“ Fires are going to be a criticaldeterminant in our landscape.What's happened with climate change, whole landscapes are systemically aridifying, drying. Southern Australia will get30% less rainfall, so it'll dry, but much more worrying than just the lower rainfall is that the weather is more variable,unreliable and extreme.With that drying, and with that extreme climate, we're going to go into dangerous fire, wildfire weather. And it's going togo beyond the capacity for fire management, conventional fire management, to control. We've already seen that.We're now getting crown fires, we're getting fuel volatilising, and burning in the crowns, well ahead of any fire fronts,impossible to put out on an extreme day.-Walter Jehne

“

INTERVIEW

Hello, you're listening to EarthMatters. Earth Matters brings youenvironment and social justicestories.

Bec HorridgeToday's story was produced in thestudios of Radio 2XX, Canberra, onthe lines of Ngunnawal and theGambrey peoples, for Radio 3CR inMelbourne, Wiradjuri country, andbroadcast nationally on theCommunity Radio Network. I'm BecHorridge.

Bec HorridgeToday I'm talking to soil scientist,Walter Jehne, and campaigner CindyIritz. Now they're two climate activistswho've been in demand overseaswith a proposal, how to build a globalsoil carbon sponge, that would soakup CO2, and save us from globalwarming. Cindy, how did you getinvolved in all of this?

Cindy IritzWhen I retired from my career, Ispent a couple of years doing actionresearch, trying to work out where

was the best place for me to put mytime and my energy to be able tomake the biggest difference. And Icame upon soils, and discovered thatsoils can, through plants, takecarbon out of the atmosphere, andstore them stably in soils. And I waslike, "Wow, okay, this is where I needto put my time and energy." So that'swhat I've been doing.

Bec HorridgeYou can store carbon in soils, andplants do that. Could you explain alittle bit for us?

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Cindy IritzMost people understand aboutforests, and when forests arecleared, that carbon goes up into thesky. So basically, it's the opposite.We all learned about photosynthesisin schools. Through photosynthesis,the plants take carbon out of the sky,and it goes down into the roots, andis dripped into the soil, and then it'sheld securely in the soil. It's quiteexciting.

Bec HorridgeYou were invited to be part of adelegation to COP 21 in Paris. Whatwas that?

Cindy IritzI had networks in different parts ofthe world, and one of these networksestablished an organization calledRegeneration International, and theydecided that they would invitedelegates from all over the world tocome to Paris. And I was one ofthose delegates.The Paris people were starting aninitiative called 4p1000, which isunder the Lima-Paris accord. I wasthere with about three dozen otherdelegates. And it was amazing,mostly because we'd all beenworking in isolation - so the solidaritywas incredible.

Bec HorridgeI looked up what the Four PerThousand initiative is and found thatan annual growth rate of 4% in thesoil carbon stocks per year wouldhalt the increase in the CO2concentration in the atmosphererelated to human activities. The FourPer Thousand International Initiativewas launched in 2015, at the COP 21International Climate Conference. Itconsists of federating voluntarystakeholders of the public andprivate sectors.The aim of the initiative is todemonstrate that agriculture and,agricultural soils, can play a crucialrole where food security and climatechange are concerned. The ambitionof the initiative is to encouragestakeholders to transition towards a

productive, highly resilientagriculture, based on the appropriatemanagement of lands and soilscreating jobs and incomes, hence,ensuring sustainable development.

Walter JehneWe're at this position now, after 50years of hard evidence, that CO2 isgoing up, and increasing. And we'rein a position now where CO2 willcontinue to rise. And drawing down,or just slowing down emissions, oreven politically pretending to slowdown emissions is nowhere nearenough. And so, it's not just a matterof slowing emissions. We still mustdo that, but we also must and candraw down massive quantities ofcarbon naturally back into the soilsand the biosphere.Up to now we've completely ignoredthe potential of our residual naturalbiosystems to draw that down, but ifwe stop ignoring that, and startenhancing that, yes, we can drawdown twice as much carbon as weare now annually emitting into theatmosphere. And that really isimperative for the climate, globally, inthe next decades, we haven't gotmuch time.

Bec HorridgeBuilding up our souls with carboncould draw down a massive amountof CO2. I'd like to dig into the sciencea little more. What are soil microbes?What do they do?Walter JehneSoil microbes are really the activeagents. They're really the front-linesoldiers or activists that are workingright across the planet, have beendoing that for 420 million years. Andthey're the things that sequester thatsugar, and the root exudates thatCindy mentioned, and store thatsugar as stable soil carbon.In doing so, they build that soilcarbon sponge, that loose, fluffy,aggregated soil, that is able to holdwater and nutrients and drives awhole productivity of all our bio-systems. It's that soil carbon spongethat holds the water, allows rain toinfiltrate, and be retained, and of

course it's that hydrology thatgoverns 95% of the heat dynamics ofthe blue planet, Earth. And it's thathydrology that we must now restoreto safely, naturally cool the planet.

Bec HorridgeI read that biological agriculture thatputs carbon back in the soils cangive us healthier food. Can youplease explain?

Walter JehneEvery living organism on this planetneeds nutrients. It needs thosenutrients for total biochemistry, for itshealth. We need in the excess of 30different nutrients in the rightconcentration, forms, ratios andbalance. And we get those nutrientsnaturally, from our soils. The thingsthat make those nutrients available inthe right concentration ratios, formsand balances are the microbes, thefungi that are involved with taking upthose nutrients, and thentransporting them to plants, inexchange for the sugars that Cindymentioned, the plants are exuding.The health of our food, and thehealth of people, then depends on -are we getting these right nutrients?We can only get those nutrients if wegrow food in these natural ways,from these natural soils. Otherwisewe're dependent on fertilizernutrients, and invariably we havehyper concentrations of some, anddeficiencies in others, and that'scausing massive diseaseconsequences right across modernhumans, because the wholenutritional integrity of our food isfundamentally compromised.

Bec HorridgeWhat sort of diseases are youthinking of there?

Walter JehneWell, over the last 60 - 70 years,we've had an explosion of a wholerange of self-induced diseases.These are diseases which are reallyour biochemistry malfunctioning. Andthat includes the cancers, the cardiacheart diseases, the autoimmune, the

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whole range of diabetes, the wholerange of diseases that are-

Bec HorridgeAttention deficit disorders?

Walter JehneYes, attention deficit, allergyreactions. But these are all diseasesthat directly relate to what we put intoour bodies through our food. And ifthe nutritional integrity of that food iscompromised, by definition, so is ourbiochemistry, and so is ourpreventative health. We've had thismassive exponential explosion,where two-thirds of the communityglobally are now either obese ormalnourished. And that's all relatedto the lack of nutritional integrity ofour food, and how we've destroyedthat through agriculture, because ofour destruction of healthy soils.We have globally a $10 trillion a yearglobal industrial food system. Itwants to produce its products andthe cheapest possible way. It's notreally interested in our health,because it makes even more moneyon then fixing the symptoms of thatlack of nutritional integrity in whatwe're eating.If you go to a supermarket and 98%of the shelf spaces are from thesenutritionally poor products. Andinvariably, that's what people arebuying. Trillions of dollars ofmarketing money is being spent onto induce us to buy that stuff. Thereare impediments there, there'svested interest. It's a, as Cindy said,a very challenging, difficult area.

Bec HorridgeHow exactly are you proposing toproduce healthier food in Australia?

Walter JehneWorking with groups of, orindividually, with innovative farmersall over Australia and regions.They're already doing it, but thenreally saying, "Here is a natural way.Here's a healthier way that we canregenerate those soils, grow bettercrops with far fewer artificial inputs."And in so, doing by it through these

natural processes, produce healthierfood. And so, our challenge now is tosay, "Okay, how do we work withindividuals, groups, and how do wehelp them to do that at that locallevel, get into markets, to get thoseproducts as high premium, highnutritional integrity products, intomarkets at the premiums that theydeserve?"Bec HorridgeWalter made the change toregenerative agriculture sound soeasy, but Cindy could see someobstacles.

Cindy IritzFarmers who put themselves forwardand try new things get ostracisedwithin their community. There's athing which is known in our field as‘the Hundred Mile Rule’, where,within a hundred miles of your farm,everybody thinks you're a fool, andnobody wants to know you.Socially, you're ostracised. And youimagine how difficult this makesfarming. which is a traditionalindustry. Relationships are obviouslyvery deep in rural areas - terriblyhard.What we've just been doing isworking with those innovators, givingthem credibility, giving them support.This has made a big difference.There's more produce and productsbeing required for export, that meansthat more land is gettingregenerated.The original story of the carbon beingtaken out of the atmosphere is storedin the soil. The more regenerativeagriculture, the more exports that arehappening of regenerativeagriculture, the better chance of usgetting closer towards saving theplanet one day.Bec HorridgeWalter, we know that there's beenfires all over the place. When yousee litter on a forest floor, deadbranches and things, what do youthink of?

Walter JehneFires are going to be a criticaldeterminant in our landscape. What's

happened with climate change,whole landscapes are systemicallyaridifying, drying. Southern Australiawill get 30% less rainfall, so it'll dry,but much more worrying than just thelower rainfall is that the weather ismore variable, unreliable andextreme.With that drying, and with thatextreme climate, we're going to reallygo into dangerous fire, wildfireweather. And it's going to go beyondthe capacity for fire management,conventional fire management, tocontrol. We've already seen that.We're now getting crown fires, we'regetting fuel volatilising, and burningin the crowns, well ahead of any firefronts, impossible to put out on anextreme day.We need to rethink the whole basisof fire management. We must do it.It's critical, but we need a whole newparadigm of approaches. And it'sagain, very, very simple, and it's whathappens naturally. We havephotosynthesis that producesbiomass. Green plants grow andproduce biomass, which is celluloseand lignum, woody tissue.Balancing, balancing growth, theplant growth, biomass production,there's an equal balancing function innature, which is biodegradation. Therotting down of that biomass, largelyby fungi, and bacteria to turn that fuelinto stable soil carbon.

Bec HorridgeYou're with Earth Matters. I'm BecHorridge. And I have in the studiowith us today, Cindy Iritz, who's alogistics expert, and Walter Jehne, asoil scientist.

Walter JehneEvery piece of biomass that's everformed on land, for the last 420million years on this planet, haseither burned back to CO2, oroxidized back to CO2, or beenconverted into stable soil carbon. It'sthat balance between burning andstable soil carbon formation, whichwe control through our landmanagement.

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It's fungi that are the dominant factorin biodegrading it, so it's not there infuel.

We've got a whole new, amazing,powerful opportunity to say, "Look,can we actually biodegrade the fuels,so as to avoid those dangerous fireperiods?" And the answer is, “Yes,we can. We can do that practicallyreadily.” Instead of having five to 10tonnes of fuel per hectareaccumulating every year in ourforest, leading to extremecatastrophic wildfires, we can turnthat five to 10 tonnes of biomass intosoil carbon, which will then holdwater, increase the moistureretention of that soil, and change thefire risk. Both by reducing the fueland maintaining higher soil moisturelevels.In turning from a dry, sclerophyll,extreme habitat, that same forest -we can turn into a moist, amazingsheltered, more wet sclerophyllenvironment. This is fundamentalAustralian ecology, that wasdescribed way back in the 60s, byBeadle, and [name?]. We have wetsclerophyll forest, and dry sclerophyllforest, from the same soils, in thesame climate, with the samespecies. What's needed to turn itfrom a dry sclerophyll, fire-proneenvironment into a wet sclerophyll,more rainforest inducingenvironment? That is the activity ofthese fungi - we can control those,we can enhance those, and in thatway, preventatively reduced firerisks.

Bec HorridgeHow does this relate to water?Friends of mine from different placesin New South Wales are saying theirlocal creeks and rivers have gonedry. Can you talk to that - the dryingof rivers, and that the landscape isso dehydrated?

Walter JehneIt's a critical symptom of what'shappening in the landscape withclimate change. We get less rainfall.It becomes more critical that insteadof worrying about that we've got less

rainfall; we've got to focus on whathappens to every one of a hundredraindrops that do fall.Does it infiltrate the soil, to rechargethe soil carbon sponge, our in-soilreservoirs, and keep that landscapegreen and functioning - keep subsoilwater recharging streams andsprings, to keep the rivers flowing?Or do we allow that surface tobecome so compacted, so degraded,that 95% of those raindrops that dofall, just rapidly run off, in erosiveflood flows, and invariably causedrought as a consequence? Droughtisn't anything to do with the weather,per se. Drought is all about ourmismanagement of our landscape.We've prevented those hundredraindrops that do fall, staying in thelandscape, to keep that landscapegreen and healthy.

Bec HorridgeAnd by cutting down so many trees,we've affected the hydrology cycletoo, haven't we?

Walter JehneWe have fundamentally changed thatsoil hydrological cycle, because ofour agricultural land managementpractices. As we clear the land,cutting down trees, as we burn theland excessively - indigenous fireswere a completely different story.They were cool mosaic burns, largelyby women, that managed the surfacefuel level, but didn't degrade the soil.Ours are degrading the soil.Clearing, burning, cultivation,overfertilization, biocide use, whichkills that soil microbial life, and barefallows, are all extremely impactingon our soils, degrading, destructuringthem, compacting them - causingmost of this water to run off. As far asthe whole hydrology of thelandscape, it's making sure thatevery one of those a hundredraindrops infiltrates, is retained,rather than running off. And we cando that by changing our landmanagement practices.

Bec HorridgeThat's great, Walter, but you didn'treally explain what I wanted to know.

How do you get fungi - how do youget them to eat more forest litter?How do you make more fungi?

Walter JehneWe'd just go back to nature becausenature had beautifully balancedsystems for doing this. It all revolvesaround the carbon-nitrogen ratio inthat forest litter. If we have dryeucalypt litter, particularly as wehave now, it's got a carbon nitrogenratio of over 100 to one. There's somuch carbon, there's so littlenitrogen in that litter, it's almostimpossible to break down. Itaccumulates to create thesedangerous fire weathers.In nature we had a lot of animals andbiodiversity in those forests. Theseanimals were important inincorporating that nitrogen, andturning around that litter, toaccelerate its breakdown. Let's gothrough that. We had koala bearsand the crown turning eucalyptleaves into, basically frass, whichwas urine and excrement. Koalas,you could class them as aerialalimentary canals.They were eating prodigious quantityof eucalypt leaves, excreting thenutrient as nitrogen litter, addingnitrogen to the forest floor in theurine and excrement, to help drivethe breakdown of that litter.We had vast quantities of leaf eatinginsects eating eucalypt leaves,turning 50% of that leaf into insectprotein, and another 50% intoexcrement. Nitrogen that raineddown on the forest floor helped breakdown that litter. We had bandicootsand potoroos and pademelons, littlemarsupials on the forest floor,continually digging for truffles, fungalfruiting bodies.Every night, each little potoroo woulddig up 150 little holes. On a yearlybasis, zoologists have studied, theymoved six tonnes of topsoil a yearper pademelon.Disturbing that forest floor,composting, accelerating thatcompost floor, putting extra nitrogenin.We had lyre birds, what we calledscratchable scrub turkeys, bush

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turkeys, scratching through that litter,continually excreting in that litter,accelerating its composting to stablesoil carbon. There was a myriad ofbiological life, all those beautiful fairylittle animals, birds, and it was thatbiodiversity life that added nitrogento the fuel, brought the carbonnitrogen ratio down to about 20 toone, not one hundred to one.At 20 to one, that litter breaks downrapidly to stable soil carbon, to buildthe sponge, to build its water holdingcapacity, and turn what were drysclerophyll forests into progressivelywet sclerophyll forest. Now you cansee this, for those people who evervisited the South Coast of NewSouth Wales, where we had spottedgum forest on very dry gravelly soils.In the same climate, those spottedgum forests can either be very dry,very fire prone, or where they haveenough nitrogen, with theirmacrozamia communis understories,and these animals turning intoeffectively wet sclerophyll, for pre-rainforest conditions. It's as simpleas accelerating the breakdown ofthat litter, to reduce the fire fuel, boththrough moving the fuel, andenhancing soil moisture.

Bec HorridgeWhat are you going to do? Like,sprinkle fungi food on there? How doyou do that, with vast areas offorest? It seems like a bit of a call.

Walter JehneOf course, we don't sprinkle fungiaround - there's no such thing,they're already there. We must nowmanage the forest, we must respectand restore the biodiversity, theanimal diversity. We understandthese animals in the forest arecritically part of the ecology. We muststart looking at these forests, not justas trees and timber, but as a livingfunctional, dynamic biosystem withthese nitrogen cycles, avoiding thefire.It's respecting, restoring theecological biodiversity of thoseforests. On top of that, we can do alot of preventative work. We canhave biological firebreaks, where weagain can put natural nitrogen ontoroad edges, and accelerate thebreakdown of litter, creatingbiological firebreaks in those forests.We can do a whole lot of basic landmanagement changes that limit theamount of fuel. We can stop the firescrowning, going up into the crowns,where they become unmanageableand uncontrollable, and extremelydangerous.

Bec HorridgeWalter Jehne and Cindy Iritz, fromRegenerate Earth, talking on theglobal soil carbon sponge. You'vebeen listening to Earth Matters.

This edition of Earth Matters wasproduced for Radio 3CR inMelbourne, on Wiradjuri country,and broadcast nationally on theCommunity Radio network.

Earth Matters would like to thankthe Community BroadcastingFederation for their generousfinancial support.And if you'd like to get in touchwith the Earth Matters team, youcan e-mail us, atearthmatters3cr@gmail.com, orvisit our Facebook page onearthmatters3crradio. Or follow uson Twitter, at @EarthMradio.

If you'd like to listen to or shareeditions of Earth Matters, you canfind this, and all the Earth Matterspodcasts, at 3cr.orgdot.au/earthmatters.

The Earth Matters team will beback next week with moreenvironmental and social justicestories, from all over this beautifulblue planet.

I'm Bec Horridge. That amazingmusic we've been listening to isthe music of Dar Shelton, and thatsong, Encounter By The River.

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