Seeking the World’s Soul

I’ve just been read­ing up on mycore­me­di­a­tion, or clean­ing soil with ben­e­fi­cial fungi, at Fungi Per­fecti (http://www NULL.fungi NULL.com/mycotech/mycova NULL.html).

Here’s an exerpt:

What can you do? Delin­eate your garbage into cat­e­gories. Not only com­post all organic debris, but seg­re­gate the refuse into piles appro­pri­ate for a vari­ety of desired mush­room species. Inoc­u­late card­board and paper prod­ucts, cof­fee grounds, and wood debris with mush­room spawn. Teach chil­dren about the role of fungi, espe­cially mush­rooms, in the forests and their crit­i­cal role in build­ing soils. Encour­age mush­rooms to grow in your yards by mulching around plants. Take advan­tage of cat­a­strophia — nat­ural dis­as­ters are per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ties for community-action recy­cling projects. We should learn from our elders. Native peo­ples world­wide have viewed fungi as spir­i­tual allies. They are not only the guardians of the for­est. They are the guardians of our future.

Inter­est­ing stuff. Being able to fil­ter agri­cul­tural runoff and get edi­ble mush­rooms at the same time sounds like a great idea. They’ve also been using oys­ter mush­rooms (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Oyster_mushroom) to clean up oil spills; read the whole arti­cle to learn more.

(http://reblog NULL.zemanta NULL.com/zemified/97c259e5-ba65-488e-80a5-1a0401ebd733/)

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“Terra Preta (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Terra_preta)”, or “dark earth”, is an Ama­zon­ian Indian tech­nol­ogy which can vastly improve soil fer­til­ity (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Fertility_%28soil%29) and pull car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere, poten­tially keep­ing it out for thou­sands of years. Bio­mass — plant and ani­mal waste such as manure, waste wood, and crop left­overs — can be turned into char­coal (or “biochar”) and then buried in agri­cul­tural soil, mak­ing rich black earth that plants grow very, very well in. Char­coal is extremely porous, and pro­vides a per­fect envi­ron­ment for ben­e­fi­cial soil microor­gan­isms that help plants grow. It also holds water, and can greatly help crops to sur­vive drought conditions.

Biochar can be used to pull car­bon diox­ide out of the atmos­phere and poten­tially reverse global warm­ing (if it were used on a wide enough scale). As we know from archae­o­log­i­cal carbon-14 dat­ing (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating) processes, char­coal lasts a long time; (terra preta was actu­ally “dis­cov­ered” by archae­ol­o­gists try­ing to fig­ure out how the Ama­zon, with its depleted trop­i­cal soil, could have sup­ported the large urban pop­u­la­tion for which they were find­ing evi­dence). Plants pull CO2, car­bon diox­ide, out of the air to grow — this is where the vast major­ity of their mass comes from. If that mass is bro­ken down nat­u­rally by the com­post­ing process, the car­bon stays out of the atmos­phere for 6 – 12 years on aver­age. Char it, though, and it’ll be in the ground for hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of years. (Some patches of Terra Preta soil in the Ama­zon are around 2000 years old.) What’s more, you can weigh exactly how much you’re seques­ter­ing — just put it on a scale. The­o­ret­i­cally, this could even­tu­ally work into car­bon trad­ing schemes.

Pho­to­syn­the­sis, at its most basic, is the process where plants use sun­light to take in car­bon diox­ide, use the car­bon for cell build­ing blocks, and give off oxy­gen. When it is charred, or burned with­out access to oxy­gen, the water vapor and var­i­ous flam­ma­ble gases, pri­mar­ily methane and hydro­gen, are dri­ven off. The gases can be col­lected for cook­ing gas or elec­tric­ity gen­er­a­tion, or in lower tech pro­duc­tion directed below the char­coal con­tainer to feed the burn. A com­pany called Epidra is mak­ing char, hydro­gen, and biodiesel simul­ta­ne­ously — see this arti­cle (http://www NULL.eprida NULL.com/news/nature_viewpoint_on_charcoal NULL.pdf) for a good overview on biochar and mod­ern usage.

Char­coal appears to pro­vide a medium which facil­i­tates the trans­fer of min­er­als from soils to plants; there­fore it is bet­ter used in con­junc­tion with min­eral fer­til­iz­ers and com­post. Essen­tially, it pro­vides habi­tat for sym­bi­otic organ­isms that help plant roots to grow, and acts as a buffer for soil mois­ture; it is not a fer­til­izer but a facil­i­ta­tor. Liq­uid fer­til­iz­ers can be applied to the char before it is mixed into soil; an Indian researcher, Dr. Sai Bhaskar Reddy Nakka, has been exper­i­ment­ing (http://e-terrapretarooftopexp NULL.blogspot NULL.com/2008/04/tp-urine-experiment-photos NULL.html) with using clay pots full of char­coal as uri­nals in a boys’ school in India; when the pots start to smell, after 10 days or so, the sat­u­rated char­coal is removed and then mixed into pot­ting, bring­ing a strong dose of eas­ily acces­si­ble nitro­gen to plants. Pho­tos from the trial showed a much darker, health­ier green leaves on the treated plants than on the con­trol sample.

Com­pletely untested per­sonal the­ory, but I sus­pect that apply­ing a liq­uid myc­or­rhizal root­ing enhancer (like Mycogrow (http://www NULL.fungi NULL.com/mycogrow/index NULL.html), for exam­ple) to char­coal would give very nice results as well.

For a home gar­dener, you could make your own char­coal or buy bar­be­cue char­coal made from tree trim­mings — i.e., the nat­ural stuff, not the bri­quets. The eas­i­est way to make char­coal, though it won’t be burned entirely through, is to place a metal garbage bin full of yard waste upside down on bon­fire coals and leave it 24 hours, then pore water over it to make sure no coals sur­vive. Crush the char­coal down to a pow­der and add it to your gar­den beds, pot­ting soil, or com­post bin.

Any­way, some links:

Watch this first (3 minutes):

Click on the image for a film sec­tion in English

(http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/images/stories/BBCmyPart NULL.WMV)

Full movie (45 min) on youtube — very inter­est­ing film about ancient civ­i­liza­tions in the Ama­zon and track­ing them down with archae­ol­ogy (http://nz NULL.youtube NULL.com/watch?v=76gAB5x0sjQ)

Treehugger.com’s overview. (http://www NULL.tree­hug­ger NULL.com/files/2008/03/biochar_an_answer NULL.php) Lots of links in the com­ments sec­tion, too.

Biochar.org (http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/index NULL.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=6&Itemid=7) has a bit on sim­ple char­coal mak­ing (http://www NULL.biochar NULL.org/joomla/index NULL.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=3).

Terra Preta on Bioen­er­gylists (http://terrapreta NULL.bioen­er­gylists NULL.org/) — big clear­ing house of infor­ma­tion, lots of links on how to make char­coal. There’s also a dif­fer­ent sec­tion on gasi­fi­ca­tion (http://gasifiers NULL.bioen­er­gylists NULL.org/), which aims at pro­duc­ing burn­able gases from bio­mass pri­mar­ily but gets char as a side product.

Biochar Inter­na­tional (http://www NULL.biochar-international NULL.org/) — very good sum­mary of what Terra Preta does on this page

Wikipedia’s Terra Preta page (http://en NULL.wikipedia NULL.org/wiki/Terra_preta)

Terra Preta — Sci­ence forums (http://hypography NULL.com/forums/terra-preta/) — nice active forums talk­ing about terra preta

Note: Terra Preta has become a big inter­est of mine and some­thing that peo­ple really need to know more about (espe­cially my Dad, who’s the main per­son I’m writ­ing this sum­mary for since he works on envi­ron­men­tal projects around Africa). Feel free to link to this post!

Update, Feb 12 2009: There’s now a book on biochar, “Biochar for Envi­ron­men­tal Management”, available at http://www.earthscan.co.uk/?tabid=49381 (http://www NULL.earth­scan NULL.co NULL.uk/?tabid=49381) .

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I’ve been play­ing with a big site redesign — I’m think­ing about switch­ing to the “Options” theme and using Gallery2 for my pho­tos, since google can index it and I can still set up print order­ing. Any­way, just test­ing some things out. I feel like I’m star­ing up a very steep learn­ing curve, again.

Orig­i­nal here for pinged sites.

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