Requiem for 400

"The scope and speed of the climate changes, our lack of information about coupled systems, and our limited ability to influence human behavior all make it probable that more large surprises lie ahead."

We take no relish nor revel in saying we told you so. We will be long dead before the really worst of our best predictions will unfold. Our brief remaining lifetime will be punctuated by shocking glimpses of the shadows our future throws, tinged with remorse because though we tried, we were unable to reverse or mitigate any of this.

And now we can only look into the eyes of our grandchild and inwardly weep. There is no going home for prophets.

This past Thursday the two observatories that measure atmospheric carbon dioxide both reached the same milestone. On a 24-hour average, last Thursday was the first time atmospheric concentrations had exceeded four hundred parts per million by volume (400 ppmv). As we pointed out in 1990, “A doubling of atmospheric carbon by the middle of the next century (from 300 parts per million to 600 parts per million) will likely raise global temperatures between 2° and 9°F (1° to 5°C).”
 

The New York Times this morning compared Thursday’s event to canning pickles: “[I]f a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about [400] quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.”

Back in the mid-1980s, when we were writing Climate in Crisis, we took a more circumspect outlook:

The enormity of the crisis we have so recently discovered offers no reassurances. The scope and speed of the climate changes, our lack of information about coupled systems, and our limited ability to influence human behavior all make it probable that more large surprises lie ahead.

When Venus spun away from the sun almost 5 billion years ago, it was essentially the same size and composition as Earth. Today Earth is a blue water world with an oxygen atmosphere and abundant life. Venus is a lifeless, bone-dry rock shrouded in dense clouds of sulfuric acid. The surface of Venus is hot enough to melt lead.

Without its thick clouds, Venus would be approximately the same temperature as Earth. However, because its carbon dioxide atmosphere traps infrared radiation 100 times more efficiently than our atmosphere, Venus is 750°F hotter. Could Venus have once been like Earth, a blue planet covered by oceans? Could Venus's atmosphere, eons ago, have begun a carbon dioxide exchange cycle that got away and changed that planet forever? Could a runaway greenhouse effect have consumed its oxygen, evaporated its oceans, and turned its surface into a hellish oven incapable of sustaining life in any form?

As we look around the worlds within our solar system, we see no other life-bearing planets. This is the only one. Many of the processes which brought us to our present circumstances are processes that are capable of being reversed or overcome by new processes. We are taking enormous risks by tampering with our spaceship.

And yet we neither fully understand nor appear to consider these risks serious enough to give us pause.

By and large, ignoring screaming environmentalists and only going by the paper of record, most people still do not consider the risk of a runaway climate serious enough to give them pause. After all, its only too many pickle jars.

Quoting again from the Times:

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

The Times then compared our situation to having a bad day in the bar.

“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.”

And what, we might ask Professor Alley, might be the worst we can imagine?

We are descendants of creatures that lived in trees, swung from branch to branch, and addressed only those decisions immediately in front of us, like securing the next branch without missing our grasp, or ingesting enough fruit to quench our appetite. We sapien animals are linear thinkers, and solve problems in sequence, based on a narrow recognition of patterns, strongly influenced by our biological history. We do not see out-of-the-frame existentential threats, usually, or take them more seriously than children’s stories. We do not, as a broad population, recognize patterns that require understanding atmospheric chemistry or advanced mathematical modeling. We are more secure in attributing our personal hardships to the machinations of demons and gods; and our successes to our physical prowess and quick thinking.

And thus we drift, as Einstein said, “towards unparalleled catastrophes.” 

Fomenting Ferment with Sandor Katz

"... Saturday morning the koji has powdery sporulation. The tempeh from Thursday found its way to supper last night and will be in lunch again today. The mauby needs a stir, then is ready to bottle. The kefir water gets raisins to help it grow...."

The Art of Fermentation

Sandor Katz lives a couple hours across Tennessee from us, so on a delightful April weekend we decided to spend four days attending his Wild Fermentation Intensive. Sandor is quite the celebrity these days — after profiles in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked, Sandor’s own encyclopedia, The Art of Fermentation, still in hardcover, has galloped through several printings for Chelsea Green. Readers of Resilience will find scores of references to Sandor over the past few years, as sustainability bloggers have come to recognize the importance of fermentation to sustainability.

Sandor remains humble and accessible, despite being whisked around the world to rub elbows with celebrity chefs and food editors, take part in red carpet gastronomic events in Japan, France and California, or opine in various fora like Bioneers, the Mother Earth News Fair and TED. Today he is in Brooklyn and then Los Angeles, then the Ballymaloe Literary Festival of Food and Wine in County Cork, Ireland, then back to Tennessee, then on to Vermont, Oregon, Florida, Wisconsin, and Seattle in June.

For several years he has been doing very intimate, down home workshops and for this purpose has outfitted a rustic kitchen stadium in the basement of a house across the road from Short Mountain Distillery (makers of quality Tennessee Moonshine since 2012). This kitchen has everything needed for a dozen people to rub elbows while chopping vegetables, stuffing pickle jars, or heating raw milk to 180°F. Sandor keeps the workshops small enough to allow hands-on experiential learning, and cheap enough for anyone to attend, providing camping and self-cooked meals from his refrigerators and freezers stocked with the produce of his farming neighbors.

Arriving on Thursday, we were immediately plunged into two cultures that Sandor wants to get into the incubator right away — tempeh and koji. As Sandor describes his personal journey into fermentation — having too much cabbage and not wanting to let it go to waste — he is boiling a pot of cracked, organic soybeans and millet (the splitting was done by the hand-crank mill at the end of the counter, and the beans came from the same source as The Farm’s organic tofu and soy milk) until the hulls separate and can be skimmed off. After half an hour of participant introductions, the beans and millet come off the stove and are drained. As he pours the hot mix into two large mixing bowls to cool, Sandor is telling us about the Cultured Pickle Shop in Berkeley where he learned about a second ferment of kombucha juice with turnips.

The narrative — a practiced patter of pickling wisdom and microbial factoids — does not let up as he gently turns the beans with his fingers to cool. When the bean-millet mix is ready to inoculate — he inserts a meat thermometer to see if it is under 100° — he pours the starter from a small mixing bowl where the packaged powder (Rhizopus oligosporus) has been reviving in lukewarm water, as would a bread yeast, into the large mixing bowl and resumes fondling.

Now he demonstrates for us the method, first developed by the late Keith Steinkraus at Cornell University, of taking a zip-lock pint sandwich bag, laying it over a grilling screen, and perforating it with a grid of holes at one-inch intervals. We all take turns making perforations, filling each bag with about a pound of inoculated beans, flattening the contents and setting them into the incubator. The incubator is not a laboratory instrument, but befitting this Tennessee basement across from a moonshine still, is an old broken refrigerator with a lightbulb on a thermostat to keep it at 85-95°F.

When he is traveling, he sometimes takes a standard Dollar General plastic tub, a metal oven pan and a tubular aquarium heater. Filling the metal pan with an inch or two of water, he submerses the heater, set to 85-95°F, lays pan of water with heater in the tub, puts a rack on top, and is ready to incubate cultures.

Kefir feeding on raisins

Tempeh started, Sandor moves on to his pot of boiling barley, which will provide the substrate for koji. He tells us that the latest craze sweeping Tokyo is koji and salt, which is not that great tasting and not traditional, but people are snacking on it as if it were cheese doodles. When the barley is cool, he spreads it into cheesecloth-lined wooden trays and inoculates it with miso starter (Aspergillus orizae), in much the same fashion as the tempeh. Into the incubator it goes.

Now its time to make supper and Sandor has mixed chick peas, lentils and rice into a reddish paste that has been sitting quietly at room temperature to form sambar, something akin to chili. He steams up a pot of rice and breaks out some fermented daikon radish pickles and mixed vegetable krauts.

Koji

Over supper Sandor tells us the four main reasons people learned to ferment were (1) alcohol; (2) preserving food outside season; (3) detoxifying otherwise inedible food; and (4) saving energy. Ferments were the original fast foods.

Day Two begins, after eggs and sourdough pancakes, with sour tonic beverages. Mabí, also known as mauby, comes from a bark of a tree (Colubrina elliptica) found in the Caribbean, which naturally Sandor has a 5-pound sack of (from an importer in Connecticut). He says the name is a contraction of the creole “ma biere” (my beer). He has original mauby starter culture was smuggled home from St. Croix but he says kefir can also work as a starter. The process starts with brewing the bark into tea, then aerating back and forth between cups, and bottling it with some sugar. He suggests bottling it in plastic so you can tell if it is getting pressurized and relieve the pressure before it explodes. By Sunday the bottled mauby is a sweet fizzy soda.

Caleb bottles kombucha

We went on to start water kefir (with a slice of papaya for sugar), drain whey from curds of clabbered raw milk, and start a ginger bug. Sandor’s friend Caleb dropped in to show us how to make a carbonated kombucha tea, and we proceeded to make a variety of sour tonics and bottle them up for later sampling. Caleb likes grape juice, lemon juice, lime juice and various fruit teas. Kombucha is a SCOBY (Symbiotic Community of Bacteria and Yeast) that comes from Tibet, but is sensitive to flavors (although it seems to do well in apple juice) so a second fermentation of the liquid is needed to produce a flavored beverage.

The ginger bug is just a thumb of grated ginger, 3 Tbsp sugar (can be cane syrup, maple syrup, agave, etc.), and water in a mason jar with a cloth cover. In 2 days it’s ready for second fermentation. We age it in plastic bottles with turmeric and grapefruit juice.

Sandor ladles idly

After a tour of the distillery and samplings of Short Mountain Shine and Apple Pie, we are back to make some idly, using fermented black lentils (de-husked) and rice. The fermentation process breaks down the starches to be more readily metabolized. The batter is poured into idly dishes that are stacked into trees and suspended into a pot of boiling water to steam or be baked in the oven. Dosa is a fried preparation of the same batter. Our lunch is idly dressed with sambar, and more pickles and chutney.

Afternoon finds us working with vegetables making kraut and kim chi. We each bottle up a mason jar of carrot and cabbage kraut to take home. The tempeh is already turning white.

Moving miso to ferment for 2 years

Saturday morning the koji has powdery sporulation. The tempeh from Thursday found its way to supper last night and will be in lunch again today. The mauby needs a stir, then is ready to bottle. The kefir water gets raisins to help it grow. Soybeans have been boiled the previous evening, cooled and injected with natto starter. After a cool night they will go into the incubator for the rest of the day.

The kim chi is undisturbed in a large, covered pot but later today we will can it. We are heating raw milk for yogurt, doul and kefir. The buttermilk sat out for 24 hours and is clabbering. We all take a taste. Yum. The viscosity in the kefir is called “kefiring” and is not a cause for concern. Sandor is oft heard to note from a USDA source that in two centuries of records, there has never been a reported case of food poisoning from fermented foods.

Sandor refers us to the late Lynn Margulis’s essay “Sex, Death and Kefir”  as he puts the milk on the stove and stirs. He is denaturing it at 180° so that the bacteria of the yogurt can reweave the strings of protein. He has two strains of yogurt starter, one the Lactobacillus Bulgaricus that forms the basis for all Western yogurt cultures, and the other a rarer Lebanese strain. We mark our mason jars “B” and “L.”

Sandor tells us about skyr, an Icelandic yogurt that has nothing to do with yogurt, greek yogurt, and vily, a rare milk culture that forms a colloidal solid. We make 10 quarts of yogurt, 5 each of “B” and “L.” Sandor then starts a sorghum porridge that will get a 48-hour fermentation into a tasty cake. Our Saturday supper includes the last of the tempeh, bacon-fried in coconut oil with Italian spices, and a Japanese natto dish: egg yolk, uncooked stringy natto, white rice and Dijon mustard, strong on the horseradish. We contribute a six-pack of Oatmeal Stout homebrewed by Jon Hatcher at the Ecovillage Training Center, and Sandor uncorks some bubbly mead.

Sandor Katz

After three days, Sunday is a bit of a blur and we’ve stopped taking notes but we seem to recall something about alcoholic beverages and putting up crocks of miso. Persons braver than might be expected dive into a deep, ancient kraut barrel in Sandor’s root cellar and rebottle years-old ferments until his jar library is emptied. We tour Sandor’s home on Short Mountain, an 1820s log cabin being remodeled, and the adjacent ecovillage. We gather wild ramps, nettles, poke salat, and reishi. We ate, we hugged, we exchanged addresses and we parted.

We will next see Sandor July 27, when he comes to The Farm for our workshop on Fermaculture,  mixing the basics of food preservation with an introduction to permaculture design.

Multiplexing Capitalism

"There is a lot of fine detail needed to separate the work of ecological repair from Ponzi-the-Clown traditional business models common to shark-tank TV shows, weekend webinars and MBA-mills. The line between monopolistic robber barons and “green business” triple-bottom-line eco-entrepreneurs has been muddied by the human profit motive and capitalism’s ROI imperative."

Since putting forward our comprehensive plan to reverse civilizational drift towards extinction and regain the breathing space of a habitable Holocene for a while longer — in The Biochar Solution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change (New Society 2010) — we've been sent a lot of interesting items, too many to be able to thoughtfully respond to, or even keep up with, but recently our friend Hans-Peter Schmidt gathered some of the better climate saving strategies together for publication in Ithaka, his journal of ecology, winegrowing and climate farming.  He also thoughtfully translated it into English for those like ourselves who are not so fluent in German.

Some years ago here at the Ecovillage Training Center we put together a seminar series we called “Financial Permaculture.” Two of our fantastic organizers for that series, Gaia University students Ethan Roland and Greg Landua, have now gone on to write an ambitious book on the subject that reformulates the whole notion of capitalism in the hopes of supplanting version 1.x with something robust enough to stand up to the challenges of contraction and collapse. Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-Capital Abundance proposes we upgrade traditional laissez faire capitalism to get to the next plateau, which is more compassionate, steady-state and earth-restorative. There is a lot of fine detail needed to separate the work of ecological repair from Ponzi-the-Clown traditional business models common to shark-tank TV shows, weekend webinars and MBA-mills. The line between the monopolistic robber baron model pioneered by Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Westinghouse and the alternative promoted by “green business” triple-bottom-line eco-entrepreneurs has been muddied by the human profit motive and capitalism’s ROI imperative. Roland and Landua have significantly advanced the discussion by creating a bright line formula for marking the distinction: Stop buying, selling, and trading in degenerative goods and services.

Printing For More Trees

Another book underway by an author who helped us teach that seminar series, Eric Toensmeier, is called, Carbon Farming: A Global Toolkit for Stabilizing the Climate with Tree Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices. Eric launched a kickstarter campaign on April 3rd and received 104% of his target in just 8 days, so we look forward to an early manuscript.

Back to Hans-Peter Schmidt, who is a wine producer in Valais, Switzerland. Hans-Peter has been doing field trials with biochar for several years and has concluded that “biochar is much too valuable (and expensive to produce) for it to be just worked into the soil without having it used at least once for other [financially beneficial] purposes – whether as storage for volatile nutrients, as an adsorber in functional clothing, as insulation in the building industry, as energy storage in batteries, as a filter in a sewage plant, as a silage agent or as a feed supplement. Such uses can be followed by use in a farmer’s slurry pit or in a sewage plant, before being composted.” Only then should biochar be worked into the soil at the end of this “cascade” to create Terra Preta soils. He compiled 50 such uses and published them in Ithaka.

Animal Farming:

1. Silage agent
2. Feed additive / supplement
3. Litter additive
4. Slurry treatment
5. Manure composting
6. Water treatment in fish farming

Soil Conditioner:

7. Carbon fertilizer
8. Compost
9. Substitute for peat in potting soil
10. Plant protection
11. Compensatory fertilizer for trace elements

Buildings:

12. Insulation
13. Air decontamination
14. Decontamination of earth foundations
15. Humidity regulation
16. Protection against electromagnetic radiation (“electrosmog”)

Decontamination:

17. Soil additive for soil remediation (for use in particular on former mine-works, military bases and landfill sites.)
18. Soil substrates (highly adsorbing plantable soil substrates for use in cleaning waste water; in particular urban waste water contaminated by heavy metals)
19. A barrier preventing pesticides getting into surface water (Sides of field and ponds can be equipped with 30-50 cm deep barriers made of biochar for filtering out pesticides.)
20. Treating pond and lake water (Biochar is good for adsorbing pesticides and fertilizers
as well as for improving water aeration.)

Energy Production:

21. Biomass additive
22. Biogas slurry treatment

Wastewater Treatment:

23. Active carbon filter
24. Pre-rinsing additive
25. Soil substrate for organic plant beds
26. Composting toilets

Drinking Water Treatment:

27. Micro-filters
28. Macro-filters in developing countries

Industrial Applications:

29. Exhaust filters for controlling emissions
30. Room air filters
31. Carbon fibers
32. Biodegradable plastics
33. Semiconductors
34. Batteries
35. Metal reduction

Cosmetics:

36. Soaps
37. Skin-cream
38. Therapeutic bath additives

Paints and coloring:

39. Food colorants
40. Industrial paints (including flame-retardant geotextiles)

Energy production:

41. Hydrogen storage cells
42. Substitute for lignite coal 

Medicines:

43. Detoxification
44. Carrier for active pharmaceutical ingredients

Textiles:
 
45. Fabric additive for functional underwear
46. Thermal insulation for functional clothing
47. Deodorant for shoe soles

Wellness:

48. Filling for mattresses
49. Filling for pillows
50. Shield against electromagnetic radiation

 
Amazonian Dark Plasters

One area that is of special interest to those of us in the natural building and permaculture communities is biochar’s unique qualities as a plaster or render. In combination with clay, lime or cement, biochar can be added to sand at a ratio of up to 50%. According to Schmidt, “This creates indoor plasters with excellent insulation and breathing properties, able to maintain humidity levels in a room at 45 – 70% in both summer and winter. This in turn prevents not just dry air, which can lead to respiratory disorders and allergies, but also dampness through air condensing on the outside walls, which can lead to mold developing.” (see [in German]: Biochar as building material for an optimal indoor climate).


Schmidt tried these dark plasters in his wine cellar and discovered that they absorb smells and airborne spores. They kept his cellar sterile of molds. From a baubiologie standpoint, the potential for schools, hospitals, factories and offices is enormous. This could be one way of remediating “sick building” syndrome. Schmidt’s “cascading” idea is precisely the kind of new industrial paradigm that Roland and Landua are proposing and also the kind of integrated carbon sequestration that Toensmeier advocates.

You have to love it when a plan comes together.

Says Schmidt, “Biochar can also be applied to the outside walls of a building by jet-spray technique mixing it with lime. Applied at thicknesses of up to 20 cm, it is a substitute for styrofoam. Houses insulated this way become carbon sinks, while at the same time having a more healthy indoor climate. Should such a house be demolished at a later date, the biochar-mud plaster can be recycled as a valuable compost additive.”

We will be teaching a climate farming short course here in Tennessee in June of this year and again in Norway in early July.

Droning On

""Even if you think there's no realistic chance that the U.S. will carry out targeted killings in Canada…when Iran or India or whatever country has the capability to carry out these targeted killings in the same way, they're going to be invoking the rules that the U.S. is creating right now." —ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer"

Home drones you can legally own

Several thousand years ago, men discovered the sling, boomerang and javelin and took a step back from the actual point of hand-to-hand confrontation with rival groups. Then came the bow and arrow, the catapault and trebuchet, each of which increased the range and the damage inflicted, while protecting the user by dint of distance. 

Then came gunpowder, cannons and guns, and warriors took another step back. Then came aircraft, submarines and ICBM's, more refinements in defensive confrontation.

And then came drones.

Any comparison of President Obama’s war-fighting with that of his predecessors would quickly establish his preference for unseen death from the sky rather than boots on the ground. Given the technical bankruptcy of the United States (16-30 trillion in debt on 2 trillion in annual tax revenues), drones are also a whole lot cheaper way to run a war.

The only hitch is, they are illegal.

Not that being illegal should stop a president. US presidents always keep whole stables of lawyers busy telling them, essentially, that if a president does it, it is legal. The Attorney General, whom the US Constitution empowers to serve as a check on the President, has been emasculated. Eric Holder is just an updated version of Alberto Gonzales, the President’s yes-sir, no-sir, whatever-you-say, sir guy.

One might hope that international law might deter a president, but seeing how the Nuremberg obligation of a soldier to disobey any and all illegal orders to participate in war crimes has been stripped from the defense of Bradley Manning, that hope must also be seen as forlorn.

Just for the record, drone warfare is illegal. In every technical sense, it is “terrorism.” That it is used by an almighty sovereign government through a military chain of command does not make it less terroristic legally, or as a weapon. Eventually, it will likely fall under a specific treaty banning its use. That does not make it any less illegal now.

Imagine, for a moment, how a typical Miami resident might feel if one of their neighbors was, say, Luis Posada Carriles. Posada Carriles is an international fugitive who blew up a commercial airliner, Cubana Flight 455 from Barbados to Jamaica, killing all 73 passengers and 5 crew, including 11 Guyanese medical students and 5 North Korean government officials, in 1976. He was the Director of Counterintelligence at Venezuela's FBI equivalent, the DISIP, from 1967 to 1974, but at the time of the bombing he was in the employ of the CIA. Although sought for extradition to Barbados, Venezuela and Cuba, he is currently living in Miami as a free man, under the protection of the US Justice Department. The Cuban-5, undercover intelligence officers for the Cuban government now serving life sentences, often in solitary confinement, in US prisons for spying on Posada’s Miami terror ring (they were rounded up by the FBI when Cuba shared intelligence on the Miami terror ring with the Bush administration as a gesture of mutual interest after 9-11) were viewed as a threat to Posada’s security by Gonzales.

But, imagine if North Korea decided to stop wasting time in court, or wanted to avoid the risk of sending secret assassins, and just sent a drone.

Under the Obama Doctrine of Drone Warfare, North Korea is entirely within its rights to identify Posada Carriles as a potential and imminent threat. Anyone associating with Posada or in close proximity would be, by the Doctrine’s definition, a “militant.” Any unfortunate children nearby who might be caught in the missile strike would be “collateral damage,” the same as the more than 175 Pakistani children now known to have been killed by CIA drones between 2004 and 2012.

Imagine, then, the outrage felt on the Miami street outside that café where Posada was caught having a double expresso. Imagine the horror at all the carnage. Maybe North Korea gets Posada, maybe it doesn’t. Surely there would be calls for revenge strikes on North Korea, and one can only speculate where that might lead, now that Korea has the ability to hit California with nuclear-tipped warheads.

Christof Heyns, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings and Summary or Arbitrary Executions, told a conference in Geneva last year that President Obama's drone attacks constitute war crimes, as China and Russia had alleged in their formal filing with the UN Human Rights Commission. 

Specifically, Heyns said, many targeted killings take place far from areas in armed conflict and the Obama Doctrine includes secondary strikes on rescuers who are helping the injured after an initial drone attack. Both of those kinds of attacks are by legal definition war crimes.

Notably, it is the second type mentioned by the UN Rapporteur for which Bradley Manning stands accused of treason for refusing to cover up the crimes he witnessed as a military intelligence analyst.

This thing that is being debated in UN hallways and Geneva press conferences cannot be talked about in US courtrooms. The US Supreme Court has now ruled it outside the scope of judicial review. Whether the CIA is involved in targeted assassinations is still classified, even though it is widely reported that 98% of drone victims, about 4000 civilians by ACLU estimates, are non-targeted individuals as can be seen in this vivid graphic. 

http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/

Ian Seiderman, director of the International Commission of Jurists, told an ACLU conference that "immense damage was being done to the fabric of international law." But the best rule of law that the President might be want to think about to is probably not the UN Convention on Human Rights or the Geneva Convention, but the Golden Rule.

Firing missiles from unmanned robots from an altitude of 20,000 feet, controlled electronically from 7,000 miles away is an act of cowardice. Obama kills helpless victims seemingly without incurring any personal risk at all. It is exactly like torture, and it serves little purpose other than to terrorize a population. More significantly for all USAnians, it degrades and dehumanizes the perpetrator more than it does the victim. And in the end, what is destroyed is the fabric of law, something built over centuries, and without which, we are all at greater risk. 

Climate and the Khans

"What we have to learn from Genghis Khan is that forests actually can work to bring climate back into a second Holocene. What we don’t yet know is whether they can provide sufficient food to support Anthropocene populations after petrocollapse."

There are periods in Western Civilization’s history that lack the glamor of the ages of empire or the steady march of progress that seemed to characterize the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans or other remarkably advanced societies. Between military adventures we tend see the periods of hiatus and re-consolidation as “dark” or “middle” ages. Nothing much was going on, we think.

These periods comprise a largely un-rediscovered history. The fascination of the dominant university narrative with militarism also leaves out vast areas on the periphery, where a lot of innovation began. We know about the Silk Road and the exchanges between East and West that it augured. We also know something of the slave and precious metal industries, and the cultural influences that flowed between North and South.

The Mongol Empire, established by Genghis Khan in 1206 and lasting through the 13th and 14th centuries — generally considered in the west as a part of the descent in the post-Roman world into barbarism — was the largest contiguous empire in the world, covering 16 to 22 percent of the Earth's total land area, and dominating a population of 100 million. Having that much land, as we shall see, can have implications for Earth’s biomechanical systems, depending on the management style of the small group of Khans in control.

We tend to think of the Mongol ‘barbarians’ the way we think of Klingons or Dothraki, but Genghis Khan (a title meaning “universal leader”) was elevated based on his policy of forbidding looting and sharing the spoils of war amongst the warriors, rather than sending it back home to aristocrats. He was thus seen as a loose cannon and an army was sent out from the Kurultai (general assembly) to reign him in, which he promptly defeated.

Genghis Khan came up with a number of military innovations that fueled his army’s prowess in battle. He organized his troops into cadres of ten men, divided his imperial guard into day guards and night guards, dispensed with most privileges of class and family, ended women’s slavery and permitted them to divorce, promoted religious freedom, encouraged literacy, and stopped internecine conflict in order to better concentrate on Mongolia’s external goals.

Khan’s sons and grandsons were just as ambitious but not as wise as their patriarch, and when he died in 1227, leaving them an empire twice the size of Rome, they expanded outwards in all directions and, rather than promoting social equality and other benefits for their new constituents, were more inclined just to massacre them.

This began in the campaign in Russia near Kiev in 1237 with the massacre of Ryazan, then extended into Hungary and Croatia, where the ironclad Templar Knights were defeated by the Golden Horde in 1241. With Eastern Europe laid bare, the Mongolian capital of Karakorum was adorned with a large silver tree that dispensed various drinks, crafted by Guillaume Boucher, a Parisian goldsmith. The aristocrats grew fat and wealthy again and internecine warfare between brothers’ and cousins’ armies once more became common. Religious intolerance led to massacres of captive Muslim populations, and famine and putting whole cities to the torch became mere battle tactics. When the Mongols eventually lost control of their empire, the chaos and reprisals that followed were not pretty, but the Turkic tribes that seized the western end of the Silk Road planted the seeds of the later Sunni Ottoman Empire, the native Chinese who overthrew the puppet Yuan Dynasty created the isolationist and artistic Ming Dynasty, and the Samurai who defeated the Mongols in 1280 unified Japan for its first time, spreading a samurai style of Zen Buddhism and the giddy notion that Japan was favored by God and could never be defeated, which persisted until 1945.

It is estimated that 30 to 60 million people were slaughtered under the rule of the Mongol Empire, roughly 30 to 60 percent of the Empire’s population at its peak. Bubonic Plague factored into the decline in Europe, but the populations of Russia, Hungary and China fell by half in fifty years. To speed their way towards future conquests, Mongols punished urban centers that refused to surrender. So, for instance, after the conquest of Urgench in present Turkmenistan, perhaps the wealthiest city on the Silk Road at the time, each of 20,000 Mongol warriors was required to execute 24 civilians. After the fall of the Mongolian Empire in China, 30 million were killed in the violent overthrow of the Yuan Dynasty.

If it is somehow imagined by right-wing US Congressmen, New York Times columnists, and other climate deniers that somehow we humans are the victims of natural cycles of sunspots and freakish weather, the legacy of the Golden Horde should settle that question. We, as a species, are profoundly entangled with planetary biomechanical cycles, including weather.

As we described in The Biochar Solution, the Colombian Encounter, which may have directly caused the deaths of 100 million native inhabitants of the Americas, wiping away all traces of their cultures, languages, and domesticated plants and animals, also changed the climate of the planet, triggering the Little Ice Age from the 16th to 19th Centuries, including three particularly cold intervals at 1650, 1770 and 1850.

According to studies performed by the ARVE Group in Lausanne, Switzerland,  the forests of the Americas, growing in the deep black earths built over millenia by native milpa agriculture, sequestered 35-40 GtC between 1525 and 1600 following the Columbian Encounter. These new findings, based on newer datasets and better models,  are considerably higher than earlier estimates and in the range needed to explain the 7-10 ppm CO2 drop observed.

We’ve referred to the work of William Ruddiman who first linked the Black Death to a decrease in agricultural activity that had climate-altering impacts. Ruddiman is author of Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, which propounded the "early anthropocene" hypothesis, the idea that human-induced changes in greenhouse gases did not begin in the eighteenth century with advent of coal-burning factories and power plants but date back to our early agrarian ancestors 8000 years ago. By 3000 years ago, cumulative carbon emissions caused by anthropogenic land cover change were between 84 and 102 GtC, translating to about 14-20 ppm increase of atmospheric CO2.

Clearing forests for hunting, gathering, and agriculture put carbon into the atmosphere, warming the world by small increments. And, whenever humans have disappeared from an ecosystem, en masse, reforestation absorbed back carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which cooled the world. Many recent studies of lake sediments, ice cores and tree rings now support the theory that depopulation in the Americas was a major contributing factor for the Little Ice Age. One example is a drop in carbon dioxide levels observed from ice cores taken at Law Dome, Antarctica.



Left to cyclical variations in the orbit and tilt of the Earth, we should by rights be on glide descent into another glaciation. Land use changes, beginning with the deforestation of Egypt and China, arrested that trend and ever since has kept us in the steady holding pattern we call the Holocene.

Eocene Arctic. That little creature with the furry tail
in the tree branches was our most direct ancestor.

Alas, the Holocene was too much of a good thing, and with the discovery of cheap, abundant energy slaves living close to the surface belowground some 150 years ago, the Age of Oil ushered in the Anthropocene, with uncertain prospects for survival of our civilization, barring some Deus Ex Machina.

The overdue glaciation has now been cancelled, and in its place has been scheduled the second coming of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with crocodiles in the cypress and redwood swamps of the Arctic, palm trees in Greenland, Antarctica a subtropical rainforest, and sea surface temperatures at the equator within 5 degrees of boiling. Given the unprecedented slope of the rising exponential curve of change, and the sheer volume of fossil carbon now being withdrawn from land and banked in the atmosphere and oceans, the new PETM may be just a brief train stop on the track to Hell. Venus, move over, here we come.

Except, on that Eastern hilltop, surveying his battlefield, with eyes cast toward the setting sun, stands the great and mighty Khan.According to a 2011 study by a group at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, when the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, cultivated fields returned to forests, scrubbing some 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

We now have the example of two great genocidal conquerors turned climate heroes — Christopher Columbus and Genghis Khan. In both cases, the greenhouse effect was shown to have direct correlation to changing human population and land use. It should be no surprise that today, with a world population North of 7 billion, boosted by high-GHG-emission technological lifestyles, that we are experiencing a runaway greenhouse warming.

It should also be evident that the only viable way out is a forest path.

But what about clean coal or the Kyoto Protocol, you may ask?

The carbon sequestering techniques available to us can be divided between those that require further research and development, conventional financial methods of capitalization, or an industrial infrastructure that may not survive economic contraction (for example, ceramic honeycomb filters coated with immobilized amine sorbants deployed on coal-burning power plants), and those that require none of these and can be begun at the smallest scale, using few or no special tools, without benefit of loans, savings, or even an exchange currency.

Tree planting is a more viable strategy post-petrocollapse, than is the manufacture of artificial trees and their deployment over the scale of land area required to make a difference.

Forests also confer advantages not available to fossil-energy-made structures, such as resilience, self-repair, ecosystem services, preservation of biodiversity, etc.

What we have learned from Genghis Khan is that forests actually can work to bring climate back into a second Holocene. What we don’t yet know is whether they can provide sufficient food to support Anthropocene populations after petrocollapse. Can we have the regreening, without the gore?

Food forests are a frontier being explored by permaculturists, and while we can see that strategy already working to sustain large populations in the tropics, whether it can do so outside the tropics is an open discussion. Work in edible forest design by Eric Toensmeier,  David Jacke,  Martin Crawford and others is showing steady progress. Geoff Lawton and Brad Lancaster’s  pioneering work in greening desert-scapes will also contribute, as will the work of Alan Savory and Wes Jackson in productive savannah and prairie ecologies.

It may be a good thing that tropics and deserts hold the most promise for building food forests. We will be experiencing a greater abundance of both in the decades to come, until we collectively grasp these concepts and go back to gardening our planet, the way we always have. 

The Colombian Renaissance

"In Colombia, the ecovillage movement is ceasing to be seen as the alternative, hippy, or maladjusted parts of society, but rather are coming to be known as 'the people.' The are the 99-percent, the cultural center and point of reference."

After a 2 week permaculture course in southern Belize — the part that Guatemala is making noises about annexing — we returned to Colombia, a place we last visited at the height of La Violencia 15 years ago.

In the late-90s our hemisphere-wide ecovillage network had decided to host a series of meetings around Colombia and we were fortunate to have among us some skilled negiotiators able to obtain safe passage between the various factions, traversing areas where kidnappings and atrocities were commonplace. In one town where the mayor invited us to speak, he was killed shortly after we left. It was near there, in February, 2005, that a joint army/paramilitary “anti-terrorist” battalion funded by the United States moved in and massacred members of the peace movement, most of them displaced refugees, killing eight people, including 3 children.

Biogas from sewage

Less than a month later, then-President Uribe justified the killings, saying, “The peace communities have the right to establish themselves in Colombia thanks to our regime of liberties. But they cannot, as is practiced in San José de Apartadó, obstruct justice, reject the Public Force… In this community of San José de Apartadó there are good people, but some of their leaders, sponsors and defenders ... want to use the community to protect this terrorist organization.”

On February 13, 2013, Colombia’s constitutional court ruled in favor of the claims of the survivors of that massacre, who now urge supporters to send a letter to President Santos, urging him to use this historic court ruling to recover the relationship between Colombia and the peace community.
 
Since we visited and gave our first village design courses more than a decade ago, the ecovillage movement has been wedding Colombian grassroots organizations – the Campesinos, Indigenous and Afro-decendant people — into action-oriented environmental networks. The ecovillagers, Red de Ecoaldeas Colombia when we last visited, reformed 7 years ago into Renace Colombia. RC is developing a multilayered strategy for greater communication with other networks, sectors and movements in the country, as well as developing capacity to incubate new ecovillages and other varieties of experimental human settlements.

There are 16 ecovillages throughout Colombia, five or six of which are still in the formative stages. The longest existing ecovillage is 28 years old.

 Some recent achievements of Colombian ecovillages:

• Pachamama Ecovillage in Quindio is exporting full containers of their organically treated bamboo as building material in Spain and the Caribbean.
• 
  Aldea Feliz in Cundinamarca won the Fulbright Commission grant to build an ‘ecoshop’ with high green architectural standards. 
• 
  By the end of 2012, all the major ecovillages in Colombia will have their own Maloka — an ancestral house of gathering in the Amazonic tradition. 
• 
  Atlántida ecovillage in Cauca is the main training center for Latinamerica for leaders of Dances of Universal Peace. One of Colombia’s indigenous traditions is the “mambeo,” artistic decontamination of the world, merging the mind with the heart.


The movement is ceasing to be seen as the alternative, hippy, or maladjusted parts of society, but rather are coming to be known as “the people.” The are the 99-percent, the cultural center and point of reference. Another Colombian tradition is the “minga,” the whole community working together for a purpose, whether to build a house or make a garden — what those of us who live in Amish country call “barnraising.”

Renace brought the “Vision Council” (Consejo de Visiones) methodology to Colombia from Mexico in 2012, and changed its traditional annual ecovillage gatherings into an open space with clear facilitation for dialogue between alternative movements, of which the ecovillages are just one part. For the 2013 Vision Council, they decided to deliver 4 different parallel and simultaneous gatherings in 4 different bioregions of the country, as a contraction/expansion dynamic, to be introduced as a new national initiative in 2014.

We are also directly involved in the production of the first Ecovillage Design Education programme (EDE) in Colombia with the full 160 hours curriculum from Gaia Education, as a pioneer course offered sequentially in 3 different ecovillages. We were invited to instruct the ecological module and for that week we lived in the Pachamama village, just down the lane from the bamboo drying sheds. We also got to visit La Pequeña Granja de Mama Lulu, a one-hectare permaculture agroforestry project that rivals the best examples of futuristic eco-agriculture we have seen anywhere in the world.
 
Two of those attending the EDE were the founders of the EcoBarrios (eco-neighborhood) Project in Bogotá, Carlos Rojas and Anamaria Aristizabal. That program produced remarkable transformations in the lives of urban dwellers, with a period of government funding in 2000-2003 enabling 180 city-neighborhoods to plant gardens, create public art and develop seed exchanges, among other improvements.


The Ecobarrios Project convened hundreds of neighborhood leaders, provided training courses in each district, designed projects according to particular needs of a neighborhood, and employed transparent participatory processes and the labor of the community. A survey in 2003 showed an increase in social capital with new micro-enterprises employing some 15,000 people. While 70% of urban garden and similar projects gradually diminished without Colombian government financing and the continuity of a support organization, 30% were still operating ten years later and replicating EcoBarrio projects had spread to Venezuela, Mexico City and Chile.

Bamboo Drinking Cup

From 2003 until 2010, after the government suspended EcoBarrios’ support, Aristizabal and Rojas went to work in the creation of ecovillage Aldeafeliz near Bogota and Renace Colombia. Rojas is now one of South America’s delegates to the Global Ecovillage Network board.

Renace is in dialogue with several government branches and regional institutions about a project for the transformation of 100 indigenous villages that were victims of forced relocation. What is planned are 100 healthy and thriving ancestral ecovillages, combining the best practices of the native heritage with those of the modern sustainability movement.

Each member community of
Renace is building a
Maloca, the traditional meeting
hall in Amazonia.

After examining models of ecovillage networks in Brazil and Senegal, Renace sees their incubator program evolving into a non-profit, quasi-governmental agency, establishing quality standards and transferring technology and green enterprise models. In the fertile ground of post-civil-war social rebuilding, these young ecovillagers are capable of opening up historically closed circles of politics and economics, in a kind of reverse “disaster capitalism.” They have a plan, they are ready, and the opportunity is now.