Thanks Ryan, for writing this piece. I think it's a great example of how local communities, regardless of whether they're in Costa Rica or Pakistan or Akron, Ohio, can create a synergy of positive effects by building local energy self-sufficiency, local environmental preservation, and community networks. And, as you point out, if these systems are local, if they are economically viable without outside subsidy, they aren't waiting for centralized governments or captains of industry to voluntarily get their act together--something I'm certainly not holding my breath waiting for.

And while I'm busy taking a 50 lbs propane tank and combining it with 2 hot water heaters to make a natural gas/biochar/waterheater configuration ....

(and if I was ambitious I'd use http://www.sredmond.com/vthr_index.htm ideas as the heat source - right now I'll just use the natural gas along with a weight sensor and call the char char'ed based on delta weight over time)

Does anyone know if Dr. Inghram has changed her position on Biochar?

Not only methanol but waste vegetable oil really requires the fossil fuel economy to maintain a cheap supply. The WVO could be a byproduct from crops like corn, soy or canola some grown in cool climates and transported great distances. Petrodiesel machines were most likely also needed to harvest the crops which were crushed with coal fired electricity and grown with fertiliser made from natural gas. I doubt if biodiesel is viable without the fossil fuel economy.

With biochar I'd guess you are depleting several square metres of forest floor for every square metre of garden that gets the benefit. In the charring process you produce a sudden CO2 surge that might have taken decades just left alone. You are also removing phosphorus and potassium from the forest nutrient cycle. Hopefully no petro powered vehicles were used in the harvesting of the leaf litter and taking charcoal to the garden. All this needs to be tested with careful life cycle analysis.

I've come to these conclusions after years of making biodiesel and putting wood charcoal on the garden. I'll keep doing it though because I have free WVO and firewood. In my opinion they will always be cottage industries. Our energy future lies in nuclear and unsubsidised renewables.

"With biochar I'd guess you are depleting several square metres of forest floor for every square metre of garden that gets the benefit."

no. we collect biomass that has already fallen (sticks, leaves, etc) and would be returned to active carbon cycling. i am also interested in applying biochar to restore urban wastelands in the cities here - the idea is sort of like guerrilla gardening - clean up a trashed, abandoned place in a city like san jose, use biochar and compost to help the soil and then plant native trees and fruits for homeless people to eat. please let me know if there are any technical objections to this - after being robbed (as have many other scientists here in CR) and forced to basically live in the gutters and random sustainable farms as a volunteer for almost a year i have a very strong interest in restoring urban areas and giving homeless/hungry persons food and plants that they can eat. there was this one time when i spent the night on the streets of granada, nicaragua alone and this crackhead tried to bum money off me - so i bought him beer and food and we talked about anastasio somoza and the sandanistas until the sun rose. he kept trying to get me to buy him crack cocaine, which he called "cracks" or "papas" (spanish for potatoes) but i just kept him talking and we drank beer and he didn't smoke any "cracks" that night. i wonder if i offset any emissions from him not smoking crack or if the methane from the beer farts contributed more to climate change.

what do you think?

"In the charring process you produce a sudden CO2 surge that might have taken decades just left alone. You are also removing phosphorus and potassium from the forest nutrient cycle."

if the biochar processor is run correctly, from my understanding based on the science evidence, the overall effect is carbon negative. the effectiveness depends on the design of the processor. i tend to collect biomass that has fallen not in the forests, but on the property of the ecohostels where there are driveways and rocks. i use compost from the restaurant here to help add nutrients back to the biochar and soils, as well as a mixture of human urine in about a 1 to 10 ration with water. the plants love it!

"Hopefully no petro powered vehicles were used in the harvesting of the leaf litter and taking charcoal to the garden. All this needs to be tested with careful life cycle analysis."

i have a bike. its blue. i ride my bike between the flutterby house and rancho diandrew and make biochar and garden. let me know if you would like to help with that "careful life cycle analysis, kay? until then im going to base my info on james lovelock, the international geosphere-biosphere programme and the overall scientific opinion of the effects of biochar.

"This structurally demands continual growth, and is the real root cause of our problems..."

exactly. solving the problem of growth generating societies is of utmost and immediate importance: speaking of which, i have to go take a break from the discussion now - we are going on a short night hike - i could've sworn i heard a bird that sang out "Karuna!"

;)

thanks jeff!

I am involved in a community project as well. After doing 10 years of agricultural / agrotourism / community projects in "developing" countries, I decided to stay at home and help my "own community" (France). Between brackets, cause I still haven't defined what IS exactly my own community :-) Anyway, one of the projects we run here is about another soil ammendment: chipped wood branches. I have written before about it, and sorry to seem a bit pushy about it, but it need to be said that at least in temperate regions this wood chips solution to improve and protect soils is more performative, logical, (CO2)efficient, etc.
The reason why biochar is so performative in tropical countries, is because of its resistence against decomposition. Rapid decomposition ("burning" of organic material in the soil) is a major element of soil management in the tropics. Minerals are made available rapidly, and unprotected soils will loose their fertility in no time. Hence the difficulties of Organic agriculture who is dependent on organic fertilisation. Although less spectacular, in temperate regions there are the same problems, soil organic matter is in decline in practically all agricultural soils. Because of it liginine content, the ramial wood chips (RWC) can only be decomposed by funghi. In forest soils, funghi are the base of the food pyramide. By adding wood to the soils, you are basically giving an enormous energy supply to the soil for life. Biochar gives a good shelter, but no energy.

Have a look to a good english introduction to RWC: http://www.hydrogeochem.qc.ca/brf/ramial_chipped_wood_2007_11_27.pdf

RWC has also been tested in some African countries with good results.
For the moment chips is a by-product of park / woods / orchard maintenance.
But the good news is that it can also be a self-sufficient system, by allowing trees to grow on your agricultural land (agroforestry). But this is again a whole other story :-)

"My" community project: http://www.rebelfarmer.org/2/post/2009/11/new-project-of-rebelfarmer-woo...

It is advisable to consume ethanol while operating a greasercycle to ward off methanol poisoning from methanol vapors which inevitably escape from such a high-tech piece of equipment. Biochar can be made from fallen debris or from the aftermath of a forest fire.

Jeff - "This structurally demands continual growth, and is the real root cause of our problems..."

the problem of growth is the most fascinating element out all this - regardless of the type of fuels we use a technologically advanced human superorganism would inevitably overextend/pollute/destroy the earth system without a widespread and profound shift in consciousness. solving the seemingly hard-wired behaviors of the majority of humans i think will require exploring the ideas of the mutants and outliers -memetics, conscious evolution, and sociocultural engineering - we will have to sort of a means to transcend civilized consciousness. in his book "on human nature" famed biologist eo wilson suggests that we will require genetic engineering in order to overcome the Pleistocene-wired instincts that lead us into self-destruction... the book was published in the late 70's and since then i think the understanding of memetics has provided much more potential for rapidly reshaping human culture than genetic engineering.

i think the one of the greatest benefits of reflective consciousness is that we can play out (relatively accurate) stories of what will happen to human populations as fossil fuel decline, rapid climate change,increasing population, pollution, etc ("global change") hit the world with increasingly devastating jolts to economy and environment (which are inextricably linked). but if we play out the story of the future based solely on what has happened before in the history of civilizational collapse we become limited and fall into the same patterns that have kept us rebuilding hierarchies after collapses... some of us that are most emotionally receptive to social pressure and the need for cultural change tend to fall into the position of the "revolutionary/prophet" character... when times get tough the social group turns to the revolutionary for an alternative means to provide necessities to the group as well as a new group cohesion - new values, standards, etc. revolutionaries will have to avoid assuming hierarchy and manipulating the desperate masses to follow one leader, or one movement. the process reminds of the lyrics from the song "Eulogy," which mock the revolutionary/prophet character:
"Ranting and pointing his finger
At everything but his heart.
We'll miss him.
We'll miss him.
We're gonna miss him.
We're gonna miss him.

No way to recall
What it was that you had said to me,
Like I care at all.

But you were so loud.
You sure could yell.
You took a stand on every little thing
And so loud.

Standing above the crowd,
He had a voice that was strong and loud and I
Swallowed his facade cuz I'm so
Eager to identify with
Someone above the ground,
Someone who seemed to feel the same,
Someone prepared to lead the way, with
Someone who would die for me."

interesting...

so how can you pause the desire for growth and material consumption by the developed world?

as Huxley says in Island,

"Don’t look analytically. Don’t look as a scientist or even as a gardener. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labeling, judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery; breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of wisdom from the other shore."

science and industrial society have whittled down our receptivity and biophilia so that we can function as cogs in the system. we are now facing the consequences of a world culture driven by an incomplete consciousness...

hey Jeff – I will wager a beer (hopefully something from the Wynkoop’s brewery again) that within the next 0-10 years the combined pressures of global change (peak oil is nothing compared to the economic systems disruptions that will be delivered by global change) will drive a overall shift in power from nation-states to rhizome/resilient communities. Sounds kinda vague and hard to quantify, but basically the environmental destruction caused by runaway climate change (scientists were about 100 years off on the severity due to their inabilities to fully model climate as well as the social cohesion effects of the hierarchy (groups like the IPCC and IGBP are unable to articulate how bad things are because the leap in conscious evolution has not yet occurred – we still act like the majority of Milgram’s test subjects or the subjects of Solomon Asch’s conformity tests – we dismiss the radical views even if they are by our most revered and pocket-protected scientists (James Lovelock, Jim Hansen…).

Due to the interconnectedness of global society/economy, however, increasing global change disasters of the coming decade will delegitimize states much faster than global “terrorism”. The climate events will be, of course, coupled to an increasingly organizing and unifying global social/environmental justice movement seeking to live in autonomously and locally beneath failing states. The ideological connectivity shared by these nodes will create incredible global networks, uniting everyone from hackers to organic gardeners, from international science organizations to grassroots environmental movements, and even perhaps from “radical” environmentalists to former US military intelligence officers. ;)

Oh, and a new level of warfare (5th Gen war) will eclipse the power structures created by 4th Gen conflicts – think of it like this – those who are “enlightened” as to the biological and sociocultural forces that control mass perception (see Bloom’s Lucifer Principle…) will learn to use the media for sort of “Tool” of memetic apoptosis – the programmed cell death of maladaptive units of the human social superorganism. The effectiveness of this sort of warfare would, of course, depend on consciousness of the agents in the complex adaptive systems and environmental feedbacks. At the same time as the understanding/acceptance of conscious evolutionary theory is used a “Tool” of warfare, it will also be restorative: think back to some of our discussion on emergence on your blog – suicide is enabled by subjective consciousness and disabled by pure enlightenment beyond the ego – how, after all, could a "self" that perceives "itself" as within part of an eternal system kill "itself"?

Lind has it wrong on his conception of 5th GW, but as he says, “One simple test for whether or not something constitutes a generational shift is that, absent a vast disparity in size, an army from a previous generation cannot beat a force from the new generation.”

...I sure hope you come down to CR sometime and check out the army ants - from the right distance they look just like anarchists…

Si vis pacem parabellum

Rebel farmer –
“I decided to stay at home and help my "own community" (France). Between brackets, cause I still haven't defined what IS exactly my own community :-)” yeah, I know exactly how you feel. It was so strange and difficult to present the initial biodiesel project in Monteverde, which had been my “community” for many years before I began trying to get people off fossil fuel. Most people are so accustomed to having their resources – food, energy, so on… - provided by a big company, all packaged with impressive and shiny logos – they aren’t generally receptive to a random person offering to put alternative fuel in their precious automobiles. I will have to spend some time checking onto the RMC info – thanks for the links. From my research biochar seems most appropriate here in the tropics. The soils tend to be highly weathered and acidic – biochar amended with compost tea has been working great for our plants when we amend even the crummy clay oxisols. What I am really excited about is an extension of the biochar and gardens we have started at the Flutterby house and Rancho DiAndrew with a system using biochar to absorb agricultural pollution runoff from big farms and test it in plots compared to non amended biochar soils. None of what we have done so far has gone widespread by any means, but it feels like it really catches the attention of visitors and travelers to see that the business owners here are working with weird, ranting science geeks like on environmental projects. It is crucial to have that sense of community of like-minded folks – even if they are not in your immediate locale – the internet gives us the connectivity to share and discuss all our efforts.
Oh…. I guess I should’ve mentioned “I” am “ryan”– I chose the login w farnaby as a reference to a story I once read…
Reb farmer and others who may be interested – I have also written for www.mongabay.com, (search the site for Ryan king) and write environmental news for the Costa Rican journal “Dominical Days.” I am focusing much of my reading and writing on ant-civilization and post-industrial philosophy… im not a primitivist, though, I am convinced that the theory of conscious evolution proposed by Julian Jaynes in his “Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” indicates that we will (or already are!) to experience a profound, rapid, and emergent sort of level of socialization which will allow for rhizome/anarchist/resilient communities/autonomous groups to become empowered and independent of all states and corporations in a sort of desperate last-minute (and successful, of course!) attempt to adapt to what industrial civilization has done to the planet.

regarding the humans, EO Wilson explains:

"The first dilemma, in a word is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature. It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and material crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But then what? Educated people everywhere believe that beyond material needs lie fulfillment and realization of human potential. But what is fulfillment, and to what ends may potential be realized?"

any thoughts?

some folks are fascinated with the idea of humankind "going into outer space." from my understanding we already are in outer space living on a materially-limited and sensitive planetary system we tend to call "earth." perhaps the next frontier will be for us to go back into the places "we" the "civilized" world "developed" and restore them with education and environmental/social aid...