Orion Magazine - March/April 2009

have found streaks of this dark earth, or in Portuguese terra preta, in the soil; the locals may have figured out the technology as many as seven thousand years ago.) Sitting there doing nothing for a very long time is an attractive idea all of a sudden—the technical term would be that the carbon that originally was in those weeds and stalks and sticks is now “sequestered” underground.

If you could continually turn a lot of organic material into biochar, you could, over time, reverse the history of the last two hundred years. During those two centuries we’ve taken millions of years of compressed organic material— weeds and sticks and dinosaurs and plankton— and drilled and mined them up to the surface so we could burn them. All that ancient biomass is now up in the atmosphere, causing problems. Big problems, like melting the ice caps. The biggest problems ever. In fact, scientists last year told us that we already had way too much CO2 in the air—387 parts per million, when 350 ppm was the maximum safe load. So we’re not only going to have to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere (shut down coal mines, park cars, learn to use solar panels). We’re also going to have to take some out. As fast as we can.

Biochar may be the first really good way we’ve hit on to start scrubbing the atmosphere. Like all plants, the weeds and stalks and such will suck the CO2 out of the air; if we just left them to decay,

they’d eventually release all that carbon back into the atmosphere. But this way we’ll capture it and store it safely in the soil, where it can’t contribute to global warming. Larger-scale tests will get underway this year in both Britain and Belize—with luck they’ll find that the process can be commercialized. One of its

appeals, though, is that it probably can’t be over-commercialized. Almost by definition, it will work best to have many medium-sized burners instead of a few giant ones, because it will be much cheaper not to have to transport the weeds and stalks great distances before you burn them. In fact, some

aficionados have proposed mobile systems—consider, say, the utterly devastated forests of Colorado or British Columbia, where pine bark beetles basking in the newfound warmth have killed o= millions of acres of trees. You could have truck-mounted pyrolysis units that roam the forest roads, turning some of the trees into char and using it to replenish those soils. So maybe not ExxonMobil. Maybe Jim’s Bio-Burn.

Another appeal of biochar, oddly, is that it won’t save the planet, not by itself. Proponents say that, realistically, an all-out e=ort might deal with 10 percent of the carbon we pour into the atmosphere. It’s not going to change the need to change our ways. But it will help slow down the careening pace of the heating. More than that, it will give us a new way to understand our story—that’s what I mean by it being metaphorically sound. We can, literally, start sucking some of the carbon that our predecessors have poured into the atmosphere down through our weeds and stalks and stick it back in the ground. We can run the movie backward. We can unmine some of the coal, undrill some of the oil. We can take at least pieces of the