 Well, thank you, San Francisco, for inviting me to speak to you tonight. My name is Diana Donlon, and I work at Center for Food Safety. And I was actually born and raised in San Francisco. I was born on Geary Street and raised on Fillmore Street. And you might be wondering how somebody who's a very urban person ended up making a video that was shown at the recent climate conference by the French government. So before I begin my presentation, I'd like to tell you a little story. I worked for many years for Richard and Rhoda Goldman and worked on their environmental prize program. And learned all sorts of things about the problems that our environment faces. And after a career in philanthropy, I decided I wanted to work at a nonprofit. And I was hired by Andrew Kimbrel, who is the visionary founder and executive director of Center for Food Safety. I was very concerned that there wasn't enough being done at the intersection of food and climate. And so Andrew hired me. And he said, basically, I could do what I wanted with the program, but he had one caveat. I had to keep it positive. So that was a little challenging, because most of what we hear around climate is so depressing and overwhelming. But the upside is that having this mandate to focus on solutions led me to what we call the soil carbon opportunity. And I really feel that if more people knew that we have this tremendous opportunity to rebuild soil carbon, it would give a lot more people hope. And if people have hope, then they are empowered to take action. So I just want to go over some slides with you that drill down a little deeper to some of the things that were mentioned in the video, which is actually a film, because we made it for the big screen. So even though it's only four minutes long, it's technically in film quality. So without further ado, essentially, the soil is what differentiates our planet from other planets. And the soil, as you heard Michael Pollan so eloquently say, is a living miracle. It is a living system. For much of the 20th century, we forgot that. And we focused on soil as if it were a chemistry set and just a medium for growing plants. So the soil underpins. Obviously, most people know that our food comes from the soil and that the quality of the soil influences the nutritional quality of the food that comes out of that soil. But beyond that, people don't really think about the connection of soil to moisture and water. And that is extremely important. And for our purposes, we were really interested to learn more about the connection between soil and climate. And basically, if you think of the Earth's atmosphere, which we know has been overwhelmed by carbon dioxide, and that's in the gas, the solid form of carbon, because it can be in different forms, is in the soil. And that's actually something that is essential to soil function. And that's actually lacking. So as you learned in the short film, many of our cultivated soils are lacking upwards of 50% of soil carbon. So if you look at the opportunity there, that means we have this global opportunity to take that carbon out of the atmosphere where it is causing havoc and put it in the soil where it does a world of good. And this slide just shows the food, climate, and water. But it also supports biodiversity and so many other things. So the diversity above the ground mirrors the diversity below the ground. And even though we can't see that diversity below ground, there is an entire world of living creatures down there that are carrying on so many functions, including decomposition. But as mentioned, so many of our soils are degraded. And if anybody knows a graphic artist, this is put out by United Nations Environment Program. And it needs a little bit of a facelift. But you can see that parts of the world range from very degraded soil to degraded soil. And so again, the opportunity to rebuild soil health is pretty endless. So how do we lose soil carbon? The film alluded to it a little bit. But basically, there's a whole list of reasons that we can degrade soil. And they include things that you may have thought of like overgrazing. But they also include things like plowing and converting land from farmland to say like urban landscapes and sealing the soil surface with blacktop. That kills the microbial life. So this is something that feeds on itself. When you see these little bubbles, this is actually down the peninsula near Santa Cruz. And this was just a field that we drove by, stopped, set up the camera and took a picture. That bare field is oxidizing. There should always be a cover. You think of the soil as the skin of the earth. And you want your skin covered, the earth should be covered. And that's why nature is always trying to grow something. It's kind of like a scab of weeds or something will grow in a ditch just to cover up that bare soil. So I'm going to get a little technical here for a minute. But what's another very exciting thing to me is that, OK, so first off, the unexciting thing, the sad thing, is that our CO2 emissions have gone up. And I'm sure most of you have heard of that 350 number that we're not supposed to exceed, right? And we've exceeded it by 50 parts per million. So we are beyond the danger zone. We are already well above what should be our upper limit. But if you see these squiggly red lines, that to me is very hopeful. Because what those lines represent is photosynthetic activity on the planet. So we live in the northern hemisphere. And in our winter, much of our vegetation is dormant. But then when spring comes, all these trees go into, they make their leaves and their branches and flowers and grasses grow and so forth. That is actually such a huge activity that it can be measured by these satellites. And there's a really cool satellite that NASA put out where you can see the color of the CO2 changing of the concentration as the northern forests are leafing out. So photosynthetic activity is really key because this is the process that takes this atmospheric carbon with such a problem and turns it into a solid carbon, which is a solution. And then what happens is as much as 40% of that carbon is fed down through the roots into the soil where the plants trade it with the microorganisms. And this is really interesting because plants are stationary. So they can't go, if they need some trace mineral, some zinc or some manganese or something, they can't go get it. They depend on their partnership with the microbes to go get it for them. And how do they get the microbes to do this work for them? They give them carbon. So there's a whole trading economy underground. Now, this makes us think of carbon then as not a problem really, but as a resource. And we just have to rebalance the system. There are two kinds of plants that most of you, I'm sure, are familiar with their annuals. Those are planted every year. And then the perennials, which are the longer-lived plants. And we're very interested in encouraging people to plant perennials because they have deeper roots. And the deeper the roots, the further down the carbon goes into the ground, the more stable it is. So this country used to have prairies in the middle of the country. We've destroyed 97% of them. We only have 3% of our prairies left. But imagine how much carbon was released and became carbon dioxide when that happened. So I tell people this because our problems with CO2 have been going on for centuries. We've just accelerated it in recent times. Humankind has been taking bad care of the soil for millennia. So it's not all our fault. But they didn't know that we could rebuild it. And this is something that we are learning now. It used to be thought that soil formed exclusively under weatherization. So when you see something that says it takes 500 years for soil, an inch of topsoil to grow, that's under a weathering process. But if you have biologically active soils that are being fed compost and so forth, they can grow from the bottom up. Grasslands are something that need particular attention. I was reading recently that most people think of them as kind of wastelands. But because they can have these deep rooted systems and they co-evolve with large herds of ruminants, they are actually some of the best places to sequester carbon. And they cover 40% of the Earth's surface. And they cover, I think, 23 million hectares in California alone. So regenerative agricultural practices that Nigel I'm sure will tell us more about are the key to rebuilding soil compost. They have soil carbon. And that includes composting because the composting is like the fuel, the food for these microorganisms. So there are basically a few principles that are generally agreed upon. You wanna keep the soil covered, as I mentioned earlier. You wanna minimize disturbance to the soil because that disturbs the aggregates in the soil and the soil microbial life. You want to feed your microbiology a diverse diet so you don't wanna have monocropping because it's better for the soil life to have all sorts of diversity above ground. You wanna have a living root at all times. And then if you add animals into the system, their dung and urine adds a lot more fertility as well. So in closing, I'd like to encourage you to share our video. We actually have it coming out with Mandarin Chinese subtitles for Earth Day. We'd love for you to follow us on social media. We'd love for you to join Center for Food Safety and you can follow us on Twitter at rebuildsoil. And our website is soilsolutionsingular.org. Thank you very much. Thank you.