Egg On Their Faces

I found my way to a site that claimed to have research on bio-char. They supposedly found that loss rates can be as high as sixty percent in their "test plots", with the majority being lost to runoff and a significant amount just blowing away. I personally have worked with char for about three years and I can imagine scenarios that might approach those numbers, but only an ignoramus would leave the char sitting on top of the soil, on a hill in a rainstorm, or try to top dress a windblown prairie that has had virtually all organic matter produced there removed from it for decades. The ultimate refutation of this "scholarly" work lies in the fact that 2,000+ year old fire pits are frequently nearly 100% intact and that the most easily recognized element in them is carbon. Human-sequestered carbon. In this age of anthropogenic climate change, looking to the options we have for removing carbon from the atmosphere, especially the simplest ways that require virtually no special equipment or heroic new technologies just makes too much sense for our oligarchs. They always want to overdo things.

It has recently come to light that some scholars are willing to doctor their research or tailor it to meet the requirements of big donors. This is not to call all science into question, but when you know what you are trying to describe, and how it is supposed to look, the mere thinking that you know what you are doing can have drastic consequences. Advancing human understanding is difficult enough when we bring to the table a huge number of assumptions, expectations and rules that have been established for centuries. Looking at the here and now often challenges us to let go of what we have been told.

There are several things that are terribly wrong with these pictures. I can only imagine that there are ulterior motives behind why giant corporations owned by multi-billionaires would want to prove that char does not work.

I received this picture of a page from a magazine from a friend, who is learning about using biochar and was interested to show me that the message is being echoed in the press and there was no credit given. (Please forgive my not having the name and issue number of the magazine it came from.) My presumption is that the image comes from National Geographic magazine because it is a thinly veiled advert for them, designed to sway the hearts and minds of casual viewers to believe that the institution, now owned by Mr. Murdoch and his Fox Entertainment Group Inc. has the best interests of Costa Ricans and tropical farmers in mind as they massage their public image. This information is intended to be used for educational purposes only. I am sharing it to hone to a fine point my concerns about the inhumanity of capital against humankind. Billionaires and corporations owned by nameless faceless corporate boards, like oil giant Shell or corporations owned by oligarchs from overseas, like Rupert Murdoch, want the World's population to see them as benevolent. Whether they are or not can only be determined by looking critically at their actions and the results of those actions.

The photos above raise more questions than they answer in that regard. Optimal sizes of biochar particles are 2mm or less, far smaller than the pieces being buried in the photo. Natural processes in the soil will never break down the relatively giant chunks of char that are being buried in the photo above. The char pieces pictured above will suck moisture out of the soil and keep it out of reach of the roots that char can benefit if used and prepared properly. Since the picture shows people adding raw char to the soil, they are creating a massive sink for nitrogen, which will deprive plants of that important nutrient as well. Trying to think like a microbe is difficult enough without letting industrial minded donors push our attempts to benefit humankind push short sighted use of appropriate technologies in inappropriate ways.

It is difficult enough to make positive change. Cooking the books and offering help that hurts only complicates the issues and makes adoption of appropriate technologies less likely to be adopted. I think that this sort of activity does more harm than good.

TLUD technology is an acronym for Top-lit, up-draft, which is a fairly simple way to drive off the volatile gasses from organic material while preserving the carbon that has been heated to a glow in an oxygen deprived atmosphere.

Courtesy of Dr. Paul Anderson of the Biochar Working Group in Seattle. Image helps explain how easily we can make char.

Biochar and the Five Principles

My pagan friends know the Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Spirit connection well. These forces and qualities permeate, entwine and give substance to all that surrounds us. All of these elemental forces are alive in soils as well. Biochar can help heal and nourish our environment, our soils, our cells, our selves and our spirits, but only when we take the time to honor the fundamental parts, the char itself and the life giving nutrients and minerals that we add to it with love. I have been part of this process since before time began and my ideas will continue to be passed along centuries after I have passed the veil. That is one of the things about charmaking that has become infinitely clear to me. Making it and using it allows one to step out of the human time scale and operate in th ename of and for the sake of thousands of generations into the future while honoring those equally far back in time as well.

The Earth, supreme mother and womb of all terrestrial life is the structure, the latticework upon which life thrives. The fundamental basis for biochar involves roasting organic cells to purify them, pyrolyze them down to nearly pure carbon. As you can easily see and understand, the roasting involves fire. During the actual roasting, it is important to deprive the char of air, otherwise you will be left with mineral ash only, the beginning of making lye. The black char acts as a structure upon which soil organisms thrive.

The Air comes later, once the char is heated to glowing hot (about 450 degrees) and left to cool, the char becomes highly absorbent and can be allowed to, should be allowed to breathe. Interestingly, the surface area of finished char is over fourteen acres per handful and the smaller the bits, the better. most experts recognize a maximum size of 2mm, or about the size of a grain of rice, but my work is finding that smaller seems to always be better. The smaller the particles, the more surface area that can later hold moisture and nutrients and to exchange gasses (air). All living things must breathe soil is no different. Healthier, deeper soils need air, so organisms living in them can exchange gasses.

Fire lends an energy to the char that lasts literally for many millennia, like clay, once fired is as permanent as rock. The cellular structure of the parent material is preserved as a microscopic network of tubules upon which life can thrive. We invest time, energy and thoughtfully prepared substances to the char to make soil faster than the Earth ever does. Our efforts are rewarded over immense periods of time. Doubled crop yields, half the need for irrigation and massive increases in CEC (Cation Exchange Capacity) at only 1% concentration is well documented. Adding this fired, microscopic sponge to soils changes their character for the better, forever.

Water, is part of the magic as well. Char holds 6X its own weight in water. Although char is extremely light, biochar is relatively heavy. Once ithas nutrients added, primarily with organic sources of nitrogen, and mineralized (typically with rock dust or other mineral-rich substances), it can hold even more moisture. Finally, when a safe and secure habitat is created upon the surfaces of the char, healthy soil microbes are introduced that will colonize and fill the char with microscopic life.

Finally, you ask, What about Spirit? This is the part that is most difficult to speak of. For me, after five years of making char, caring for soils and building my garden beds, I am only beginning to grasp the spiritual depth of my commitment. Giving our lives for our children or a cause only take us so far, but giving our life force to the healing of the soils upon which we grow our food, upon which future generations will grow their food, upon which forests rely and upon which future generations will make their way, now that is a profound gift.

We are stardust; with a brain

501(c)3 Status

Years ago, Eco-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. was established to further my tree planting hobby. I always loved to take people out into relatively wild areas, discuss a bit about what we were seeing, what the natural history of the area was and to teach by example, inviting their reciprocation. Our mission was to help them learn, to plant trees with them and to help heal the rift between humankind and nature. Ostensibly, I told myself, this was "our mission" at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin. As we developed, organically, we found our lessons to be more about soil regeneration. See, planting trees is not enough, you need healthy soil to have healthy trees. ECO-Tours always had very good survival rates, as long as we were in relatively healthy soils, but when clients asked us to plant on pure dirt, by the time we discussed what would be needed for trees to thrive, the landowner's eyes would glaze over.

When we assembled our bard and formally organized, we spent the majority of a full year of donations to hire a lawyer to help write up our articles of incorporation. Then, over the first year or so, we worked on filling in the many pages of forms for getting our Federal Non-profit Status. We finally got the whole package together and the entire thing came back to us with a notification that the information had to be in digital format and that only three companies were allowed to format it for the IRS. This is just the kind of sign that we here at ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. take seriously.
After calling these places and finding that we would have to sacrifice another year of donations to pay faraway people for the privilege of having tax exempt status, we felt that the powers that be were telling us to just back away. since that time, we have still been able to plant tens of thousands of plants and millions of seeds across Northeast Wisconsin, but we are getting more and more donations as well. Not for the tax break, not for a deduction, but because it is the right thing to do. We plant trees. We build soil, it is that simple.

Our efforts have remained HIP (my readers know I'm all about the acronyms) characterized by Honesty, Integrity & Passion. My becoming a charmaster was in part because of my relentless quest for increasing the soil building potential of our work. Without putting time, effort and money into our efforts, we would eventually become irrelevant. The microcosm that is ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. has organically grown in leaps and bounds, reaching more and more people over the years. Sometimes we have growth is people locally, at other times we get more response from people via digital means. Evolving into the future often requires breaking traditions that we didn't even know we had established. when we initially formed, our vision allowed us to have impact in a relatively small georaphic area, planting trees, mulching, composting, building fertility with a few dozen pairs of hands or less, to help on our tours, helping the Earth flourish by our passing.

Through digital means, I have taught four teachers in Africa how to build soils in their areas. I am being asked to provide many more classes for them and to teach what might eventually be hundreds of people in Africa to do what I am teaching here. It is amazing to think of thousands of people building soils every day, not just when they are on tour with me! If, one day, an ultrawealthy donor wants us to get that 501(c)3, I'm not sure that it would ever be worth as much as realizing that the entire world is going to be turning a corner here, real quick, and those I have been teaching, for over a decade now, will be better off for having learned to heal the Earth and that in response, it will heal you. When I started this Odyssey, I did not expect to have herbal healing classes become part of our ECO-Tours, nor did I think that we would have people from around the world on board so quickly. You see, I had been preaching this for twenty five years already, but only recently has it all seemed to catch the mainstream awareness. Each new person needs to become adept at seeing the ecological consequences of every action, something bioneers like myself have known implicitly for decades.

Sometimes, deciding what might be relevant to newbies becomes hard. In my own world view, many things I have learned have become so deeply understood that I would hardly know where to begin. The pranayama, (breathing) exercises that I learned while going to Middle School, The experience of laying roots into contact with the Earth in ways that will make them happy, restoring biodiversity within the soil itself are all things that have become integrated on a cellular level into who I am. Some people will only learn these things by doing, others by hearing about it, others through reading, still others will only know it when all the sounds and smells of tools and roots in the Earth lodge in their nasal passages aural canals and brain. However we learn is our style, our superpower if you will, but how we forget is sublime. It can be our undoing. Imagine getting deeply into the subject of natural history and the abundance of certain foods native to your area, before learning that all foods, even wild foods can concentrate toxic chemicals as well as nutrients. Or learning that introduction of non-native plants can be bad for native species and habitat, after having learned to like exotic species.

ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. will be sponsoring all of my campaign appearances. In fact, I will be taking this opportunity to speak to as many people as possible in Wisconsin's 8th District

This is the region that is covered by the seat that i am running for. This area pretty nearly covers all of what we call, Northeast Wisconsin

A At each of my campaign stops I will be teaching local people how to make and use biochar. Through all 10 and 1/3 Counties. This way, even if i were to lose, they would be able to heal soils in their areas. When I win, there will be places we can point to to show others what will flourish under our care!

Oh, and Happy Solstice! (the real reason for the season)

...from somewhere near the far right boob area, Northeast Wisconsin East River Valley Estuary.
May Grace dwell in your soul. Not just this holy day season, but throughout the coming year!
Thanks for reading my stuff! Blessed Be! Namaste'. Ubuntu.

Four Families Moved Away

I met some people the other day who were dead set against having wind turbines anywhere. Especially anywhere they would have to see them. They claimed that four families had moved away in response to wind turbines going up in their area. What they claimed that they do was a collection of things that I wanted to understand. There must be some sort of cohesive understanding of what these ideas are based on, right? How they "learned" these things only becomes important when you begin to understand how much money, time and effort have been put into studying and teaching these false claims to others. One of their claims is that turbines are getting louder. I am hearing/feeling the throbbing of our local coal fired electric generating station four and a half miles away. But to be fair, it produces more power than 200 wind spinners. Using machines to do work is not quiet by any means. These people also said that all the turbines interconnected so that when one went down, or stopped running all of them stop producing power. The most interesting complaint was that if enough turbines are put up, it will slow the Earth's rotation, lengthening days, reducing gravitational forces and creating climate change. These extremely strong-headed folks also made an outrageous claim that each turbine gets what they claimed to be an $11,000 subsidy each year just for being there. So I went out, trying to find out if any of it was true.

I hate taking the word of others only because I have been burned by doing so in the past. I try to be impeccable with my word, but to do so means not accepting the claims of others until the facts behind them are understood. Sometimes, even the motivations of those speaking need to be taken into consideration before one can understand their claims completely. It seems that virtually none of what these folks had to say was based on fact, however, as fervent as they were, it is hard to envision a process by which they could be educated out of their delusion.

What I found was, that there is a subsidy that was set in 1992 at one point five cents per kilowatt produced. (that number has been annually adjusted for inflation.) To get a thousand dollars each month, you would be producing 100,000 Kw. Aka 100 megawatts (mw). I went on to study even more critically, trying to find out where he got that number. For perspective, the Pulliam power station, which sits at the mouth of the Fox River, the main tributary feeding into Green Bay produces 350-375 mw, but it does so continuously, nearly without stop. It seems that if the wind towers are producing 1.6 megawatts, each, which would lead to the subsidy being in that 10-11,000 dollar range, It would take over 200 wind turbines to equal the output of our nearby coal-fired power generating station and they would have to spin 24/7/365. Wind is intermittent and I frequently see whole groups of turbines sitting idle. When I began to understand the meaning of this, virtually all of the other claims became questionable at best.

First, noise is the result of inefficiency, the wind turbines that I have sat under and walked around are quiet, very quiet. In fact, that is part of why they seem so beautifully elegant to me. The quieter they are, the more efficient they are and the owners know this and have a vested interest in running them as efficiently as possible, especially if their subsidy is based on their production of energy. The fact is that turbines have actually gotten quieter, to harness as much energy from the wind as possible.

Even in the most blustery conditions, it seems that on the large wind farms there are one or two turbines that are not spinning.  There would be no point in running all of the others if a single stopped turbine was taking all the energy produced by the others away. Considering the costs of putting even a single tower up, running them this way would not be worth the subsidy. I'm not an expert, but these machines are smart now, if they are not running efficiently, the things stop themselves, which occasionally requires power, but broken down ones mean jobs, for real people, like me, not a guy blasting away at a mountain or setting explosives deep in a mine, technicians at turbines are high tech versions of me and probably get far better wages than either me or coal miners. Good jobs. I have lived in the Coal Region of PA and can attest to the death, destruction, desperation, misogyny and mayhem that boom-bust economies foster. Turbine technicians, on the other hand, could sleep in their own beds at night if we had wind farms abundantly in windy areas. The economies of scale are making wind far cheaper to install than coal or even natural gas generating facilities. I'm not a technocrat, but conservative thinkers should all agree that fossil energy will only exacerbate climate change. I have a ticker on one of the blogs I follow that shows a graph of how many Hiroshima bombs of energy have been released to the atmosphere since 1970. Over four billion four hundred million and counting. http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/  Reviewing now, so forgive me, each of the 400 million is a thousand thousands. The billions are thousands of millions...Take your time, think it through. Four thousands of millions. We all saw the pictures of the sorts of clouds and energy released when that amount of energy happens all at once, but when it happens slowly over time from many areas of the globe, the way we release it, from millions of discreet, often mobile sources spreads the release over millions of discreet environments. Wherever humans congregate, releasing their BTUs near others, giant invisible high pressure ridges build up over the cities, roads and towns, which in turn act like invisible mountain ranges. Expanding air is the result of burning. I have seen these effects since the early eighties and continue to see them get more pronounced and more pronounced over the last thirty years. I have even seen repeated events where this high pressure ridge actually gets sandwiched under colder, dense air for days on end, stagnating and picking up the pollution released over several days into a giant bolus of nasty air, before "fresh" air blows the nauseating bolus somewhere else. This is the result of fossil energy and renewable energy gets extra points with me on this fact alone.

The idea of slowing earth's rotation is actually pretty funny on the face of it, but I had to look into the energy available, the relative amounts of energy in natural phenomena and the affect that wind has on keeping the Earth spinning and the more I understood, the more ludicrous the claim becomes. A single hurricane  contains more energy than humans use in a year. But even if we lined the entire coast with wind turbines, and somehow all the turbines took a direct hit from the storm, we would not reap even 1% of the energy that one of these storms contain. I also discovered that winds don't effect the spin of the Earth much at all. The winds are more likely affected by the rotation of the Earth more.

My most recent theory is that the four families that moved away were just able to use the wind farms and turbines as a timely excuse. Anyone keeping up on the lives of farm families knows that they are under extreme stress already, mostly stemming from their reliance on fossil energy and one more thing to worry about is often just enough to push them over the edge. Restless sleep, exhaustion and the host of supposed medical problems that farmers are attributing to the turbines is much more likely to be from chemical exposure, contaminated wells and/or financial stress than the nearby wind turbines. In fact, many people prefer to sleep with white noise in the room.

Ironically, we have had more than four families leave our neighborhood in the past year and the closest wind turbine is more than a dozen miles away. Crushing debt burdens, homes and farms that are financially under water and having to pay more for flood insurance to cover the increasing claims, primarily from uberwealthy home owners on the coasts, are more to blame in my neighborhood for the hollowing out of our community than wind spinners. Heck, even the crippled job market and the policies of our horrible slate of currently "serving" Teathuglican operatives in Wisconsin politics has more to do with people moving away than wind turbines. We need to look hard at why so much is going into the process of misinforming well meaning people. Oddly enough, the ultrawealthy are spending more to try to stop wind towers from going up than the industry spends on building them.

We have a problem Houston... 

Nine Intrepid Fans

ECO-Tours has put out the call for help from our followers, our tribe as it were. We are wordsmithing and redesigning a flyer and would like trusted eyes to see what they would change/improve. Your suggestions will be humbly accepted and as we embark on our next journey, we will be able to connect with more people, the better our materials are, so those who choose to join us in this task, consider yourself thanked in advance!

We can offer to either e-mail you a PDF format copy or send hard copy if you prefer the feel of paper in your hands. The draft we have is pretty rough, so don't be afraid to tear it apart or completyely start over. We need a clear, concise way to encourage readers to host classes and/or enough information to inspire them to become students.

At a cost of $35, the value is many times higher! Every bed that I have added biochar to has yielded double the harvests! What I am going to offer, only through this blog is that our helpers on the flyer project become eligible for a half off the baker's dozen special, instead of getting a free class with a dozen paid students, you can get the free class with only six paid students! Half the work for the host, twice the time to practice your technique!

Twelve sided structure encloses maximum space with minimum of material.

It is well to realize that the current conditions exist because we humans, or our ancestors, did something in the past. We humans made the decision to set ourselves at odds with nature, or outright against her. Mother Earth is beyond our ability to quantify, so the raping of the planet is beyond our comprehension. The living planet presents far too many relationships to keep track of all of, so we may never understand the depth of our damage. It does not take any great stretch of the imagination to understand that the dust bowl days blew away nearly all the humus on the Great Plains. Precious soil that mother Nature builds at the rate of only one inch every ten thousand years. It left. There were reports of ships having great storms of dust 300 miles out at sea, where after the storm, they would have to sweep dirt and mud off the hull. Those soils were lost from Kansas, Oklahoma, and a dozen other western states, remnants of those soils may still be settling to the bottom. More important for this post, they never came back. Using biochar, and aggressive composting, we can build soils at thousands of times the rate that nature would, but when we do, it is best to do it in raised bed situations where footfalls can be eliminated. soil, especially healthy soil, has air in it, any footfall or traffic can compact the ground, leading to less healthy conditions.

Another secret to maximizing soil creation is mulch. In addition to keeping soils well composted, mulch helps keep ultraviolet rays from the Sun from sterilizing the soil  surface. Intact mulch helps to preserve soil organisms that help moderate conditions and whose waste products are important parts of the soil biome. It may seem out of place, to include a picture of the earthship (dodecagon) design, but it helps to imagine the microbial landscape as well. Even the tiniest organisms reflect the compact shape...conditions can be menacing, so they expend as little on outside as possible to contain and protect their vital protoplasm and structures. Like us, microbes are over 2/3 water and they too help to stabilize soil temperatures and moisture. Sheer mass of microbes in healthy soil equals about the combined weight of a cow and her calf, per acre! Biochar has fourteen acres of surface area per handful. Slowly, let those two ideas merge and play in your mind for a while. Fourteen acres of surface area. If that amount of area were to be colonized with as many microbes as healthy soil contains, it is like adding a mass of microbe to the soil equivalent in mass to fourteen cows and fourteen calves. These microscopic plants and creatures metabolize carbohydrates, fats, protein, etc, creating heat and  exchange gasses, just like we do. I have a few beds that have had biochar added at a rate of one kilo per cubic meter (2.2 pounds to 1.2 sq. yards.) and these soils always produce an extra two weeks in fall, freeze up as much as one moon later and in sporing are ready to go that much earlier in Spring because the microbial community is thriving in them. They thaw out sooner and are ready to plant a few weeks sooner than similar untreated areas.

Getting these concepts encapsulated in just a few words is the main mission of this effort. If we could get the thrust of the message down to just nine words, or less, which ones would they be? Reverse atmospheric carbon one fire at a time? Begin sequestering carbon today? Roast wood for posterity? What do you think would motivate people the best?

Recovery Park Farms

There is a plan and a movement in Detroit that will be transforming a small part of the city into one of the largest urban farms in America. Eco-Tours has offered to teach their lead people and a core group of their employees. This project envisions transforming a large urban parcel, 60 acres, into a food production, and distribution center as well as a community resource for the urban Renaissance of one of our nation's most blighted cities.

ECO-Tours has reached out to Recovery Park Farms and plans to present our biochar classes for them before planting begins in the Spring. If you would like to sponsor a class, let us know and we can make arrangements.