The potential for large-scale removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis and related land-based carbon sequestration activities is both large and largely overlooked. Strategies and co-benefits include: enriching soil carbon, no-till farming with perennials, employing climate-friendly livestock practices, conserving natural habitat, restoring degraded watersheds and rangelands, increasing biodiversity, lowering agricultural emissions, and producing local food. Each of these strategies has been demonstrated individually to be both practical and profitable. A carbon ranch bundles them into an economic and ecological whole with the aim of reducing the atmospheric content of CO2 while producing substantial co-benefits for all living things.
The Carbon Ranch
The Carbon Ranch
This essay explores the possibility of large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis and related land-based carbon sequestration activities.
Published in the Society for Range Management’s Rangelands magazine in April 2011
Originally published in the Quivira Coalition Journal No. 36, December 2010
The Story of Carbon
This is a condensed version of my blog The Carbon Pilgrim which ran from early 2012 to the end of 2015 and highlighted the many essential roles that carbon plays in life on Earth. The essay version here is a primer about carbon in all its glory — with photos! Its sole purpose is educational. Please share.
Prologue to Grass, Soil, Hope
“This is the story of how I came into Carbon Country. I’m a former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist who became a dues-paying member of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association as a producer of local, grass-fed beef. For a boy raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, during the heyday of sprawl, fast food, and disco music, this was a bewildering sequence of events.”
Originally published by Chelsea Green Press, June 2014
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/grass_soil_hope.