Sideways News

Amazon Indians found an ingenious way to keep soil fertile year on year

Environmental entrepreneurs, Craig Sams (Green & Black’s) and Dan Morrell (The Carbon Neutral Company) have come up with a solution to the World’s Co2 emissions, following techniques used by Amazon Indians over 500 years ago.

Sams and Morrell are so optimistic about their biochar brainchild, Carbon Gold, that they suggest this most ambitious commercial endeavour to date could even reverse global warming. Their hope is that, following trials in Belize (Central America) and Sussex (England) earlier in 2009, the method will be rapidly adopted worldwide.

Old tricks for new dogs
There’s evidence that Amazon Indians found an ingenious and simple way to keep their soil fertile enough to produce harvests year on year. The key ingredients include carbon, soil and fire. Their efforts can still be seen today in the form of black hills of fertile soil among surrounding poor rainforest soil.

So how do you cleanse a climate?
The Amazon Indians’ method was achieved by burning plants without oxygen (pyrolysis) and burying the resulting biochar (a form of charcoal that stores carbon) in the earth. The plants themselves absorb Co2 from the atmosphere and then once their useful life is over, the biochar can be locked away for thousands of years.

The goodness doesn’t stop there. Apart from keeping it out of the atmosphere, this form of carbon acts as a super-fertiliser. It removes the need for chemical substitutes, reduces methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the Earth, acts as a pollutant filter and reduces flood risk in the local area. What’s more, the energy it gives off can also be used as bio fuel.

Will it work?
Sams is supremely confident; he predicts that if just 2.5% of worldwide productive land was given over to create biochar then we could be back to pre-Industrial Revolution Co2 levels by 2050.

The technique would have a double whammy of cutting Co2 emissions as well as getting rid of current greenhouse gases, something scientists all over the world are calling for. 

While the revival of this farming method has huge potential, how will adoption of it occur and which countries will need to adapt to it? Can it be structured so that developing countries feel the benefits first? Will it support current population levels?

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