It seems Darwin was a permaculturist!

In his days globetrotting aboard HMS Beagle, Darwin set in motion the transformation of a dead, volcanic island rock – Ascension Island, described by nearby islanders as "a cinder" – into a green, rain-creating oasis. How did he do it?

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker’s visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens – where Hooker’s father was director – shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot. – BBC

And he did it by breaking what is to some a cardinal rule, the rule of not using non-native plant species. (This island never had any ‘natives’, as it came into existence from being vomited up out of the ocean through volcanic activity.)

Dr Dave Wilkinson is an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island’s strange ecosystem.

He first visited Ascension in 2003.

"I remember thinking, this is really weird," he told the BBC.

"There were all kinds of plants that don’t belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened," he said.

Dr Wilkinson describes the vegetation of "Green Mountain" – as the highest peak is now known – as a "cloud forest". The trees capture sea mist, creating a damp oasis amid the aridity.

However, this is a forest with a difference. It is totally artificial. – BBC

Imagine what could happen if people could see the earth-transforming potential evidenced here – and take up the urgent challenge and joy of utilising intelligent plant assembly to create productive food forests everywhere!

Dr. Wilkinson seems to be excited:

"What it tells us is that we can build a fully functioning ecosystem through a series of chance accidents or trial and error."

In effect, what Darwin, Hooker and the Royal Navy achieved was the world’s first experiment in "terra-forming". They created a self-sustaining and self-reproducing ecosystem in order to make Ascension Island more habitable. – BBC

Have you ever tried to instill a concept in a child or adult, and got excited to observe an apparent spark of realisation in their eyes, just to see your excitement suddenly dissipate when the person speaks… when you realise that ’spark’ was totally off base? Unfortunately Dr. Wilkinson appears to have come to a remarkable conclusion – the island’s cobbled-together eco-system should be studied, not for re-greening all the dead spaces we’ve created on the Earth, but for colonising Mars instead.

Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way".

Believe me Dr. Wilkinson – if you got out the gardening gloves and put a thousand spaceship loads of mixed plants on the red rock, you will not a habitable planet make.

How about people take more notice of such discoveries to do something real and viable, right here on terra firma? And to the BBC – please… for everyone’s sake – get with the program….

Further Reading:

• The Biology of Global Warming
• Greening the Desert
• The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration
• A Call to Large Scale Earth Healing and Lessons from the Loess Plateau

Photo © copyright Craig Mackintosh Note by photographer/editor: This photo was taken in a wildlife park in New Zealand. Just a few weeks later the gecko was stolen from the park, and suspected of being smuggled into Asia. It had an estimated ‘value’ of NZ$10,000 according to newspaper reports at the time. If only people would go to such lengths to preserve rare species and habitats rather than cashing in on their rarity…. Please support Guillaume Chapron and George Monbiot’s bid to give the powers that be a bit of a push.

It’s on course to make the farcical climate talks in Copenhagen look like a roaring success. The big international meeting in October which is meant to protect the world’s biodiversity is destined to be an even greater failure than last year’s attempt to protect the world’s atmosphere. Already the UN has conceded that the targets for safeguarding wild species and wild places in 2010 have been missed: comprehensively and tragically(1).

In 2002, 188 countries launched a global initiative, usually referred to as the 2010 biodiversity target, to achieve by this year a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss. The plan was widely reported as the beginning of the end of the biodiversity crisis. But in May this year, the Convention on Biological Diversity admitted that it had failed. It appears to have had no appreciable effect on the rate of loss of animals, plants and wild places.

In a few weeks, the same countries will meet in Nagoya, Japan and make a similarly meaningless set of promises(2). Rather than taking immediate action to address their failures, they will concentrate on producing a revised target for 2020 and a “vision” for 2050, as well as creating further delays by expressing the need for better biodiversity indicators. In many cases there’s little need for more research. It’s not biodiversity indicators that are in short supply; but any kind of indicator that the member states are willing to act.

A striking example was provided last month by French secretary of state for ecology, Chantal Jouanno. She announced that there would be no further major efforts to restore the population of Pyrenean brown bears, of which fewer than 20 remain. Extensive scientific research shows that this population is not viable. European agreements oblige France to sustain the population. Yet the government knows that the political costs of reintroducing more bears outweigh the costs of inaction. Immediate special interests triumph over the world’s natural wonders, even in nations which have the money and the means to protect them.

The international agreements struck so far have failed miserably in halting the world’s biodiversity crisis. Because biodiversity is even less amenable to vague international treaties than climate change, generalised targets are ill-suited to an issue that is all about specifics. The policies that really count need to be enforced at the national level: reintroducing more bears does not need a global agreement between major economies. All the international meetings have done so far is to diffuse responsibility for the crisis, allowing member states to hide behind each other’s failures. They create a false impression of action, insulating governments from public pressure.

We don’t accept this outcome, or the apathy and indifference with which governments are prepared to let another environmental calamity develop.

So today we are launching a new campaign, hosted by the Guardian, to put pressure on dithering governments(3). Rather than allowing them to hide behind generalities, with help from you and many of the world’s top ecologists, we are compiling a list of 100 specific tasks that will demonstrate whether they are serious about defending the wonders of the natural world. Each will be targeted at a particular government, and they will be asked to sign up to it before the meeting in Nagoya.

We are asking governments to supplement the current treaty-making process with something real and specific, in such a way that success becomes possible and failure accountable. The campaign is called Biodiversity100.

Time is short, so our intention is to choose the 100 tasks within one month. We will be addressing the G20 countries, as their wealth and power deprives them of excuses for ducking their obligations. We are looking for actions that make a major contribution to protecting a particular species or ecosystem; that are strongly and widely supported by scientific evidence published in academic journals; but that are politically costly or opposed by special interest groups.

All these actions, in contrast to the vague political statements made at international meetings, will be concrete, specific and achievable in a reasonable timeframe: they might, for example, involve stopping a destructive industrial project, protecting the habitat of an endangered species, changing or passing a law, or reintroducing a population of animals or plants.

We’ll be sending the link to this article to websites in all the G20 countries and asking readers to help to nominate the key biodiversity actions. Please add your actions to our simple form by the end of August(4). Once we have chosen the list of 100 actions, we will be calling on readers to put pressure on governments: first to agree to them and then to implement them.

We don’t pretend that this campaign will solve the global biodiversity crisis, and we don’t want to create the impression that the problem is under control. But we hope it will perform two useful tasks: protecting a collection of species and habitats that might otherwise be lost, and pressuring a collection of governments that might otherwise avoid public scrutiny.

• Guillaume Chapron is assistant professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. He can be contacted on info (at) biodiversity100.org

References:

1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/29/international-failure-biodiversity-decline
2. http://www.cbd.int/meetings/
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/series/biodiversity-100
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/13/biodiversity-100-form

Map of fires in Russia

As I type, half of Russia is on fire after its hottest summer on record, Pakistan is dealing with the biggest floods in living memory and Australia is still in the clutches of a decade long drought. The last decade, worldwide, was the hottest since records began, and 2010 may break the records of 1998 and 2005 to become the hottest year we’ve ever known. We could spend weeks just examining the extreme weather events going on on a country by country basis.

Today we are crossing thresholds in our destruction of nature that will make all our subsequent efforts at earth healing even harder than they ever should have been. We have removed eco-systems, and their services, to such an extent that dangerous feedback loops are in progress. Climate is fast becoming a runaway train – and we’re its passengers.

Consider the fires in Russia, for example – millions of rain-producing trees are going up in smoke, taking their carbon with it. Trees growing in the ground are a carbon sink. On fire, they’re a carbon source. The Pakistan floods kill trees and plants likewise. These will later dry out and much of it too will end up in the atmosphere. With less trees in place, flooding events will occur even more often, and the soils these plants held in place will be washed away. The arctic permafrost is melting, releasing the powerful heat trapping gas, methane, at unprecedented levels – promising even more temperature increases. Our oceans are acidifying, threatening to turn the world’s largest carbon sink into a carbon source. And so on….

The dominoes are falling. It’s like nature is shouting to us: "If you don’t appreciate the services of these systems, then I’ll remove them all entirely".

We are facing crises on an unprecedented scale. Atop the foundations of an energy crisis, a climate crisis and a soil, water and biodiversity crisis, rests that mother of all crises – a food crisis. Crops are going up in smoke or are being washed away in deluges, our precious soils with them, while world grain stores are at their lowest levels and production is in decline whilst demand is rising. Such a food crisis, in the context of today’s population levels, translates, in turn, to a social/political/economic crisis on a scale that will make the convulsions of WWII look like a walk in the park.

It’s getting ugly, yet many are still not even awake to the perfect storm that is upon us. And of the few who are, many are discussing light bulbs and hybrids, cap and trade and recycling. They’re discussing being a little ‘less bad’, not recognising the urgent need for us – all 6.8 billion of us (and counting, at a rate of 1 billion every twelve years…) – to immediately become a positive element within our biosphere. And we must move fast! (The proverb ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ really rings true when considering these feedback loops….)

There is a solution though! That being a widespread, collaborative effort to assist nature in restoring, at scale, the biological processes that have, until today, kept this world stable for millennia. The solutions are in design, and in the observation and replication of natural symbiotic systems. We don’t need just less cars, we need more biology – more photosynthesis and more life! We might not be able to have rainforests everywhere, but we can certainly have food forests everywhere! The video clips below share a glimmer of hope along these lines. It documents an incredible journey of restorative transition for a 35,000 square kilometre area in the Leoss Plateau in the north of China. It is a journey that begins with completely eroded, overgrazed land where floods were a constant nightmare, and ends in terraced green hills, flood and food stability and prosperity. And, it only took ten years.

Give it a watch, and, as you do, consider what kind of social/political/economic systems would be the most conducive to achieving similar results in other places worldwide. It’s an interesting mix of top-down ‘interference’ (both in terms of blanket regulations and financial investment) combined with land ‘privatisation’, and participatory involvement at all levels. It reinforces for me the need to build resilient, localised, holistically educated and politically engaged communities whose members don’t discard government, but who through greater involvement in the decision-making process (including choosing their representatives) effectively become government and self-determine to build a world based on land stewardship and voluntary simplicity. We cannot act as individuals alone, working in our own self-interest, and achieve the kind of results you’ll see in the video below. We need to work collaboratively, and sometimes sensible, holistically discussed decisions will need to be enforced on individuals who either can’t see the big picture, or who don’t care.

Further reading:

• The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration
• The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Biology of Global Warming

Over the past couple of years, there has been quite a bit of attention paid to the purchase of massive amounts of agricultural land by rich countries and corporate entities in the developing world. Craig Mackintosh wrote about this on this site, as have many other very informative reports and press stories.

To summarize, there has been approximately US$100 Billion mobilized to purchase somewhere between 40 – 50 million hectares (roughly 100 – 125 million acres) of agricultural land worldwide.

Quoting a recent article published by The Financial Times on July 27, 2010, World Bank warns about the ‘farmland grab’ trend:

Investors in farmland are targeting countries with weak laws, buying arable land on the cheap and failing to deliver on promises of jobs and investments, according to the draft of a report by the World Bank.

“Investor interest is focused on countries with weak land governance,” the draft said. Although deals promised jobs and infrastructure, “investors failed to follow through on their investments plans, in some cases after inflicting serious damage on the local resource base”.

In addition, “the level of formal payments required was low”, making speculation a key motive for purchases. “Payments for land are often waived … and large investors often pay lower taxes than smallholders … or none at all.”

[A World Bank study entitled] ‘The Global Land Rush: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits?’ is the broadest study yet of the so-called “farmland grab”, in which countries invest in overseas land to boost their food security, or investors – who are mostly locals – buy arable land. The “farmland grab” trend gained notoriety after an attempt in 2008 by South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics to secure a large chunk of land in Madagascar for a very low price and vague promises of investment. The deal contributed to a coup d’état in the African country." – farmlandgrab.org

A couple of excellent examinations of this issue has been published by The Oakland Institute. They are:

• (Mis)Investment in Agriculture: The Role of the International Finance Corporation in the Global Land Grab
• The Great Land Grab: Rush for World’s Farmland Threatens Food Security for the Poor

This topic has also been featured by news outlets such as Al-Jazeera English’s Riz Khan Program "Land Grab or Investment":

Part I

Part II

What is, in essence, the primary driver behind these land deals is identified in a UK Telegraph article titled ‘Britain facing food crisis as world’s soil ‘vanishes in 60 years’, which was published on February 3, 2010. Quoting from the article, which followed the Carbon Farming conference that took place in Borenore, NSW Australia November 2009:

An estimated 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost annually with more than 80 per cent of the world’s farming land "moderately or severely eroded", the Carbon Farming conference heard.

A University of Sydney study, presented to the conference, found soil is being lost in China 57 times faster than it can be replaced through natural processes.

In Europe that figure is 17 times, in America 10 times while five times as much soil is being lost in Australia.

Soil is also a valuable store of carbon and can release the greenhouse gas if it is ploughed or dug up.

The conference heard world soil, including European and British soils, could vanish within about 60 years if drastic action was not taken.

This will lead to a global food crisis, chronic food shortages and higher prices, the conference heard.

Despite better than average farming practices, European soil might last for 100 years if no further damage occurs worldwide, scientists said.

In reality, however, increased land pressures aimed at compensating global production losses would likely mean it will run out faster, they added. – telegraph.co.uk

The issues connected to the Global Land Grab controversy are directly linked to those of the global Earth Repair/Ecosystem Restoration Work (ERW) agenda. ERW has yet to be seriously discussed as means by which the global ecological dilemma and degrading of natural capital can be effectively addressed.

The attempts made to purchase these vast amounts of arable land speaks to the manner in which investors treat natural capital like financial capital. The impression given is that the ecological problem is something that can be avoided by buying our collective way out of the situation. The rich and wealthy are mostly woefully ignorant of how to manage & use natural capital. This is where those acquainted with ERW techniques and strategies can provide an indispensable service.

I was invited to speak at a socially responsible/triple bottom line investors conference taking place in London November 2010. The event is being put on by TBLI (Triple Bottom Line Investment). I intend on addressing this very issue in my presentation entitled: "Economic Support for Global Earth Repair Work and Ecological Restoration – Making The Case".

With phyloplankton levels crashing and the whole marine food chain going belly-up, perhaps marine life should follow this whale’s example, and be a bit more pro-active.

by Christine Jones, PhD

The number of farmers in Australia has fallen 30 per cent in the last 20 years, with more than 10,000 farming families leaving the agricultural sector in the last five years alone. This decline is ongoing. There is also a reluctance on the part of young people to return to the land, indicative of the poor image and low income-earning potential of current farming practices.

Agricultural debt in Australia has increased from just over $10 billion in 1994 to close to $60 billion in 2009 (Fig.1). The increased debt is not linked to interest rates, which have generally declined over the same period (Burgess 2010).

Fig. 1. Increase in agricultural debt (AUD millions)
1994-2009 vs interest rates (%pa)

The financial viability of the agricultural sector, as well as the health and social wellbeing of individuals, families and businesses in both rural and urban communities, is inexorably linked to the functioning of the land.

There is widespread agreement that the integrity and function of soils, vegetation and waterways in many parts of the Australian landscape have become seriously impaired, resulting in reduced resilience in the face of increasingly challenging climate variability.

Agriculture is the sector most strongly impacted by these changes. It is also the sector with the greatest potential for fundamental redesign.

The most meaningful indicator for the health of the land, and the long-term wealth of a nation, is whether soil is being formed or lost. If soil is being lost, so too is the economic and ecological foundation on which production and conservation are based.

The soil carbon sink

In July 2009, the Portuguese government introduced an AUD$13.8 million soil carbon offsets scheme based on dryland pasture improvement, compliant with Article 3.4 of the Kyoto Protocol.

The scheme will pay an estimated 400 participating farmers to establish biodiverse perennial mixed grass/legume pastures (upwards of 20 species) to improve soil carbon, soil water holding capacity and livestock productivity in an area of approximately 42,000 hectares (Watson, 2010).

The Portuguese scheme has been designed to comply with Kyoto’s strict criteria of additionality and permanence. Coordinator of Project Extensity and Terraprima project leader, Professor Tiago Domingos, has calculated that the area of agricultural land in Portugal amenable to soil carbon offsets could collectively sequester more than the current Portuguese national emissions deficit under existing Kyoto arrangements (Watson 2010).

The mediterranean-type climate of central and southern Portugal is very similar to that in many parts of south-eastern, southern and south-western Australia. The Portuguese Terraprima data illustrated in Fig.2 show that under sown perennial pasture, soil organic matter increased to a level of 3% over 10 years, from a starting point of 0.87%.

Fig. 2. Accumulation of soil organic matter (SOM), shown as percentage
by weight, in soils under three pasture types:
SG = sown perennial pasture;
FNG = fertilised annual pasture;
NG = unfertilised annual pasture
(from Watson 2010).

The Portuguese soil carbon offsets project aims to sequester 0.91 million tonnes of CO2 from 2010 to 2012 (Watson 2010). This equates to the sequestration of 10.85t CO2/ha/yr.

In addition to the carbon payments they receive, participating Portuguese farmers are reported as “enjoying the environmental spin-offs of greater biodiversity, higher soil fertility, higher water infiltration rates, less erosion, less desertification, fewer fires, less floods, improvement in water quality, less dependence on concentrated feed for their herds in protracted dry periods and better milk and meat quality” (Watson 2010).

US study on soil carbon sequestration rates under perennial grassland

Recent research by United States Department of Agriculture (Liebig et al. 2008) investigated soil carbon sequestration under a perennial native grass, switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) grown for the production of cellulosic ethanol.

Despite the annual removal of aboveground biomass, low to medium rainfall and a relatively short growing season, the USDA-ARS research, averaged across 10 sites, recorded average soil carbon sequestration rates of 4t CO2/ha/yr in the 0-30 cm soil profile and 10.6t CO2/ha/yr in the 0-120 cm profile (Liebig et al 2008).

The best performing site was at Bristol, where soil carbon levels increased by 21.67 tonnes in the 0-30 cm soil profile over a 5 year period. A soil carbon increase of 21.67t C/ha equates to the sequestration of 80t CO2/ha.

At the three sites where carbon was measured to 120 cm, the USDA research found relatively high sequestration rates below 30 cm. The sequestration rate was higher for the 30-60 cm increment than for the 0-30 cm increment (18.2t CO2/ha vs 16.5t CO2/ha, respectively). A possible interpretation is that the deeper the sequestration, the greater the likelihood that the carbon be protected from oxidative and/or microbial decomposition.

There were virtually no ‘biomass inputs’ to soil in these trials, as all aboveground material was removed for ethanol production. This suggests the liquid carbon pathway (Jones 2008) as the primary mechanism for soil building.

Carbon trading in the real world

The recent demise of the Federal Government’s proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme provides an opportunity to reflect on the true meaning of a carbon-based economy.

For some time, analysts have tipped carbon to become the world’s most traded commodity. The reality is that it has been the world’s most traded commodity for millennia.

A great variety of life forms require liquid carbon – referred to in the scientific literature as ‘dissolved organic carbon’ (DOC) – for their growth and reproduction. The growth of trees, crops and pastures, for example, requires the transport of dissolved carbon via sap within the plant; animal growth is dependant on the digestion of carbon containing foods and the transport of dissolved carbon to cells via the blood; the formation of topsoil is dependent on photosynthesis and the transport of dissolved carbon, via a microbial bridge, from plants to soil.

Carbon is the currency for most transactions within and between living things. Nowhere is this more evident than in the soil. Here, carbon is king. Mycorrhizal fungi, which are totally dependant on dissolved organic carbon from green plants, trade carbon with colonies of bacteria located at their hyphal tips in exchange for macro-nutrients such as phosphorus, organic nitrogen and calcium, trace elements such as zinc, boron and copper, and plant growth stimulating substances (Killham 1994, Leake et al. 2004).

By means of an extraordinary physiological process known as ‘bidirectional flow’ nutrients are transported to roots at the same time as dissolved organic carbon moves through fungal hyphae in the opposite direction (Killham 1994, Leake et al. 2004). Indeed, mycorrhizal roots are significant sinks for carbon, transferring as much as 15 times more carbon to soil as adjacent non-mycorrhizal roots (Killham 1994).

Impoverishment of agricultural soils

Mycorrhizal fungi and associative bacteria are very strongly inhibited by excessive soil disturbance and the high levels of water-soluble phosphorus and nitrogen commonly used in modern agriculture (Killham 1994, Leake et al. 2004). Where soils have been subjected to cultivation and/or the application of MAP, DAP, superphosphate, urea or anhydrous ammonia, the suppressed mycorrhizal colonisation of plant roots significantly reduces carbon flow. The structural degradation of agricultural soils, accompanied by mineral depletion in food, has largely been the result of the inhibition of this natural carbon pathway.

When carbon supply is limited by the loss of the primary pathway for sequestration, the physical, chemical and biological functions normally performed by healthy soil are markedly reduced.

Historical levels of soil carbon

Noted Polish explorer and geologist, Sir Paul Edmund [Count] Strzelecki, travelled widely through the colonies of south-eastern Australia during the period 1839 to 1843, collecting minerals, visiting farms and analysing soils. One of the questions Strzelecki posed was, what factors determine soil productivity? He collected 41 soil samples from farmed paddocks of either high or low productivity. The analyses revealed that the most important determinant of soil productivity was the level of soil carbon (measured as organic matter in Strzelecki’s day).

Of the 41 samples analysed, Strzelecki (1845) found …

The top 10 soils in the high productivity group had organic matter levels ranging from 11% to 37.75% (average 20%). The lowest ranking 10 soils in the low productivity group had organic matter levels ranging from 2.2% to 5.0% (average 3.72%)

The soils with the highest organic matter levels also had the highest moisture holding capacity, with an 18-fold difference in capacity to hold moisture between the lowest and the highest (Strzelecki 1845).

Strzelecki’s data indicate that organic matter levels in the early settlement period were around five to ten times higher than in many soils today. The soil test data from Strzelecki is consistent with the writings of first settlers, who described soils in the early settlement period as soft, spongy and absorbent. The 1840s journal of George Augustus Robinson, for example, contains numerous references to the extremely fertile and productive soils encountered by pastoralists in the mid-1800s (Presland 1970).

Soil carbon and soil moisture

In addition to enhancing nutrient availability, carbon performs many other functions in soil, including the maintenance of soil porosity, aeration and water-holding capacity.

Glenn Morris (Morris 2004) extensively researched the water holding capacity of humus (an extremely stable form of soil carbon) and concluded that within the soil matrix, one part of soil humus could, on average, retain a minimum of four parts of soil water.

From this relationship it can be calculated that an increase of 16.8 litres (almost two buckets) of extra plant available water could be stored per square metre in the top 30 cm (12”) of soil with a bulk density of 1.4 g/cm3, for every 1% increase (in absolute terms) in the level of soil organic carbon. This equates to 168,000 litres of water that could be stored per hectare, in addition to the water-holding capacity of the soil itself (Jones 2006).

The flip side is that the same amount of water-holding capacity will be lost when soil carbon levels fall. Low soil moisture and low levels of soil organic carbon go hand in hand.

Soil organic carbon levels in many areas have fallen by at least 3% (in absolute terms) since the time of European settlement, This reduction in soil carbon content represents the LOSS of the ability of soil to store around 504,000 litres of water per hectare.

Mycorrhizas and water

It is well known that mycorrhizal fungi access and transport nutrients in exchange for carbon from the host plant (Killham 1994, Leake et al. 2004). What is less well known is that in seasonally dry, variable, or unpredictable environments (that is, most of Australia), mycorrhizal fungi play an extremely important role in plant-water dynamics.

Mycorrhizal fungi can supply moisture to plants in dry environments by exploring micropores not accessible to plant roots. They can also improve hydraulic conductivity by bridging macropores in dry soils of low water-holding capacity (such as sands). In these situations, external wicking along the hyphae is of greater importance than cytoplasmic flow (Allen 2007). Mycorrhizal fungi can also increase drought resistance by stimulating an increase in the number and depth of plant roots.

Soil carbon and soil nitrogen

Aside from water, nitrogen is frequently the most limiting factor to crop and pasture production. It is one of the great ironies of agriculture that the atmosphere is around 78% nitrogen, but not one single molecule is directly available to plants. There are approximately 78,000 tonnes of nitrogen gas sitting above every hectare of land. Apart from small accessions via lightning, this nitrogen cannot be accessed without a microbial bridge.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria – be they free-living in the rhizosphere, confined to nodules on plant roots, or existing as endophytes in leaves or stems – derive most of their energy from liquid carbon fixed during photosynthesis.

Adding water-soluble nitrogen in the form of urea, anhydrous ammonia or nitrate destabilises the plant-soil ecosystem by reducing the activity of mycorrhizal fungi and free living N-fixing bacteria (Killham 1994). The presence of high levels of water-soluble nitrogen in soil sends a signal to plants to reduce the supply of liquid carbon to microbial symbionts, effectively inhibiting the microbial associations that would otherwise supply atmospheric nitrogen for free.

This contradicts the widely promoted belief that nitrogenous fertiliser needs to be added in order for stable soil carbon to form. Indeed, the opposite is true (Khan et al. 2007, Larson 2007, Mulvaney et al. 2009).

Soil test data show that as soil carbon levels increase in microbially active soils, availabilities of P, K, S, Ca, Zn and B commonly increase, while levels of nitrate nitrogen are often reduced.

If plants are mycorrhizal, they don’t require nitrogen in a mineralised form, that is, in the form of nitrate or ammonium. In order to transport mineralised nitrogen, mycorrhizal fungi have to convert it to glutamate, which represents an energy cost. For this reason, nitrogen is preferentially transported in an organic form, generally as amino acids such as glycine and glutamine (Leake et al. 2004).

Utilisation of organic nitrogen by mycorrhizal fungi closes the nitrogen loop and prevents soil acidity, as well as preventing volatilisation of nitrogen to the atmosphere and leaching to aquifers, rivers and streams. Changes to soil chemistry and nitrogen dynamics in microbially balanced soils also reduce the abundance of ‘weedy’ species such as annual ryegrass, capeweed, mustard weed and thistles. The germination of these species is stimulated by the ready availability of nitrate nitrogen.

Soil as a methane sink

Wetlands, rivers, oceans, lakes, plants, decaying vegetation (especially in moist environments such as rainforests) – and a wide variety of creatures great and small – from termites to whales, have been producing methane for millions of years. The rumen, for example, evolved as an efficient way of digesting plant material around 90 million years ago.

Ruminants including buffalo, goats, wild sheep, camels, giraffes, reindeer, caribou, antelopes and bison existed in greater numbers prior to the Industrial Revolution than are present today.

There would have been an overwhelming accumulation of methane in the atmosphere had not sources and sinks been able to cancel each other over past millennia.

Although most methane is inactivated by the hydroxyl (OH) free radical in the atmosphere (Quirk 2010), another source of inactivation is oxidisation in biologically active soils. Aerobic soils are net sinks for methane, due to the presence of methanotrophic bacteria, which utilise methane as their sole energy source (Dunfield 2007). Methanotrophs have the opposite function to methanogens, which bind free hydrogen atoms to carbon to reduce acidosis in the rumen.

Recent research undertaken by Professor Mark Adams, Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Sydney University, found that one hectare of pasture land could oxidise as much methane as emitted by 162 head of cattle in an entire year (Cawood 2009). The highest methane oxidation rate recorded in soil to date has been 137mg/m2/day (Dunfield 2007) which, over one hectare, equates to the absorption of the methane produced by approximately 1000 head of cattle.

In Australia, it has been widely promoted that livestock are a significant contributor to atmospheric methane and that global methane levels are rising. However, there is no evidence to suggest that methane emissions from ruminant sources are increasing. Indeed, it would seem there has been no clear trend to changes in global methane levels, from any source, over recent decades.

The increase in global methane levels from 1930 to 1970 was due to emissions from the production, transmission and distribution of natural gas (Quirk 2010). There was a tenfold increase in the use of natural gas through the 1960s and 1970s. The source of many of the natural gas emissions, such as leakages from the Trans-Siberian pipeline, have since been rectified (Quirk 2010). Measurements over the last 25 years show concentrations of atmospheric methane are merely exhibiting natural variation, with no significant trends in any direction (Fig.3).

Fig. 3. Variations in annual changes in atmospheric methane concentrations
from 1983 to 2009, from Dlugokencky et al. (2009).
Measurements are in parts per billion per year.

There is therefore no scientific basis for selectively targeting ruminants for a ‘methane tax’, or worse, interfering with this natural process. Farming in ways that enhance, rather than inhibit, soil biological activity, would improve the capacity of agricultural soil to act as a methane sink, helping balance the greenhouse equation. The issue with today’s industrialised approach to agriculture is that methanotrophic bacteria are chemically sensitive. Their activities are reduced by nitrogenous fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, acidification and excessive soil disturbance (Dunfield 2007).

Soil carbon and human health

The nutritional status of soils, plants, animals and people has fallen dramatically in the last 50 years, due to losses in soil carbon, the key driver for soil nutrient cycles. Soil health and human health are more deeply connected than many people realise. Food is often viewed in terms of quantity available, hence ‘food scarcity’ is not seen as an issue in Australia. However, food produced from depleted soils does not contain the essential trace minerals required for the effective functioning of our immune systems.

Routine premature deaths from degenerative conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer have become prominent when they were once relatively uncommon. The cancer rate, for example, has increased from approximately 1 in 100, fifty years ago, to almost 1 in 2 today. The effectiveness of the human immune system has been compromised by increased exposure to more and more chemicals coupled with insufficient mineral density in food.

The low nutritional status of many basic food items is highlighted in data from the UK Ministry of Health. Depletion in the level of minerals in vegetables for the period 1940-1991, for example, shows copper levels reduced by 76%, calcium by 46%, iron by 27%, magnesium by 24% and potassium by 16%. Deficiencies in plants translate through to deficiencies in animals. A piece of steak now contains only half the amount of iron that it would have contained 50 years ago.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies in food indicate that the symbiotic relationship between plants and soil microbes, whereby minerals are exchanged for liquid carbon, has been disrupted.

The best national health policy would be a national soils policy. But we don’t have one.

Our hospitals are over-filled and our health system is struggling to cope with illnesses that are highly correlated to the lack of essential vitamins, minerals and trace elements in our diet. The availability of these nutrients is determined to a large extent by the integrity of the soil food-web and the microbe bridge, which in turn are dependent on active soil sequestration of dissolved organic carbon.

Food labelling and a ‘Soil Integrity Index’

Food choices can have very significant effects on the kind of food produced and how it is produced. Currently, it is not possible for consumers to choose foods high in minerals, grown on healthy soils, as there is no labelling for food quality.

It is proposed that a ‘Soil Integrity Index’ with index parameters of

1. level of microbial diversity
2. soil carbon content and
3. soil water holding capacity

be used as the basis for a food labelling system.

The labels would need to be simple, with perhaps a star system (as in one, two or three stars). If a food labelling mechanism was in place, Australia’s largely city-based population could use food choices to improve not only the health of their families, but also the function and resilience of agricultural soils, thereby actively participating and supporting biology friendly farming.

The future landscape

The challenge for the future prosperity of Australian agriculture is to convert soil from its current status as a net source of carbon, to a revitalised state as a net carbon sink.

Agricultural research tends to focus on conventionally managed crop and pasture lands where intensive use of agrochemicals has dramatically reduced the number and diversity of soil flora and fauna, including beneficial microbes such as mycorrhizal fungi. As a result, the potential contribution of microbial symbionts to agricultural productivity has been greatly underestimated (Allen 2007).

Building soil carbon does not require adding biomass to soil. While crop stubbles and mulch are important for protecting soil from wind and water erosion and buffering temperature extremes, their contribution to soil carbon is limited by eventual decomposition to CO2.

The first step to restoring soil function is ‘do no harm’. A simple change from high-analysis N and/or P fertilisers to biological products such as worm leachate (vermiliquid), compost extract, seaweed extract and/or fish emulsion, applied as a seed dressing and/or a post-emergent foliar spray, will support microbial diversity, increase plant photosynthetic rate, increase the flow of liquid carbon to soil and enhance humification.

As the soil chemistry adjusts and nitrogen is converted to an organic form (freely available to mycorrhizal fungi but not to annual weeds) the incidence of pests, weeds and diseases that are stimulated by low levels of microbial diversity and high rates of water soluble nitrogen, will decline. As a result, there will be less reliance on the use of pesticides and herbicides that reduce the ability of soil to act as a sink for carbon, nitrogen, methane and moisture.

Changing the face of agriculture

Since 1960, global food production has doubled. At the same time, the soil resource on which food production is based has become seriously degraded.

The impoverishment of agricultural soils through depleted levels of biological activity and reduced carbon flow poses a greater threat to human existence than climate change.

In many regions of Australia, the effects of lower than average rainfall over the past decade have been compounded by loss of soil resilience and reduced moisture-holding capacity (Fig.4).

Fig. 4. Cropping over an old fence-line clearly demonstrates the extent to
which soil has been depleted by conventional farming practices. Paddocks
on either side of the fence have a history of high nitrogenapplication
(Photo Richard May).

It has been calculated that in the next 50 years, the planet will need to produce as much food as it has in the entire history of humankind. The way we produce that food will require a radical departure from business as usual.

At the beginning of this paper it was noted that the level of agricultural debt in Australia had increased almost 6-fold over the last 15 years. The amount of money invested by the farming community on non-biological inputs increases every year. Many of these products inhibit microbial diversity, preventing natural carbon flow to soils. Cessation of carbon flow reduces soil integrity, the mineral density in food and human health. It also prevents the processes of humification and topsoil formation from operating to any significant extent. The end result is even greater expenditure on agrochemicals in attempts to control the pest, weed, disease and fertility problems’ that ensue.

The statement that small farmers need to ‘get big or get out’ overlooks the fact that profit is the difference between expenditure and income. In years to come we will perhaps wonder why it took so long to realise the futility of trying to grow crops in dysfunctional soils, relying solely on increasingly expensive synthetic inputs.

Economic development is only sustainable if it strengthens, rather than depletes, natural resources.

The soil’s ability to produce nutrient dense, high vitality food – which after all, is agriculture’s real purpose – depends on appropriate management. Enhancing the natural flow of carbon to soils will result in increased microbial diversity, improved nutrient cycles, enhanced soil water-holding capacity, greater resilience, improved catchment health – and a more satisfying, profitable future for farmers.

The longer we delay undertaking regenerative changes to land management based on biology friendly farming practices that rebuild carbon-rich soils, the more soil carbon and soil water will be lost, exposing an increasingly fragile agricultural sector to escalating production risks, rising input costs and vulnerability to climatic extremes.

Its time to move away from depletion-style, high emission, chemically based industrial agriculture and get serious about grass-roots biologically based alternatives.

The future of Australia depends on the future of our soil – and our willingness to look after it.

Rebuilding soil productivity via the restoration of natural carbon flow and the sequestration of stable soil carbon is the only means of saving agriculture’s bacon – and ensuring a future for human society as we know it.

Literature cited

• Allen, M.F (2007). ‘Mycorrhizal fungi: highways for water and nutrients in arid soils’. Soil Science Society of America, Vadose Zone Journal. Vol 6 (2) pp. 291-297. DOI:10.2136/vzj2006.0068.
• Burgess, N. (2010). Agricultural debt from 1994 to 2009. Sourced from Westpac Economics& Reserve Bank of Australia. nburgess@westpac.com.au
• Cawood, M. (2009). ETS lifeline: soils capable of absorbing cattle methane. The Land, 3 September 2009.
• Dlugokencky, E. J. et al. (2009). Observational constraints on recent increases in the atmospheric CH4 burden. Geophysical Research Letters. 36, L18803, DOI:10.1029/2009GL039780.
• Dunfield, P. F. (2007). The soil methane sink. In D.S. Reay, C.N. Hewitt, K.A Smith and J. Grace, eds. Greenhouse Gas Sinks. pp. 152-170. Wallingford UK.
• Jones, C. E. (2006). Carbon and catchments. National ‘Managing the Carbon Cycle’ Forum, Queanbeyan, NSW, 22-23 November 2006. http://www.amazingcarbon.com
• Jones, C.E. (2008). Liquid carbon pathway unrecognised. Australian Farm Journal, July 2008, pp. 15-17. http://www.amazingcarbon.com
• Khan, S.A, Mulvaney, R.L, Ellsworth, T.R. and Boast, C.W. (2007). The myth of nitrogen fertilization for soil carbon sequestration. Journal of Environmental Quality 36:1821-1832. DOI:10.2134/jeq2007.0099
• Killham, K. (1994). ‘Soil Ecology’. Cambridge University Press.
• Larson, D. L (2007). Study reveals that nitrogen fertilizers deplete soil organic carbon. University of Illinois news, October 29, 2007. http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/news/internal/preview.cfm?NID=4185
• Leake, J.R., Johnson, D., Donnelly, D.P., Muckle, G.E., Boddy, L. and Read, D.J. (2004). Networks of power and influence: the role of mycorrhizal mycelium in controlling plant communities and agroecosystem functioning. Canadian Journal of Botany, 82: 1016-1045. DOI:10.1139/B04-060
• Liebig, M.A, Schmer, M.R, Vogel, K.P. and Mitchell. R.B. (2008). Soil carbon storage by switchgrass grown for bioenergy. Bioenergy Research 1: 215-222. DOI:10.1007/s12155-008-9019-5
• Morris G. D. (2004). Sustaining national water supplies by understanding the dynamic capacity that humus has to increase soil water-holding capacity. Thesis submitted for Master of Sustainable Agriculture, University of Sydney, July 2004.
• Mulvaney, R.L, Khan S.A, and Ellsworth, T.R. (2009). Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers deplete soil nitrogen: a global dilemma for sustainable cereal production. Journal of Environmental Quality 38:2295-2314. DOI:10.2134/jeq2008.0527
• Quirk T. W. (2010). Twentieth century sources of methane in the atmosphere. Energy and Environment, 21(3), pp. 251-256.
• Strzelecki, Paul Edmund de, (1845). Physical description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land: accompanied by a geological map, sections and diagrams, and figures of the organic remains / by P.E. de Strzelecki. Printed for Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London. (Note: prior to 1851 the state of Victoria was part of the colony of New South Wales).
• Watson, L. (2010). Portugal gives green light to pasture carbon farming as a recognised offset. Australian Farm Journal, January 2010, pp. 44-47.

Thanks to Darren Doherty for the head’s up on this new draft document from the Soil Carbon Coalition on measuring changes in soil carbon levels – the key indicator of soil health and fertility.

As we all (should) know well, land use changes over the last several centuries have significantly increased atmospheric CO2 levels. Soil mismanagement, which has increased in tandem with our burgeoning human population, has released mammoth amounts of carbon from the soil, where it is a positive, into the atmosphere, where it becomes, in its present excessive levels, a negative instead. Correct soil management, in contrast, can play a significant role in reversing that trend by pulling excess atmospheric CO2 out of the sky, through photosynthesis, and returning it to the soil in humus, the stable, final state of decomposition of organic matter – thus transforming excess CO2 from being a pollutant into a rich habitat for the micro- and macro-organisms that are the foundation of all life on this planet. Permaculture, through its favouring small scale, low-to-no till polycultures, and where the soil is always protected by a ’skin’ of plant or mulch cover, and maintained by appropriate naturally harvested moisture levels, is a powerful system for restoring the Gaia state of carbon balance.

If you’re building humus/carbon levels in your soil, you’re building fertility and health. More, you’re a hero – setting an example that if all were to follow, would rapidly put this planet back onto a sustainable path.

For those interested to more accurately gauge the effectiveness of their soil management, the document linked to here may prove entirely useful.

It is intended as a guide for do-it-yourselfers as well as part of the operating method for the Soil Carbon Challenge. It is also the first guide that attempts to understand and accommodate the variety of purposes or objectives people have in measuring soil carbon. Up to now, soil carbon measurement has been treated almost exclusively as a technical issue. But the main sources of risk and uncertainty in achieving the objectives are social, having to do with beliefs and attitudes.

Based on published literature and experience, this method outlines how to establish fixed plots, take samples, get them analyzed with the dry combustion method, and make calculations from the results.

Though targeted primarily at those who want to show possibility, and get feedback for their management, the guide should be helpful for those who wish to quantify carbon tonnage for "offsets" or research projects as well. How and what you measure, as well as the sources of uncertainty, depend on your purpose.

Measuring carbon change means establishing and measuring baseline plots, and then remeasuring them after 3 years or so. – Soil Carbon Coalition

What’s more, planting up will give us a surplus of the resources needed to create clean carbon negative energy, biomass being the fuel which creates clean electricity and biochar/ charcoal. The role of biochar in reducing the level of carbon in the atmosphere is huge. By turning biomass into biochar in fact we permanently sequester carbon from the atmosphere and are left with a potent ingredient to replenish the soil. It has been proven that digging charcoal into the soil enriches it and hugely improves growth rates, overall yield and soil life/health, thus feeding into a positive cycle of aiding the regrowth of trees and plants on which a low impact system relies.

Research shows biochar can also be beneficial for the production of carbon negative energy (“Bioenergy with biochar carbon storage facilitates the generation of carbon-negative energy” – UN) . Biochar is produced by cooking biomass in a machine called a gasifier in a zero/low oxygen environment, simultaneously producing syngas through a process known as pyrolysis/gasification. Gasification is a very efficient way of extracting energy from plants whilst permanently sequestering carbon from the atmosphere (up to 85% efficiencies at the moment) . The syngas co-product is then transformed into electricity via an internal combustion, gas turbine engine and alternator or fuel cell such as the bloombox into carbon negative electricity with which we can keep our computers and washing machines running and charge up the electric vehicle/energy store.

Our campaign:

Humanity is facing four fundamental problems in these times:

• Climate Change
• Biodiversity Loss
• Peak Oil + many other finite resources
• Soil Depletion

If all of these problems are not addressed, civilisation as we know it will end.

Fortunately, the knowledge and technology exists to deal with all of these problems simultaneously. These are:

• Permaculture: Forest Garden polycultures have been repeatedly shown to produce surpluses of food, materials and energy crops, whilst creating conditions for biodiversity to improve. Increasing the overall amount of perennial living matter on the planet locks up CO2.
• Charcoal/biochar: production which locks up CO2 whilst restoring soil, improving water retention and increasing yields.
• Biomass gasification: a process which gives 1kWh (1 unit) of electricity for each 1-1.5 kilo of plant matter (biomass). Biomass gasification produces clean energy whilst locking up CO2 taken from the atmosphere by the plant during growth, in the form of the charcoal co-product which is returned to the land.
• Consumption reduction: localisation, passive solar building techniques, waste elimination – systems should cycle and feed each other as in nature.

To implement these solutions on a large scale, planning laws must change to allow people back on the land to build off-grid low impact forest garden based eco-villages.

Growup.org.uk is campaigning to obtain this change in the law in the UK, but it’s also actively promoting a more sustainable way of living, spreading awareness about the opportunities we have to shift to a more meaningful way of life, reconnecting with nature and community, whilst improving standards of living through consideration of natural capital.

Our exhibition:

Our ideas are expressed in a weekly exhibition on sustainable living called ‘Forward the Evolution’ which started on Saturday June 12, 2010 in Oval, London, and will be on every Thursday from 6pm till midnight, with film shows, live music and information sharing.

Get involved:

Luckily, the UK Government wants to reforest two million acres of the UK for its carbon sink potential. They also need 300,000 new homes by 2020. Access to land will mean new houses, new jobs, more growth as in forest, food, soil fertility, biodiversity, sustainable energy, CO2 mitigation, communities and less waste. All of the techniques and technologies exist and are supported by sources such as the UN, the UK government, the Rand Corporation, The Royal Society along with many of the research papers upon which their findings are based, which you will find in the growup website pages.

This is positive, possible and necessary action. Are you up for it?

There are various ways to get involved in this project. The simplest is to keep in touch by email at info (at) growup.org.uk or befriend us on facebook.

You could also sign our online petition which will be delivered to new Liberal Democrat Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne as well as 10 Downing Street.

Support the cause by sending an e-mail to your MP to demand a change in planning law to enable people to address the dire problems we face. Here is a template.

Join us at one of our events such as the exhibition or online at growup.org.uk

First published in November 2007, by George Monbiot: journalist, author, academic and environmental and political activist, United Kingdom

Has BP ever made a profit? The question looks daft. The oil company posted profits of $26bn last year(1). There’s no doubt that BP has been pumping money into the pockets of its shareholders. The question is whether this money is what the company says it is. BP calls it profit. I call it the provision the firm should be making against future liabilities.

Despite an angry letter from two US senators(2) and a warning from Barack Obama about spending big money on their shareholders while nickeling and diming coastal people(3), despite the fact that it has no idea what its total liabilities in the Gulf of Mexico will be, BP seems to be planning to pay a dividend this year. It’s likely to amount to more than $10bn. As the two senators noted, by moving money “off the company’s books and into investors’ pockets”, BP “will make it much more difficult to repay the US government and American communities”.

Pollution has been defined as a resource in the wrong place. That’s also a pretty good description of the company’s profits. The great plumes of money that have been bursting out of the company’s accounts every year are not BP’s to give away. They consist, in part or in whole, of the externalised costs the company has failed to pay, and which the rest of society must carry.

Does this sound familiar? In the ten years preceding the crash, the banks posted and disposed of stupendous profits. When their risky ventures failed, they
discovered that they hadn’t made sufficient provision against future costs, and had to go begging from the state. They had classified their annual surplus as profit and given it to their investors and staff long before it was safe to do so.

Last week the British government bumped into another consequence of failing to take future costs into account. Chris Huhne, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, revealed that nuclear decommissioning liabilities will cost the government £4bn more than it was expecting to pay over the next three years(4). This will cancel out two-thirds of the vicious cuts the government has announced and swallow most of his department’s budget. As Huhne pointed out, “It is a classic example of short-termism. I cannot think of a better example of a failure to take a decision in the short run costing the taxpayer a hell of a lot more in the long run.”(5)

The decommissioning costs imposed on society by nuclear power will be dwarfed by those imposed by the fossil fuel industry. They include, but are not confined to, the money that will have to spent on adapting to climate change. The United Nations estimates this cost at $50–170 billion a year, but a report last year by British scientists suggested that this is around three times too low, as it counts only a small proportion of likely impacts(6).

The UN has hired the consultancy Trucost to estimate the costs dumped on the environment by the world’s 3000 biggest public companies. It doesn’t report until October, but earlier this year the Guardian published the interim results(7). Trucost had estimated the damage these companies inflicted on the environment in 2008 at $2.2 trillion, equivalent to one third of their profits for that year. This too is likely to be an underestimate, as the draft report did not try to value the long-term costs of any issue except climate change. Nor did it count the wider social costs of environmental change.

A paper by the New Economics Foundation in 2006 used government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions to calculate the liabilities of Shell and BP(8). It found that while the two companies had just posted profits of £25bn, they had incurred costs in the same year of £46.5bn. The oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well is scarcely more damaging, and its eventual impacts scarcely more expensive, than the oil which is captured by neighbouring rigs then processed and burnt as intended.

The full costs imposed by the oil companies, which include the loss of human lives and the extinction of species, cannot be accounted. But even if they could, you shouldn’t expect the companies to carry them. They might be incapable of capping their leaks; they are adept at capping their liabilities. The Deepwater Horizon rig, which is owned by Transocean, is registered in the Marshall Islands(9). Most oil companies pull the same trick: they register their rigs and ships in small countries with weak governments and no international reach. These nations are, in other words, incapable of regulating them.

Flags of convenience signify more than the place of registration: they’re an unmistakable sign that responsibilities are being offloaded. If powerful governments were serious about tackling pollution, the first thing they would do would be to force oil companies to register their property in the places where their major interests lie.

US lawyers are drooling over the prospect of what one of them called “the largest tort we’ve had in this country”(10). Some financial analysts are predicting the death of BP, as the fines and compensation it will have to pay outweigh its earnings. I don’t believe a word of it.

ExxonMobil was initially fined $5bn for the Exxon Valdez disaster, in 1989. But its record-breaking profits allowed it pay record-breaking legal fees: after 19 years of argument it got the fine reduced to $507m(11). That’s equivalent to the profit it made every ten days last year. Yesterday, after 25 years of deliberations, an Indian court triumphantly convicted Union Carbide India Ltd of causing death by negligence through the Bhopal catastrophe(12). There was just one catch: Union Carbide India Ltd ceased to exist many years ago. It wound itself up to avoid this outcome, and its liabilities vanished in a puff of poisoned gas.

BP’s insurers will take a hit, so will the pension funds which invested so heavily in it, but, though some people are proposing costs of $40 or even $60bn, I will bet the price of a barrel of crude that the company is still in business ten years from now. Everything else – the ecosystems it blights, the fishing and tourist industries, a habitable climate – might collapse around it, but BP, like the banks, will be deemed too big to fail. Other people will pick up the costs.

There is an alternative, but it is unlikely to materialise. Just as Norway has treated its oil money not as profit but as provision against a tougher future(13), so the governments in whose territories oil companies work should force them to pay into a decommissioning fund. The levy should reflect the costs economists are able to calculate, plus a contingency for those we can’t yet foresee.

This would outrage the oil firms, as it would render many of them unprofitable. But there’s a simple answer to that: the money currently defined as profit is nothing of the kind.

References:

1. BP Annual Review 2009. http://www.bp.com/assets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/set_branch/STAGING/common_assets/downloads/pdf/BP_Annual_Review_2009.pdf
2. Letter from Senators Charles E. Schumer and Ron Wyden to Tony Hayward, 2nd June 2010. http://wyden.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=b2b6660f-9f23-4dbd-a4d2-11a0889edcc8
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/9112408
4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/01/chris-huhne-black-hole-nuclear-power-budget
5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jun/01/chris-huhne-black-hole-nuclear-power-budget
6. Martin Parry et al, 2009. Assessing the Costs of Adaptation to Climate Change: A Review of the
   UNFCCC and Other Recent Estimates. International Institute for Environment and Development. http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/11501IIED.pdf
7. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage
8. NEF and WWF, 2006. Hooked on oil: breaking the habit with
   a windfall tax. http://www.neweconomics.org/sites/neweconomics.org/files/Hooked_on_Oil_1.pdf
9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/30/oil-spill-deepwater-horizon-marshall-islands
10. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/may/31/bp-compensation-claims-us-oil-spill
11. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article4212940.ece
12. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/07/bhopal-disaster-india-seven-convicted
13. The Government Pension Fund. See http://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/fin/Selected-topics/the-government-pension-fund.html?id=1441

Click for full view Courtesy: Marc Roberts

Spring has sprung in Europe, and yesterday I saw my first bee of the new decade zig by. I admire these unselfish little workers – conscientiously going about their daily duties, wholly unaware of their own significance. They ask little, give much, and so much depends on their instinctive behaviour.

Unfortunately too many of us are totally unaware of their significance too, it seems.

The value of pollinators starts to come into focus when you consider that more than 80% of our crop species require pollination for reproduction. Imagine if you had to walk the fields with a feather duster and do the job yourself?

In centuries past, bees were just one of a great many pollinators, who all worked in different ways but achieved similar goals – that of increasing diversity and stabilising the natural order of the plant kingdom. Today, through monocropping, however, we’ve eliminated the niche environments many of those ‘other’ pollinators (butterflies, moths, bats, nectar sucking birds like hummingbirds, etc.) depended on. Our mismanagement of natural systems has put the critical burden of pollination on one species in particular, the European honeybee. It is now the pollinator of choice for the industrial agriculture system worldwide. And, it’s quietly dying.

Four years ago an environmental tipping point was reached that has seen honeybee populations plummet. It began in the U.S. of A. but has spread to dozens of countries worldwide. Every year since, beekeepers have opened their hives at the end of winter with a high degree of apprehension…. This year initial reports tell us that bee casualty rates for the 2009/2010 winter may be up to 50%.

America’s dwindling honey bee population has been badly hit by the bitter winter, the harshest in decades, with experts warning that winter losses could be as high as 50 percent.

Beekeepers normally lose around 10 percent of their colonies during the wintertime, when food stores are low and bees are confined to the hive.

But preliminary estimates indicate that this year, losses will be between 30 to 50 percent, said David Mendes, president of the American Beekeeping Federation. – Sydney Morning Herald

And, pesticide companies are attracting unwanted attention over this:

Among all the stresses to bee health, it’s the pesticides that are attracting scrutiny now. A study published Friday in the scientific journal PLOS (Public Library of Science) One found about three out of five pollen and wax samples from 23 states had at least one systemic pesticide — a chemical designed to spread throughout all parts of a plant.

EPA officials said they are aware of problems involving pesticides and bees and the agency is "very seriously concerned."

The pesticides are not a risk to honey sold to consumers, federal officials say. And the pollen that people eat is probably safe because it is usually from remote areas where pesticides are not used, Pettis said. But the PLOS study found 121 different types of pesticides within 887 wax, pollen, bee and hive samples.

"The pollen is not in good shape," said Chris Mullin of Penn State University, lead author.

None of the chemicals themselves were at high enough levels to kill bees, he said, but it was the combination and variety of them that is worrisome.

University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum called the results "kind of alarming."

Despite EPA assurances, environmental groups don’t think the EPA is doing enough on pesticides.

Bayer Crop Science started petitioning the agency to approve a new pesticide for sale in 2006. After reviewing the company’s studies of its effects on bees, the EPA gave Bayer conditional approval to sell the product two years later, but said it had to carry a label warning that it was "potentially toxic to honey bee larvae through residues in pollen and nectar."

The Natural Resources Defense Council sued, saying the agency failed to give the public timely notice for the new pesticide application. In December, a federal judge in New York agreed, banning the pesticide’s sale and earlier this month, two more judges upheld the ruling.

"This court decision is obviously very painful for us right now, and for growers who don’t have access to that product," said Jack Boyne, an entomologist and spokesman for Bayer Crop Science. "This product quite frankly is not harmful to honeybees."

Boyne said the pesticide was sold for only about a year and most sales were in California, Arizona and Florida. The product is intended to disrupt the mating patterns of insects that threaten citrus, lettuce and grapes, he said.

Berenbaum’s research shows pesticides are not the only problem. She said multiple viruses also are attacking the bees, making it tough to propose a single solution.

"Things are still heading downhill," she said. – MyEarthlink.net

As much as we might detest dousing our environment and our food with pesticides, I don’t believe this is the only cause of this particular problem – a disease which has been likened to HIV in humans, as it effects the immune system of our six-legged friends.

Consider that in the natural order of things, in a biodiverse system, bees and other pollinators would be feeding on a wide variety of food sources. But now it’s something else entirely, as they deal with vast fields of only the same thing, and have their honey replaced with sugar water. Imagine if you ate only french fries, every day for years. How can we expect bees to survive on nothing but monocrop systems, many of which are genetically modified to produce pesticides in every cell of the plant?

If we’re looking for root causes, there are a great many of them, as I expressed in Colony Collapse Disorder, a Moment for Reflection – but if we’re looking for solutions, that’s far easier. Think of the resilience and stability that comes of increasing diversity. Think food forests. Think small scale.

While the mainstream media will focus on the honeybee – essentially an industrial worker – and the direct implications for the agricultural industry, in terms of profits and reduced crop harvests, it should be noted that the loss of pollinators (strange things are happening to bats too, by the way) impacts much more than just almonds and apples. Those ‘other’ pollinators I mentioned above should not be forgotten. Indeed, they should be reinstated. These pollinators, many of which are endangered or have already gone the way of the dodo, are critical to non-agricultural plant systems that support all life on the planet.

Nature keeps ringing the alarm bell, trying to point us in the right direction. Are we listening?