating Sahara-like deserts in southern
Europe, North America and indeed around the globe. Forests will burn down
and grasslands turn to desert, as will agricultural lands everywhere. Sea level
rise will inundate vast areas. Heating and acidifying oceans will turn into theoceanic equivalent of deserts as well. Coral reefs will disappear. The
apocalyptic catalogue goes on. We have two to three decades at most to
succeed in implementing the photosynthetic solution to climate change.
And succeed we must. It has been demonstrated through both scientificinvestigation and, even more crucially, through practical application all aroundthe world, that enhancing photosynthetic activity can both heal damaged
lands and waters, and, most importantly, contribute enormously to reversing
climate change. The work and the results described above give humanity

58

hope in the midst of an exponentially growing crisis where hope is in short
supply. The world has no choice but to apply these discoveries and methods
as fast as possible, and on as large a scale as possible, to make that hope areality. The alternative is grim beyond all imagining.

17

This assertion is based on a number of sources. One is the landmark work carried out by Dr.
Rattan Lal at Ohio State University. Based on a methodology he established to measure Soil
Organic Carbon (SOC) depletion, he has demonstrated that agricultural soils worldwide have lost
between 50 and 80% of their organic carbon. He has also by extension shown that re-sequestering
SOC can both restore degraded soils and, crucially, mitigate Global Warming, as laid out in thefollowing paper:
Global Potential of Soil Carbon Sequestration to Mitigate the Greenhouse EffectBy R. Lal (https://doi.org/10.1080/713610854)
It is crucial to note that Dr. Lal’s methodology for estimating SOC loss is limited to agriculturallands that were originally forest, and thus his estimates for the potential to mitigate global warming
are also far lower than the true potential of photosynthetic biosequestration of carbon whenrangelands, oceans, urban areas and forests themselves are collectively taken into account.
For oceanic loss to the atmosphere of organic carbon AND of atmospheric carbon biosequestration
capacity, my source is an article in the July 29, 2010 edition of Scientific American entitled“Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950” by Lauren Morello. A 40% of Oceanic
phytoplankton since 1950 is an enormous quantity!
For loss of SOC from rangeland (also described as drylands or grasslands) I have relied on widely
available data from the internet on the extent of desertification of those rangelands. Estimates vary
widely, but in every case, they are enormous and relentlessly ongoing, and my contention is that
this desertification has to be seen as a) a major source of carbon emissions to the atmosphere, and b)
an equally major loss in photosynthetic biosequestration capacity. In making these assertions here
and throughout this paper, I have also relied on the TED Talk and published work of Alan Savory,and on the reportage on activists at the front line of what has been termed the “Photosynthetic
Revolution” in “Cows Save the Planet” by Judith Schwartz, “The Soil will save us” by Kristin
Ohlson, and other similar publications.
Taken together, all these sources document a staggering loss of organic carbon to the atmospherefrom non-fossil-fuel sources, and point the way to a photosynthetic solution to Global Warming.
18

This assertion is backed in part by the following study:

Terrestrial Gross Carbon Dioxide Uptake: Global Distribution and Covariation with Climate
Beer et al.
This study “used a combination of observation and calculation to estimate that the total Gross
Primary Production (GPP) by terrestrial plants is around 122 billion tons per year: in comparison,
17
18

59
burning fossil fuels emits about 7 billion tons annually.” I took this fact, and calculating very
roughly, doubled those anthropogenic emissions to account for all the non-fossil-fuel emissions due
to land and ocean mismanagement (one of the major points in my article). Thus, I arrived at theconclusion that photosynthetic output by terrestrial plants alone moved approximately 9 times as
many carbon atoms as all anthropogenic emissions, and it moved them in the right direction:
sequestered in organic form. This leads to the assertion that by increasing photosynthetic production
by 10% we can offset ALL anthropogenic emissions. If we manage to increase photosynthetic
output by terrestrial plants alone by 20% we are well on our way to drawing down excess carbon in
the atmosphere and reversing Global Climate Change. If we include the activity of oceanic
phytoplankton and implement policies to restore oceanic phytoplankton levels, we can achieve thisgoal that much faster, and the section on Oceans discusses in some detail approaches to doing
exactly that.
19

As quoted in:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-04/kyoto-veterans-say-global-warming-goalslipping-away
20“Are We Falling Off the Climate Precipice”’ by Dahr Jamailhttps://oilprice.com/The-Environment/Global-Warming/Are-We-Falling-Off-the-ClimatePrecipice.html
Links providing sources to each item in the timeline included in the online article
21

Ibid.

Graph on Page 6: Graph from “The Siberian Traps and the End-Permian mass extinction: a critical review”
by Andy Saunders and Marc Reichow

Graph on Page 10: From: Global Changes in Drought conditions Under Different Levels of Warming” by
Gustavo Nauman, Lorenzo Alfieri et al. in Geophysical Research Letters, March 2018

Double graph on page 15: European Environment Agency (EEA) report No 12/2012
Climate Change, impacts and vulnerability, and quoted in Grist, Nov. 21, 2012:“The 16 scariest maps from the E.U.’s massive new climate change report” by Phillip Bump
22

Carve: The carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment, Charles E. Miller
Conference Paper, IEEE Aerospace conference Proceedings, March 2012
23

“Methane Hydrate: Killer cause of Earth’s greatest mass extinction” Uwe Brand, et. Al.
Palaeoworld, Volume 25, Issue 4, December 201624

Global potential of Soil Carbon Sequestration to Mitigate the Greenhouse Effect(https://doi.org/10.1080/713610854).

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by R. Lal

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Glomalin: Hiding place for a third of the world’s stored soil carbon
Wright, Sara F.; Nichols, Kristine Agricultural Research; Vol.50, Iss. 9 (Sep 2002)
26

See footnote no. 2 above

27

The United Nations Decade for Deserts (2010-2020) and the fight against Desertification
Quick Facts on Drylands, Deserts, Desertification and Land Degradation
https://www.unccd.int/sites/default/files/inlinefiles/Quick%20Facts%20on%20drylands%2C%20deserts%2C%20desertification%20and%20land%20degradation_0.pdf
28“Topsoil Erosion” Eric Verso, Stanford University
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph240/verso2/

29

Global Potential of Soil Carbon Sequestration to Mitigate the Greenhouse EffectBy R. Lal (https://doi.org/10.1080/713610854)

30

https://www.nrcs.usda.gov
1percentitemperature.pdf
31
Finance and Development, December2019, Vol 56, No 4
“Nature’s Solution to Climate Change”
Ralph Chami et. al.
https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/12/natures-solution-to-climate-changechami.htm
32

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“Diel Vertical Migration” by Andrew S. Brierley
Current Biology, Volume 24, Issue 22, November 17, 2014