 I'm just going to start the whole thing again. Most of the conversation about carbon today is about fossil fuel emissions. And most of the energy of environmentalists in the climate movement especially is to find ways to reduce carbon emissions so that we can prevent, run away, global warming, et cetera, et cetera. What has been left out of the conversation to a large extent, not entirely, and it's actually coming more and more into the conversation, which is a really hopeful sign, is the role of forests and wetlands and soil in sequestering carbon, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and restoring a healthy carbon cycle, where whatever carbon is produced, it is reabsorbed again. What I have learned in this research is that the contribution of what is euphemistically called land use changes to atmospheric carbon is at least as much as the contribution of burning fossil fuels. Exposing soil to oxidation, exposing it to erosion puts tremendous amounts of CO2 into the air. And the ruin of the biological systems, the living forests and grasslands, that prevents that released carbon from being brought back into the soil because when trees and grass and other plants uptake carbon from the air to build their cellulose, to build their bodies, some of it goes into the above-ground parts, which eventually fall down and rot and get released back into the air. But a lot of it goes underground, taking the form of organic compounds, which means carbon-containing compounds, glomalin and other compounds that form soil. And that stay underground in the soil for a year, could be for a decade, could be for 100 years. Some of them are deeply sequestered in the soil, so they're constantly pulling carbon out of the air and putting it underground. So much so that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have been rising steadily over my entire lifetime, over a couple of hundred years, but they've been rising slower than would have been expected in models that are based on how much we're emitting. Despite those models underestimating the amount emitted through land use changes, the reason that they increase slower than expected is because plants are taking up more, the more that there is in the atmosphere, the more the plants take up. Of course, they're not increasing their uptake fast enough to offset emissions, but it points to the capacity for life to maintain atmospheric balance if we're not getting in the way. Unfortunately, we're getting in the way. Something like half of, today I think we have something like half of the trees that we had before civilization. We've lost vast amounts of topsoil. The entire prairie has been turned into cultivated land. Half of the mangrove swamps of Asia have been destroyed. 80% of the seagrafts meadows on the New England coast are gone. I mean, you can go down the line. These organs of Gaia that maintain a healthy carbon cycle have been destroyed. If they were all healthy, if we still had all the wetlands, the peat bogs, the mangroves, the virgin forests, rising emissions may not even be that much of a problem, but that's a moot point because we have rising emissions and we have degradation of the regulatory organs of the planet. So what are we gonna do about it? Yeah, I think we should cut emissions, but that is maybe harder to do because we're so locked into it. All of our systems are so locked into it. That might be harder to do than to draw down carbon. And I'm using Paul Hawkins terminology here, draw down. And this is a great contribution of his work that shows that the potential for taking carbon out of the air in through regenerative agricultural practices, regenerative because they regenerate soil and the water table and biodiversity. Because they regenerate soil, the soil, healthy soil, is made in part from organic molecules, from carbon. So the potential is just tremendous. I have examples in my book and my research is by no means thorough, but of farmers who are building topsoil at a rate of half an inch or an inch a year, which in my youth, we learned in school that it takes 500 years to build an inch of topsoil. But there are people who are doing it 500 times faster than that. And if these practices were adopted on a global scale, according to some estimates, it could offset all emissions. We could begin draw down like right now, but we'd sacrifice agricultural productivity, right? No, actually these methods can be as productive or more productive than chemical-based agriculture. What they do require, there's two things though, that they do require that represent a profound disruption or a profound shift in our agricultural system and our entire society. One of the first is that they are more labor-intensive overall. We would have to have, in the United States, right now approximately 1% of the population is directly engaged in farming. That might have to go up to 10% as it was in 1950. And maybe if you include gardens, maybe go up to 50%. So a lot more people would have to have their hands in the soil. And that goes against this conception of progress, which is conceived of as a, gonna wait for this helicopter to pass. There's progress flying right over our head right now. Yeah, so progress has long been conceived of as a transcendence of labor and of dirt. The lowest social class, the lowest social class 2000 years ago is the one that had their hands in the dirt and their feet on the ground. And the highest social class was carried in a litter above the ground. Pharaoh's feet were not even allowed to touch the ground, lest he be soiled. And today we still have a veneration of those who work with abstractions. They have the most wealth and power and status in society. The scientists, the people working on their computers, the financial wizards in a world of digits, that maybe needs to be reversed to give more, not just status and reverence for those who work in materiality and work in the soil, but more money too. So it involves a different kind of agricultural economics. That would be beyond what I wanna talk about right now. But that's one big shift that would need to happen for us to really have a drawdown agricultural system. And the other is that regenerative agriculture in all of its forms, some involve horticulture, some involve animal husbandry, various kinds of intensive grazing practices, these are not cookie cutter formulas. What works in one place may not work on another continent or even in the next valley over. The only way to make them work is to be a patient, a attentive observer of nature, of that particular land. So that you know it really well and you ask what does this land need? What does the soil need here? And you try things and maybe they don't work and you realize, oh, that isn't what it needed. But now I understand a little bit better. So it requires an ongoing intimate relationship that is unique between the human or the humans living on that land, interacting with that land and the land itself. That does not fit into an industrial model where you standardize practices. The essence of industrialization is standardization. That's what makes it efficient. That's what allows a machine to do it. So that in order to have a truly regenerative agricultural system, we have to undo that way of thinking. And that's another reason why we need more people in close relationship to the land. If we do that, then the potential of these agricultural technologies is just tremendous. It would mean that carbon dioxide is really not a problem anymore. And it's not just agriculture also. It's more generally, it's the relationship between humans and other living things. So in some places it's about growing food and other places it's about restoring the water cycle through building check dams or reintroducing beavers to an area to slow the water down. I think I might have said before, water in the discussion on water, water is not supposed to be running in these deep channels. It wasn't historically. So people can intervene or they can try to understand what maybe there is an invasive species here. And maybe some of them are coming as a healing response because the land has been damaged and it invites in invasive, so-called invasive species. In other places, maybe that's not true. How do you know? There's a big debate among restoration ecologists and kind of the new ecologists and our invasive species good or bad and do they serve a purpose and what's the best response and do we just try to kill them using all kinds of herbicides and things? Like this is a big debate in a certain sector of ecology. And maybe there is no formulaic answer to that. Maybe the answer is unique to each place and not black and white and requires, again, an intimate relationship to a long observation and drawing on maybe generational knowledge and indigenous knowledge to know what serves this place and how that changes over time. What served it 200 years ago may be no longer relevant. So there's no formula here in the healing process that we wanna participate in. In some places it might be to keep humans entirely away. In other places, intervention might be needed. In other places, it might be the most important thing might be to protect indigenous people who have been taking care of that place for hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of years. So coming back to carbon, obviously this is a lot bigger than carbon. Carbon is more of a lens or a barometer. We can understand that if carbon is going into the soil out of the air and into the soil then probably something good is happening in the soil. So it is, and you can measure, this is something you can measure although it's not easy to measure. And in fact, one reason why carbon sequestration has been less prominent in the public policy conversation about global warming is that it's harder to measure. It's harder to put into a carbon budget. It's harder to put into a computer model of the atmosphere. So it kind of gets left out. It's relatively easy to assign a carbon tax to fossil fuels but it's not so easy to pay carbon farmers for the amount of carbon that they're sequestering because it's complicated. Some of the carbon oxidizes within a year and goes back into the air. Some takes 10 years, some takes centuries, some is sequestered very deeply. How do you know? How do you measure it? Carbon assays, soil assays usually only go down at most a meter, sometimes less but some of the carbon is being sequestered much more deeply and it might be different from one spot to another spot and how do you standardize that kind of thing? So here's an example of our basic solution template that we enact as a culture of standardizing and measuring, it fails us. We need a different approach and that approach is grounded in a living system view that understands the uniqueness and the relatedness of all things.