After some preliminaries and inspiring music (this youtube video isn't what they played but you'll get the idea), John Wick of the Nicasio Native Grass Ranch and the Marin Carbon Project gave a very enjoyable and detailed presentation of his work on ranching, carbon sequestration, and
education.
To summarize, John, with the help of his family foundation, has been able to operate the ranch with ecologic instead of economic goals. Initially he removed all the cows, but then the rangeland turned brushy and weedy. So he brought in some experts that told him grasslands evolved with grazing animals and that is what it needed. But the California Department of Fish and Game wouldn't give him a native elk herd for his 500 acre ranch--they said he needed 100,000 acres! So he brought back the cows under intensive management.
One of the goals he set was to restore the native grass that would benefit the native birds. And naturally, the soil health comes first. Farmers really cultivate soil, not crops. He set a minimum length of 3-4 inches for the grass--anything less than that would be overgrazing. He explained how after the cows graze an area, the grass goes into shock and sends sugar to its roots. This feeds the organisms that break down the roots. He showed a photo of grass that had grown 3/4 inch in the ten days following grazing--growth that wouldn't have occurred if the cows had stayed there.
Soon he got into the "Al Gore" presentation--the well known details of the carbon dioxide concentration increasing in our atmosphere (from 315 ppm in 1960, to 350 ppm in 1990, to 393 ppm today). He showed some great slides of carbon sinks and storage and the flux between them.
His next point was about how his demonstration project of spreading 1/2 inch of compost on rangeland sequestered carbon (and increased water holding capacity and did some other great things). He applied compost to a plot, plowed a plot, and applied both to a plot, while keeping a control plot. The compost no-till plot was still providing benefits 3 years after the application of 1/2 inch of compost in 2008. Methane release from the compost stopped after it was applied. The increase in soil moisture was 2-3%--a huge increase, since 1% all over the state would equal all the water stored in California's reservoirs. The compost plot was dominated by annuals, while the plowed and composted plot had some perennials. In an email, John later told me that meadowlarks increased from 5 birds in 2006 to over 100 in 2009. The quail population exploded, and they regularly see bald and golden eagles.
Assuming the experiment continues to go well, this could be applied to California rangelands (56% of California is classified as rangeland, but most of that is public land in the desert, so reduce that figure by 50% from the start) and sequester ALL the carbon dioxide emissions from California (calculations by Dr. Whendee Silver--not Wendy, Whendee--this IS Marin County, after all). Applying it to the large grasslands of central Asia could have an even bigger impact--1/3 of the world (and U.S.) land area is rangeland. This could be a short-term effect if the soil quickly becomes saturated with carbon, but the point is that there is a huge potential for this type of management to sequester carbon while at the same time improving the health of the soil. 50% of soil organic matter is carbon, so anything increasing organic matter will sequester carbon.
The next big demonstration project he talked about was human waste composting. There are 9 cells on the farm where cow and chicken manure is being tested for pathogens and hormones by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as it breaks down. The goal is to show that the end product is safe, and to create a technical program at the College of Marin where technicians would be certified in human waste composting. The manure is composted by alternating 1 foot of straw with 4 inches of manure in layers. Organisms destroy pathogens (as well as the 171 degree temperatures) and decay into stable carbon chains. Odor from compost means you are doing something wrong--usually there is not enough air and your compost pile is becoming anaerobic. Another problem is having enough critical mass--composting toilets are really "moldering" toilets, and piping the waste to a community composter often works better. He recommended the Humanure Handbook.
There wasn't enough time for John to give his full presentation, but he ended on current efforts with the Carbon Cycle Council and a Marin education project on continuous chain of carbon custody called C6. C6 is designed for 2-and-a-half-year-olds on up--hopefully it will inspire and empower them so that we can end the epidemic of depressed 7-year-olds that are hit by a lot of bad news just as they are beginning to understand our world.
If there is anything that having a child has taught me, it is that people must learn--we are only born with reflexes and emotions, but no knowledge. Half of our population was born before the first Earth Day, so how can we expect people to know what to do if they haven't been shown? That is why education and demonstration projects are so important, because that is how we are best able to transfer knowledge from those that are developing and rediscovering it to those that don't have it yet.
Following this exciting presentation was a panel discussion made up of John Wick, Raven Gray (co-founder of Transition US), and radio personality Helga Hellberg, who formerly was Executive Director of Marin Organic and who knows a lot about sustainability. Raven had a British accent and Helga had a German accent, which was interesting on a 3-person panel. It was moderated "Phil Donohue style" by Brian Edwards-Tiekert with KPFA Radio.
After the panel answered a few questions from Brian, he opened it up to the audience. But he asked the first questioner to stand up. This did not go very well--not only do you have to be first, but you have to stand? I wanted to ask a question, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go first and I definitely didn't want to stand up when raising a hand should do. Everybody must have felt the same because no one stood until Brian approached a woman who stood as he got to her. When he introduced the moderation format he said that one format they considered was where the audience comes up to the microphone--and the questioners "go on and on." Ironically, right after he said that, this first questioner went on and on. She had trouble articulating her question, but spoke at length about herself, managing to let everyone know that she's been here for 30 years--sacrificing a lot to be here--and was very concerned about the Keystone Pipeline Project between Canada and Texas. This is why no one wants to go first. The next questioner made sure to say she was a native, which she made clear isn't very common, and complained about rich people. I uncomfortably glanced at the first questioner, a self-described immigrant who looked quite well-to-do (but I'm from Mono County and not used to things here). It was actually a good question, since more affluence generally equals more waste.
I was initially a bit annoyed at these people spending so much time talking about themselves instead of asking questions--but then I realized, this is a very personal topic. In a rich culture, where each person's impact is disproportionate to their physical presence, each person's experience is very relevant to what we are all trying to do--make our world more sustainable. I'm so used to attending scientific presentations, ones like John Wick's, and hearing the audience ask only about the presentation, that I forgot this is a forum where the audience is just as important as the speakers. There was even a woman in the back that was cheering on John during his presentation and answering his rhetorical questions--it felt almost like a religious gathering.
So this is the challenge of the environmental movement. It is so diverse and so personal. It transcends labels--I much prefer "conservationist" to "environmentalist." The word "environmentalist" with its hard "v" followed by "mental" followed by "ist" has been criticized for not being a nice-sounding word. And any "ist" has the potential to imply fanaticism. Yet these labels are useful. Unfortunately they stereotype. Is the "out of touch urban environmentalist" who does things because they are trendy, and because a confrontational organization left out the whole story in their propaganda--is that a problem, or an opportunity? I think it is an opportunity for education and being an example of acting civil. As I said before, we only know what we are able to learn from people and organizations that we trust--and nowadays the Internet spreads partial truths faster than they've ever spread before. Yet I digress.
Another question was from self-described "Biodiesel Betty," who recently moved to Marin from Sebastopol, and was talking about energy. Biodiesel Betty was right behind me, and since I also recently moved to Marin and had a question about energy, it felt like the perfect time to ask it. But alas, Brian did not see my attempts to get his attention. So I later emailed my questions I had about the presentation to John, who kindly and promptly answered them.
My question for the panel? If I had been able to ask it, I would have said something like this (please bear with me as I go on and on about myself):
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| Electricity conservation and generation at my Lee Vining house reduced my net electricity use by about 50% over the last 10 years. |
My question? With so much energy consumed by our existing housing (and other buildings), how do we transition those buildings--especially the ones in the forest--to be zero or low-emissions? This is a very practical question for me as my family looks for a home. It was easy and cheap to do in Lee Vining in a sunny, small home with its long side facing south. It feels like I may have trouble replicating that success here--and if I can't do it with all of my motivation, I don't have high hopes for everyone else. Or maybe I just don't know how. Or maybe it is just hard for me to stop living a demonstration project--and hard to accept that the lessons from that project aren't as transferable as I'd hoped.
I suspect the answer the panel would give me would have to do with community--that I may not be able to reduce my carbon emissions as much as I'd like, but a community effort would reduce the entire community's by a lot more than individual efforts would and for less cost. Sunny locations in the community would be places to take advantage of the sun, and shady locations could produce local wood fiber and micro hydropower. It is exciting to start scaling up my thinking from the individual to the community--and at the same time hard, since I do not do well in crowds (it was actually kind of hard for me when the rest of the world finally got on the greenhouse gas bandwagon and I wasn't by myself anymore telling the world it should get on the greenhouse gas bandwagon). Mainstream and trendy are usually the last things I want to do, yet that is what is needed to scale up solutions. Even though community efforts are less likely to save me money and be implemented rapidly, the long term prospects are much more promising on a large scale.
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