Small Change Bill McKibben
PLANTS SUCK
Carbon, that is, which is good news for us and the planet
A
fair amount of my mail—
electronic, conventional—comes
from people who Know that they
have The Answer to our environmental
woes. The Answer varies from year to
year—I’ve been doing this long enough to
remember cold fusion—but never the
tone of Absolute Certainty that their proj-
ect (hydrogen! flywheels! nuclear power!),
and theirs alone, will prevent global
warming and put this planet back on its
proper course. Often there’s a hint (well,
a Confident Accusation) that anyone who
doesn’t agree is part of the conspiracy
designed to shield the public from The
Truth. (There’s also a subset of people
who know the true identity of The
Problem—often, in their minds, popula-
tion growth—and are convinced that
anyone who doesn’t absolutely and imme-
diately agree is being Politically Correct.)
I never know what to do with such correspondence. On the one hand, I admire
people who step forth strongly in a crisis
and attempt to o=er a solution. I’m more
of a ditherer, better at analysis than action.
On the other hand, Capital Letters frighten
me. After twenty years of studying climate
change, if I’m sure of anything, it’s that
there’s no one fix that will save the world.
The problem is our world—the one we’ve
built in two hundred years of burning fossil fuel—which at least in its a<uent
precincts is based entirely on filling the
atmosphere with carbon. It’s so big a problem that we need to change just about
everything—from technology to behavior
to our sense that the economy must keep
growing. And so to almost any monothe-ist, I’m a heretic.
About a year ago I began getting Capital
Letter letters from people advocating a new
technology called biochar. Actually, not a
new technology, as these letter writers
invariably pointed out, but one that had
You put it in a pyrolysis unit, which might
be, say, a fifty-gallon drum. You leave just
a little opening for smoke to escape, and
you burn it. Or rather, you smolder it—
there’s very little oxygen getting in because
the smoke is streaming out the small hole
you left. And so it’s slowly combusting
until you have a piece of char left. Ten
pounds of weeds and sticks gives you
about three pounds of this char. In the
process of burning it, you’re producing
If you could continually turn organic material into biochar,
you could reverse the history of the last two hundred years.
been pioneered by South American rainforest dwellers A Very Long Time Ago.
Anyway, it was “a miracle to save the
planet,” etc. So, naturally, I paid them scant
attention. But over the months, more and
more people whose judgment I believe to
be sound—the Australian scientist Tim
Flannery, the NASA scientist James
Hansen—have started talking about the
technology in terms that made me curious.
I’m no expert—I can’t tell you for sure if it’s
technologically workable on a large scale.
But—and this is important—it’s metaphorically sound. I have to take other people’s
word that it works as a physical device. But
as a literary device, it’s the best thing yet.
Simple explanation: you take something like grass or weeds or twigs or stalks.
energy—gas that can be burned, and,
depending on the temperature, some bio-oil. But the energy, while useful and cost-e=ective, is almost a byproduct. Because
what you’re after most of all is the char. It’s
a fine-grained black powder, which you dig
into the soil.
Once in the soil, it performs a number
of useful tricks. It makes the soil healthier—allows it to retain much more water,
for instance. And it apparently stimulates
the growth of fungi and bacteria, which,
remember, are good things if they’re in
the earth. But most of all it does nothing.
It just sits there. For a very, very long
time—thousands of years, anyway.
(Archaeologists working in the ruins of
Amazonian slash-and-burn settlements
