Biochar
Food Chain Radio Show #1172
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
A Burning Question – Biochar
Guests: Nutriculturalist Gary Kline, Blossom Consulting Services, Olympia, WA,
& Forester and Biochar Advocate Jenna Bennett
I had an occasion to spend some time in the headwaters of the Amazon. One of the things I found to be truly amazing about the Amazon was its soil.
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – Biochar and Terra Preta – Can the wastes of forests be used to turn deserts green?
You see, though the Amazon holds so much greenery it is often called the lungs of the earth, its soil holds no nutrients! It is nearly inert, like glass!
Most all of the give and take of life in the Amazon takes place on the surface of the soil. You can see it before your very eyes. A leaf falls from a tree. The moment it hits the ground, it is disassembled by a myriad of hungry organisms and taken right back up into the forest. The fact is, death does not last very long in the Amazon!
For that reason, it was long thought that the Amazon soil could not support a population of people who lived by agriculture. Even though the first Europeans to explore the Amazon basin claimed to have found vast populations of people living in cities supported by agriculture. But those populations were gone by the time the second Europeans went looking. All that remained were hunters and gatherers.
Not too long ago, scientists flying above the Amazon saw patterns below that indicated civilization. When they down for a look, they found that civilizations did indeed exist in the Amazon. And they did so with an agriculture based on a black soil, which they called, in Portuguese, “Terra Preta de Indio,” or “black earth of the Indian.”
And that, my friends, is what is truly amazing about the Amazon. People we tend to call “primitive,” turned the inert soil of the Amazon basin into life-holding, civilization-supporting Terra Preta, and they did it with smart fire!
Now, if we were to compare the destructive fires of our civilized forests, with the constructive fires of the primitive Amazon forests, we would probably find ourselves asking:
Leave a comment below: Can we turn stupid fire into smart fire?
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