Customer Reviews

The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility (Schumacher Briefings)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was attracted to this little book for two reasons: 1) "biochar" is apparently the same thing as the "terra preta" (dark fertile soil) found near the Amazon River and attributed to a now-disappeared civilization which created it, and I wanted to know more about how they did it, and 2) because the book postulates that use of biochar is supposed to help reduce global warming, and I'd like to know how it does that. These are complicated issues; the book deals with the creation and effects of biochar, but the author's main agenda seems to be around rethinking the current initiatives (such as those in the Kyoto agreement) that various nations are undertaking to contain global warming. Biochar, he says, has a role to play, but it is only a part of a larger solution to a fairly desperate crisis facing humanity.

Biochar, for those who don't know, is created from organic material that is burned into charcoal (using a process called pyrolysis). The "terra preta" discovered in the Amazon jungle is black because it contains a large amount of charcoal. The theory is that the ancient people who once lived in the region discovered a way to add charcoal to the soil, and this gave them a very fertile, productive soil that supported a large population and, amazingly, that soil is still there and still fertile. What happened to the people who created it? The best theory is that they were all but wiped out by a pandemic brought by Europeans.

The same fate (the being wiped out part) may face many more populations across the globe if nations don't begin to act more forcefuly on global warming. But what should they be doing? How does biochar fit into this scenario? Biochar, as we know from the example of the terra preta, can enrich the soil and keep it fertile for long periods. That would benefit the world through production of more food without soil-degrading and energy-consuming chemical fertilizers. But the real payoff (if I understand the author's point) is that biochar mixed into soil basically sequesters carbon, taking it out of the atmosphere. This is a good thing to do and has the effect of reducing carbon emissions that cause global warming. So far so good.

But the author also discusses current ways of counting carbon that use market mechanisms for buying and selling "carbon credits" and are supposed to provide incentives for nations and their citizens to use less carbon. But, that often doesn't happen. The author clearly does not think market forces can ever solve the problem of global warming. He says that small farmers the world over are the main producers of food, and most of them do not even operate in the global market. He thinks their main motivation for using biochar is not going to have anything to do with buying and selling carbon credits, but will simply come from the better production of food they will get by incorporating biochar into their soil.

The book makes many interesting points, but the author seems to wander all over and I got to the end still scratching my head trying to figure out what I had really learned here. Yes, I do know more about biochar than I did before reading this, so I guess from that standpoint the book succeeded. I didn't learn anything new about the people who created the terra preta, but I can't help but think about how their civilization disappeared back into the jungle. Could that also be the fate of our current global economy? When it comes to the big picture of what my country (USA) and other countries should be doing to avert a coming disaster from global warming, I admit that I am still confused.

However, I'd love to get my hands on some biochar or find a way to make some out of my yard wastes so I can improve the yield of my little backyard garden. I live in a place where the soil is basically sand, and I fight a constant battle to improve the soil enough to grow some tomato and cucumber plants. Clearly, the author had a larger purpose in this "briefing" book, but he DID convince me that biochar could help me and everyone else grow more of our own food, without resorting to chemical fertilizers, which he points out, actually deplete the soil. Perhaps millions of people with backyard gardens could make a difference. Or maybe not. Maybe we're all facing Armageddon over global warming, and there's not much any one of us can do about it. I just don't know.

"The Biochar Debate' by James Bruges is a primer about one of the few known solutions to not just alleviating, but reversing the effects of global warming. In this informative book, Mr. Bruges positions biochar as an earth-friendly response to an urgent environmental challenge imposed upon nature by industrial capitalism. Written with clarity, passion and purpose, Mr. Bruges encourages us to support biochar as an integral part of a strategy that puts people before corporate profits.

Mr. Bruges provides an overall view of global warming, making clear that the planet is well on its way towards becoming inhospitable to human civilization. Mr. Bruges briefly recounts how biochar was used successfully by generations of farmers in the Amazon to improve soil fertility, musing how biochar might help resuscitate soils that have been depleted by industrial agriculture. Indeed, he provides compelling case studies that demonstrate how biochar is used today by growers around the world to achieve better yields at lower cost. The author goes on to discuss the science of how biochar absorbs greenhouse gases and provides estimates on how much biochar might need to be produced to achieve meaningful results, offering hope that a solution may be within our reach.

Importantly, Mr. Bruges stresses that biochar must be a tool that is used to empower small farmers and not push farmers further into the tentacles of big agribusiness. The author discusses the many reasons why top-down schemes that privilege financial speculation in the form of carbon trading generally do not benefit those who work the land. On the other hand, the author believes that the knowledge and the means to produce biochar could provide badly-needed revenues to small farmers, allowing them to nurture the environment and strengthen their local communities. Indeed, the recognition that the kind of sustainable living and production practices of which biochar might be a part are essential towards envisioning a more hopeful future.

I highly recommend this book to everyone.

Before I had read this book I had not even heard of biochar. But then I am a city boy. And therein lies a tale of today's world. Too many of us are city boys and not enough of us have any real understanding of where our food comes from and how.

Biochar is the result of the pyrolysis of biomass, including trees, leaves, grass, and everything that grows. Biochar is also made from the waste products of animals. The method is to heat the "feedstock" (the biomass) to a high temperature in the absence of oxygen. The result is charcoal which ideally is used, as the subtitle of the book has it, to build soil fertility. Biochar--"finely crushed charcoal used for soil enhancement" (p. 107)--does this by returning minerals and especially carbon to the soil. Because of its porous nature biochar is excellent for dry soils because it can hold water in the soil. Mixed with manure and compost, biochar is an ideal fertilizer and has been used as such by indigenous people the world over for thousands of years.

Mixing biochar into soils is also a way of sequestering carbon. When biomass is burned without the presence of oxygen the carbon in the biomass does not combine with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Consequently there are two main advantages of using biochar: one, it helps the soil to be more fertile, and two, it keeps carbon from getting into the air as carbon dioxide which is a greenhouse gas. To the extent that the biochar stays in the soil, the production and use of biochar reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: the plants that are made into biochar drew the carbon dioxide out of the air for their growth. According to author James Bruges biochar can stay in the soil for literally hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

Bruges has observed the use of biochar in many places in the world and especially in India. This book reports on his experiences. Central to his experience is that the production and use of biochar works wonderfully well in an environment of smallholders in agrarian communities. If biochar becomes part of a cap and trade process, Bruges warns, land will be given over to industrial farms growing a monoculture in order to get carbon credits. This would be a disaster for small farmers and would result in higher food costs.

There are a number of other problems with implementing and maintaining a biochar culture. Bruges explores these difficulties and offers solutions. Clearly biochar is just one method in our effort to return the world to sustainability. Heaven knows we need all the help we can get.

(Note: The following books by Dennis Littrell are now available at Amazon.com:

Yoga: Sacred and Profane (Beyond Hatha Yoga)
Dennis Littrell's True Crime Companion
Novels and other Fictions
Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!
The Holon
Teddy and Teri
High School from Hell
Let's Play Overkill!
Like a Tsunami Headed for Hilo
Understanding Evolution and Ourselves


Coming soon:

The World Is Not as We Think It Is)

Now available at Amazon:

The World Is Not as We Think It Is

A few years ago I came across some scientific papers about the fertility benefits of "biochar" (putting charcoal in the soil), which I passed on to a farming friend of mine. However, this approach is so new that it is hard to find hands-on specifics about how to use it in the garden or in the farm field for various different food plants, and my friend has just been experimenting with it on his own, with great results. So I am always interested when something about biochar comes along.

This book has lots of general information about biochar, including things such a archaeological info that it has been used by populations in the past, its usefulness in farming (increases in soil fertility without the costs of fertilizers), how it works from a microbiological point of view, its potential contribution to carbon sequestration, and some tantalizing (but too brief) example projects from around the world. All of these are written from the point of view of the issues of climate change and atmospheric CO2, and consider things such as carbon credits, regulations, etc. There is no "debate" in the book so it seems mis-titled.

It took me a while to figure out what audience this book is addresssed to. It reads like it was expanded from a powerpoint talk -- good, but lacking specifics. I think the intended audience are those who want to know about it in general, and those who are policy and decision makers who can make things happen in communities around the world. It makes the case that people should be doing biochar everywhere. From my farming friend's point of view, using biochar is a no-brainer: make the soil more fertile for almost no cost. The carbon-sequestration effects are gravy.

That this book is intended as an overview for policy maker is confirmed by the fact that the three-page bibliography cites general policy and development literature, rather than the scientific literature on actual biochar experimentation and use. The text itself frequently talks about climate, policies, regulation, economies, etc. rather than biochar itself. [This book is part of a series of briefings about sustainable development published by the Schumacher "small is beautiful" Society.]

This book is not intended as a how-to manual for using biochar in your own garden or field. I was interested in finding out about things such as: how to obtain the charcoal, what ratio to put in the soil for specific plants, how often, what size particles, other soil amendments that might work well along with the biochar, etc., but none of that is here.

I hope and expect that better and more specific books about biochar will become available in the future. As the field matures, I don't think this book will age very well. But for the moment it is a great overview of biochar, its history, usage around the world, how it works, and why it might be worth looking into from a climate point of view. It is probably would be worth 5 stars to an out-of-touch politician, but it is worth 1-2 stars for the gardener or farmer.

I selected this book expecting to like it. I am interested in biochar, and think it has significant potential to sequester carbon and improve agriculture. But this book has far too much political baggage and too little calm discussion of the science of biochar.

The author, a retired architect turned amateur economist and polemicist, hates market capitalism, the use of oil, and modern agriculture. And he keeps reminding you of this. Before he even gets to discussing what biochar is and why it might be good he uses a quarter of the book to bash modern life, often with jarring non sequitors.

Between discussions of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and removing carbon dioxide from the air he throws in the sentence: "A global money system that is not based on debt and interest would dispense with the financial necessity for irrational economic growth." Huh?

In a paragraph that starts with a sentence about climate change resulting from the Industrial Revolution exploiting fossil fuels he segues into: "Nuclear science, that energy that promised to be 'to cheap to meter,' continues to trick governments into writing blank checks, and will almost certainly leave future generations with radioactive waste and power stations they may not have the expertise to manage. It has also provided weapons of mass destruction that, as yet, have only been used against civilian populations by a 'responsible' nation." The next sentence, still in the same paragraph, starts "Water-based sewage ...". So he appears to hate nuclear power and maybe America. But there is no discussion of the topic beyond the two sentences. The author seems more into assertion than evidence.

In Chapter 3 he gets to the Amazon Indians, who used "biochar" to enhance the poor soil of the Amazon region* to support agriculture. But he follows an historical description of this with: "In this and other descriptions there is no mention of pyramids as in the Maya civilization, no ramparts, no hierarchy of grand buildings surrounded by hovels. Is it too much speculate that the abundant fertility did away with the need for a highly centralized authoritarian society?" Well, yes it is. But this is an author with an ax to grind.

I first came upon the "biochar" topic in Charles Mann's excellent "1491", where he describes the rich soil the Amazon Indians created.** And I have encountered it a couple of times since in magazines. To simplify, there are two key points. The first is that if you take plant matter and make charcoal from it that charcoal is the carbon from carbon dioxide removed from the air. But what do you do with the charcoal? It turns out that if you grind it up and mix it with soil you enrich the soil; the "biochar" traps water and nutrients and improves crop growth (potentially with less fertilizer). This information is actually in this book, but you have to extract it from the Luddite dross.

One reason I so disliked this book is that it claims to be about a topic that I think is important and deserves a good book. But this book is so encumbered with political baggage and written from such a radical perspective that it could actually turn reasonable people against biochar.

[PS: On a bright note, the book is recyclable. Or, if it really annoys you, you can make charcoal out of it and work it into your garden.]


* While the Amazon rainforest is very lush, it mostly grows in a mat of biological material on top of the soil. The underlying soil is poor. When people clear plots in the rainforest for agriculture those plots usually only support a few harvests. They are then abandoned and new plots cleared.

** 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

As someone very much interested in global warming, and as a soil scientist working in Africa with smallholder farmers, I was very interested in this book. I was hoping that it would point to real solutions. But from my perspective, it does not.

Biochar may have a lot to offer. Biochar is basically fine-ground charcoal that can be produced from just about any organic plant residue, from entire trees right down to stems and leaves of annual crops. Biochar is created by pyrolization, the process of heating said residue in the absence of oxygen, to create charcoal, which is then ground. Either biochar or charcoal are very slow to decompose, making them a long-term sink for carbon, their primary constituent. Organic residues decompose relatively quickly; biochar does not. Furthermore, biochar has proven potential to have long-term benefits on soil fertility and soil water holding capacity. Soils treated with biochar in the Americas over 2000 years ago is still fertile today. The final beauty of biochar is that the plant residues from which they are created are renewable and abundant. Conceivably, if only 2.5% of the world's cropland were devoted to biochar, all of the industrial carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas, would be re-absorbed by the year 2050. James Bruges makes a solid case for the potential of biochar, and the book has one chapter that is particularly interesting to me as a scientist where the global carbon cycle is explained and roughly quantified.

In the early chapters, he makes a very strong case of the need for urgent action. For climate change skeptics, this may seem exaggerated, but as a scientist who has followed the debate for a number of years and has seen that scientists have actually under-estimated rather than over-estimated the pace of global warming effects, I agree with Bruges completely--urgent action is indeed necessary before we reach the "tipping point", where natural feedback mechanisms create a vicious cycle of greenhouse gas release from oceans and permafrost soils, accelerating unimaginably greenhouse gas concentrations and global warming to a scale that has in the past resulted in mass extinctions when it occurred naturally. By the way, the debate should not even be about whether it is natural or not--the debate should be, can we do something about it? And we can.

Then the book gets into solutions. The question is, are these solutions either doable or workable? And I think this the book's weakness--from my limited perspective, they are not. First of all, Bruge suggests that to limit C dumped into the atmosphere, we cap it at the source--that is, put a limit on how much the 500 or so companies that produce coal and oil can mine annually. Each person in the world is then given some sort of allocation, which they can then "sell" to the producers. So you can't produce more than what credits you have "bought" from all the 6 billion people on the planet....hmmm. Do I need to go into the number of reasons that this does not seem workable? Like, how are you going to get those funds down to every person on earth? Or whether we can get any agreement on this approach?

These companies account for 2/3 of the carbon emissions, according to Bruge. The remaining third comes from land use (or abuse thereof). Really? Actually, 1/3 of emissions come from land use in general, including the energy needed to plow, harvest, process, package, and transport the food--but then in reality, that actually is to a large extent oil and coal, so it should be in the first group. Then, his idea to monitor C gains or losses from land use is by remote sensing. I don't believe the technology is there--and biochar is supposed to fall under that. But for the most part, biochar is buried--meaning that it's a dead end to try to sense it by satellite. And if you want to correlate it through ground truthing--forget it. So, this is no way to monitor biochar or its overall carbon-reducing footprint.

But the next question is, would anyone producing biochar be ready to put it into the soil? And here's where you have to crunch some numbers. This number-crunching is lacking in the book. At their peak, carbon credits were running something like $40 per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. Charcoal has a higher CO2 equivalent than its weight--so roughly speaking, a kg of biochar is equal to over twice that. So roughly speaking, let's say that a ton of biochar has 2.5 tons of CO2 equivalent, placing its value at $100 per ton. That's 10 cents per kg. Nice. Except for the fact that its value as fuel is worth a lot more than that. It has close to the same energy content per kg as ethanol or diesel fuel. So in terms of fuel equivalence, that's the same as paying 10 cents per kg, which is roughly 10 cents per liter or 40 cents per gallon. When was the last time you saw diesel fuel so cheap? You can imagine that people might be tempted to sell their charcoal to generate power at a hefty premium to what they would get as carbon credit. Perhaps they can also get some soil fertility benefit as well, but consider application rates start at 5 tons per ha. If you are able to sell it at 25 cents per kg (the going rate for bush-produced charcoal where I live), that 5 tons is going to cost you $1250 per hectare--that is to say, if you had sold it as charcoal, you could have made $1250. That's a lot of money to spread over a hectare. Most people will take the $1250, thank you!

So in the end, the book seems to me to be thought-provoking and has enlightened me regarding a potential technology. Four stars for that, but would people actually do it--grind up their valuable charcoal and put it into the soil? I don't think so.

For a non-biochar method that has serious carbon removal potential, check out using iron seeding in the ocean. That's a whole 'nuther subject, but is perhaps more practical and can have massive impact--though it has its caveats as well.

This is a fascinating book, about the process of using charcoal - Biochar - to build fertility in the soil and reverse climate change.

I had heard some conversations about this in my organic gardening group and was very curious to read the book. There are many things that we can do to increase soil fertility, compost and rotate grazing so that the soil can be fertilized by animals. Using charcoal to fertilize turns out to be a very old method and very useful in areas of sparse conditions.

The Biochar fund even developed a stove that can be used in countries where there is a shortage of firewood, such as desert areas of Africa. The stoves are very simply made, use less natural resources and have the added bonus of producing Biochar which can then be added to the soil to increase yields.

If you are interested in Permaculture, organic gardening or climate change you will find this book has some great new information.

This is a good introduction to the concept of Biochar as a soil amendment and its possible use in addressing climate and soil fertility issues on a global level. It is fairly thin and a quick read for those with not much time or just wanting a quick overview. It looks at the crisis in soil productivity and industrial agriculture, the ancient form of biochar called terra preta (dark soil) which allowed intensive agriculture by indigenous peoples in the nutrient poor soils of the Amazon, agricultural applications, some examples of biochar operations around the world today, the science underlying biochar, and the place for biochar in carbon credit systems. The author has been active in global sustainability and engineering all his life, and writes from that perspective.

For those who already know something about biochar and are wanting to give biochar a more serious look, whether for personal use on one's land, at the scientific level, for development as a commercial product, and/or as a policy issue, I would suggest that one purchase either Biochar for Environmental Management: Science and Technology by Lehman or Biochar: Charcoal, Pyrolysis, Biomass, Biosequestration, Carbon capture and storage, Geoengineering, Bioenergy in China, Carbon sequestration, Terra preta by Miller.

Before I read "The Biochar Debate: Charcoal's Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility," I was completely unaware that there was a public policy debate in the scientific community on this issue. Over the last few years, I've read a lot about biochar in both the popular and scientific literature. I'm a retired academic research librarian so it is easy for me to get connected with just about any publication on any topic. The motivation for my research was simple: I'm an avid organic gardener and possess an irrepressible intellectual curiosity for a wide range of popular, academic, and scientific subjects.

Unfortunately, this book did not shed additional light on many of the unanswered questions I had about biochar; neither did it provide a clear, coherent introduction to the topic. Readers completely unfamiliar with the topic of biochar might find this book confusing.

I'd hoped that the book might explain the process used by the ancient Amazonians to make terra preta (biochar). It did not. Evidently, that is still a mystery that nobody in the scientific community understands. These ancient people had access only to very primitive technology, but somehow managed to pyrolyze enormous quantities of organic wastes to create fertile farming land in the notoriously infertile soils of the Amazonian rainforest. How did they do it?

Since biochar is still not available commercially, I wanted to know if there was some easy way for me to make it for use in my home organic gardening. I'd already experimented on my own and was extremely pleased with the enormous crop improvement I'd achieved. (I took unadulterated, 100% hardwood charcoal and broke it up into small pieces, and buried them in a small section of my vegetable garden.) But the method I'd used was too labor-intensive (and unhealthful) to be continued on a large scale. The book did shed light on this issue. Basically, the author confirmed that there is no simple way for suburban home gardeners to make biochar; we need to wait for commercial ventures to manufacture and market it on a large scale. His explanations convinced me...but I still wondered why in the world I was not able to do what primitive Amazonians accomplished with ease 1,500 years ago!

The book had a number of good, black-and-white illustrations that helped me visualize biochar-related concepts that I'd previously only read about. But, I found it frustrating that there was often little explanation accompanying the illustrations.

I soon discovered that "The Debate" is the heart of the book. This fact is clearly evident in the title, but I had ignored it. I'd seen the big font-size used for the word "Biochar," and ignored the smaller font-size used for the words that came after it. I soon discovered that this is not an introductory book about biochar, but rather a public policy briefing paper. Its purpose is to explain: 1) how much good biochar could do in fighting global climate change; and 2) how easy it would be for irresponsible capitalists to exploit biochar in ways that would do additional harm to the biosphere. It is an interesting debate. I found myself intellectually drawn to the author's conclusions. But the author does not present an unbiased argument by any stretch of the imagination. He is an enthusiastic follower of sustainable living and a clear adherent of peak oil. In a number of places in the text, he reveals his belief in the coming collapse of global modern civilization. His politics are extremely green and liberal. He is clearly and fundamentally against unregulated free markets. I have an intellectual curiosity for all these topics, so the book held my interest. But I can easily see that the book might irritate a lot of readers who do not share these interests or beliefs.

It is an odd little book. The writing is clear enough, but the jumbled organization of ideas and issues disturbed me. I'm glad I read it, but in the end, I'm sure this book will appeal only to a very narrow audience of readers.

If you've never heard of biochar, I would give this introduction four stars. I gave it three only because it does not include instructions on how interested persons can experiment with making biochar themselves. Instructions, however, are prevalent on the Internet. Biochar is, after all, an emerging science that has not gotten a strong toehold yet. Bruges successfully presents the case that it should be one of our top strategies while cautioning against making the same mistakes we've made with letting oil- and money-hungry agribusinesses drive our food growth and choices to human and other species' detriment.

In all the climate gloom and doom today, much of it more understatedly real than manufactured, four ideas positively excite me and give me hope: (1) bills like Georgia HB 842 (which, if passed, would permit families to grow their own food and raise their own small livestock, such as hens, to feed themselves), (2) permaculture, (3) mycelium running, and (4) biochar. Combining all four approaches in small urban and suburban homesteads--as well as in rural areas, where it's being done already--is a strategy for sustainability and curtailing runaway climate change that we need to be implementing NOW. Being able to provide ourselves and our children healthy food, exercise, collaborative survival skills, and a vision for a future working with, not against, Mother Nature, is of priceless value. Not to put too dire an edge on it, but it may be the only way our species can avoid extinction.

"The BioChar Debate" discusses what biochar is and how it can be best used for carbon sequestration. Bruges is not an alarmist, but it is difficult to read this book without becoming mightily alarmed about the course we are on--especially if you also read Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It. Biochar is carbon NEGATIVE: it actually removes carbon (from carbon dioxide) from the air and sequesters it in the ground, all while improving soil fertility. How nice it would be to be able to go to one's local Lowe's and pick up a bag of charged biochar as simply as one now purchases Black Cow. Hopefully, some enterprising soul has this in the works as we speak.

After reading this book, I started scouring the internet for YouTube videos on how to make your own biochar and sources for stoves to use for that purpose; some are mentioned in the book. But James Bruges cautions us that, as with any endeavor, balance is critical. If biochar becomes just another means for huge agribusinesses to make a lot of money at the expense of thriving ecosystems and the local food movement, it will not live up to its promise and could even be destructive.

Bruges condenses earlier scientific works on biochar into a readable format for lay persons, and it's definitely a good read for anyone new to the subject. The Science chapter will open some eyes on how the climate-change naysayers are manipulating the data to make it look like we don't have a problem when we most undeniably do. What I came away with after reading this book is that it certainly is not going to hurt anything for individuals to try to make biochar for incorporation into their yards and gardens, and if enough of us did it, it might make a huge difference in the trajectory of environmental degradation that we ARE going to experience over the coming years. Best of all, biochar can begin to help recover seriously depleted soils and, with the aid of mycelium, even reclaim some of our stripped, poisoned lands.

Finally, a word to the wise: It's time to stop taking grocery stores for granted. Start learning about permaculture, organic gardening, and soil diversity now. Even if you don't "believe" in climate change, believe that the heavily fossil-fuel-subsidized food we now depend on will either run out or become so prohibitively expensive you won't be able to buy it. Sooner, not later. It's already happening now.