FIVE CARBON POOLS

Wes Jackson

This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Energy Reader: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth, Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2012). The Energy Reader is copyright © 2012 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, and published in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute.

For other excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit energy-reality.org or contact Post Carbon Institute.

Photo: George Wuerthner

about the author

Wes Jackson is a plant geneticist and one of the foremost thinkers in sustainable agriculture. In 1976 he founded The Land Institute to develop “natural systems agriculture.” Jackson’s many honors include being named a Pew Conservation Scholar and a MacArthur Fellow. He received the Right Livelihood Award in 2000, and he is a Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. His books include New Roots for Agriculture, Becoming Native to This Place, and Consulting the Genius of the Place, from which this essay is adapted.

“Five Carbon Pools” is adapted from Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture; © 2011 by Wes Jackson, used by permission of the author and Counterpoint.

Post Carbon Institute | 613 4th Street, Suite 208 | Santa Rosa, California 95404 USA

Pull quote here lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

1

The F irst Pool

Our very being, the physical and cognitive attri-butes of Homo sapiens, was shaped by a seamless

series of changing ecosystems embedded within an ever-changing ecosphere over hundreds of millions of years. The planet’s ability to support humans into a distant future was not on the line. The context of our livelihood kept our numbers more or less in check. Diseases killed us. Predators ate us. Sometimes we starved. The context that had shaped us was the con-text within which we lived. Apparently we had been eating grains but not improving them for centuries. But something happened some ten millennia ago called the Agricultural Revolution. It also became a tread-mill. It happened first in one of these ecosystems, most likely in the land to the east of the Mediterranean, but soon spread. Hunter-gatherers initiated what would be recognized later as a break with nature, a split. This new way of being began our escape from gathering and hunting as a way of life. To set the record straight, Eden was no garden and our escape only partial. Where we planted our crops, we reduced the diversity of the biota. The landscape simplified by agriculture locked our ancestors into a life of “thistles, thorns, and sweat of brow.” We became a species out of context. It has been said that if we were meant to be agricul turists, we would have had longer arms.

No matter how unpleasant this agricultural work may

have been, the food calories increased. Our numbers rose; more mouths needed to be fed. No matter that they disliked thistles and thorns and sweat of brow, our ances tors loved their children and their own lives, and so they kept doing it. They had to eat. Some gave up agriculture when they had the chance. The intro-duction of the horse by the Spanish allowed some of the Native Americans to return to hunting and gathering, for a short while. Eventually the draft animals, espe-cially the ox and the horse, were domesticated. These creatures used the stored sunlight of a grass, shrub, or tree leaf and transferred it to the muscle used to pull a plow or bear a load. They became “beasts of burden.”

This step onto the agriculture treadmill was the first toward the current and looming problem of climate change. It was in that time that humans began a way of life that would exploit the first of five relatively nonrenew able pools of energy-rich carbon—soil. Trees, coal, oil, and natural gas would follow as addi-tional pools to rob from. Our crops and we—both of us—were beneficiaries of the energy released as nutri-ents stored in the carbon compounds in the soil now became available. It was agriculture that featured annu-als in monoculture instead of perennials in mixtures where the split with nature began. And so it was at this moment that the carbon compounds of the soil were exposed to more rapid oxida tion. Carbon dioxide headed for the atmosphere, and the nutrients formerly

The invention of agriculture ten millennia ago was the first step toward the current problem of climate change.

Humans then began a way of life that would exploit the first of five relatively nonrenewable pools of energy-rich

carbon—soil. Trees, coal, oil, and natural gas would follow as additional pools to rob from. We are the first

species in this multibillion-year journey of life on Earth that will have to practice restraint after years

of reckless use of the five carbon pools.

Jackson Five Carbon Pools

2

bound up in those organic compounds—nutrients such as phosphorus and potassium—were now available for uptake by our annual crop plants. So, this wasn’t really a use of the energy-rich carbon in the sense that we were after the energy stored in the carbon molecule. Rather, the breaking of the carbon compound at work in the soil was a consequence of agriculture. With agricul-ture, the soils that had once safely absorbed the footsteps of the Paleolithic gatherers and hunters and their food supply lay vulnerable. The hoe, along with the power to domesticate plants into crops and wild animals into livestock, turned these people into the most impor-tant revolutionar ies our species has ever known. They plunged ahead in this new way of life, repeatedly modi-fying their agrarian technique as they went.

How many were aware they were at the forefront of a way of life dependent on deficit spending of the Earth’s capital? Certainly long before the advent of writing, humans must have understood that till agriculture not only simplifies the landscape but also compromises soil quality and plant fertility. Even so, the reality informed by the immediate reigned. People needed food. Energy-rich carbon molecules were the workhorses in the soil accommodating a diversity of species. The seeds from annual crop monocultures would feed the tribe. The energy-rich carbon in the grains provided these tribes with a more reliable and abundant food supply and, therefore, made possible the beginning of civilization. Eventually the descendants of these farmers had the tools necessary to expand the scale of shrub and tree harvest. Now the agriculturists could more aggres sively exploit the second nonrenewable pool—forests.

The Second Pool

Five thousand or so years passed. It is easy to imagine that as the agricul turists wandered through the forests, their curious minds saw that they could cut down the forests to purify ores. This led to the creation some five thousand years ago of first the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age, and led to a further distancing of nature. But soon this second pool of energy-rich carbon was on its way to being used up beyond local replacement levels. This second use of carbon—deforestation—became,

unambiguously, a mining operation. And it came on fast. And so the forests went down as the soils were eroding, first in the Middle East and later in Europe and Asia. And so it went for millennia, relentlessly, until recently.

The Third Pool

Only one-quarter of one millennium ago, the third pool—coal—was opened on a large scale with the launching of the Industrial Revolution in 1750. But already by 1700, England’s forests were mostly gone to heat the pig iron. The Brits then took their ore to Ireland, where forests were still abundant, to purify the metal. The stock of the second pool of energy-rich car-bon, the forests, had been so depleted that this third pool must have gladdened the hearts of those who would exploit it. Coal reduced the pressure on the forests only slightly, for after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, it cost England its forests to rule the waves for the next three hundred years.

The availability of coal, this third pool, provided a quantum leap in our ability to accomplish more work in a shorter period of time. The density of energy stored in a pound of coal is far greater than the density in a pound of wood. The accessibility and breakability of coal sponsored countless hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the British Empire. However, the colonialism those carbon pools made possible also destroyed local cultural and ecological arrangements that will be, at best, slow to replace in a Sun-powered world.

It seems inevitable now that Neolithic farmers would move from a Stone Age and on to a Bronze Age, and later, an Iron Age. Similarly, given the energy density of coal, it also seems inevitable now that a steam engine would be built to accelerate the Industrial Revolution. Without soil carbon, forests, and coal, it seems doubt-ful that the Brit ish Empire would have had the slack in 1831 to send a young Charles Darwin on his famous voyage around the world. And once home, he was given the leisure to investigate his collections, pore over his journals, exchange letters with contemporaries, con-verse with his scientific peers, and finally, in 1859, have

Jackson Five Carbon Pools

3

On the Origin of Species appear in London bookstores.

The Fourth Pool

The year 1859 was an auspicious one, beyond Darwin’s publication. It was also the year of the first oil well—Colonel Edwin Drake’s oil well in western Pennsylvania—and the opening of the fourth pool of energy-rich carbon, oil. Cut a tree and you have to either chop or saw it into usable chunks. Coal you have to break up. But oil is a portable liquid fuel transferable in a pipe, a perfect product of the Iron Age.

The year 1859 was also when the ardent abolitionist John Brown was hanged at Harpers Ferry, a reality more than coincidental. In some respects, John Brown, beyond believing in the absolute equality of blacks and whites, stands alone in his time. His fervor would have received little traction had not the numbers of abolition-ists been growing in the indus trial North. The South had coal, of course, but not as much. It was a more agrarian society. Northern supporters, who were more profligate carbon-pool users, could afford to be more self-righteous than the more agrarian, less coal-using, slaveholding South. Leisure often makes virtue easier.

The F i fth Pool

Natural gas has been available in some form of use back to the times of the ancient Greeks. But it did not become a manageable pool as a major power source until after coal began to be used. We count it as the fifth pool and likely the last major pool. Other minor pools may follow, such as the lower-quality tar sands and shale oil—both energy- and water-intensive for their extrac-tion—which are in the early stages of being exploited. Over the last half century, we have used natural gas as a feedstock to make nitrogen fertilizer, which we apply to our fields to provide us a bountiful food supply while creating dead zones in our oceans. This technology, called the Haber-Bosch process, was developed in the first decade of the twentieth century by two Germans, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch. Vaclav Smil, a resource scholar at the University of Manitoba, has called it “the most important invention of the twentieth century.”

Without it, Smil says, 40 percent of humanity would not be here. This is certainly a true enough statement given the reality of our cattle, pig, and chicken welfare programs.

When we were gatherers and hunt ers, the ecosystem kept us in check. But since the advent of agriculture, we have forced the landscape to meet our expectations, and we have been cen tered on this way of life. We plow. We cut forests. We mine coal. We drill for oil and natural gas. We want the stored sunlight the oxy-gen helps release. The oxygen that enters our lungs to oxidize energy-rich carbon molecules in our cells is internal combustion—not too dissimilar to the oxygen that enters the air intake of an automobile and, with the aid of a spark, releases the energy to power a bulldozer or to run a car idling in a traffic jam.

We relentlessly rearrange the five carbon pools to get more energy or more useful materials. Internal combus-tion is the name of the game. We reorder our landscapes and industrial machinery to keep our economic enter-prises (and ourselves) going, all the while depleting the stocks of nonrenewable energy-rich carbon. We are like bacteria on a Petri dish with sugar.

So here we are, the first species in this multibillion-year journey of life on Earth that will have to practice restraint after years of reckless use of the five carbon pools. None of our ancestors had to face this reality. We are living in the most important and challenging moment in the history of Homo sapi ens, more important than any of our wars, more important than our walk out of Africa. More important than any of our conceptual revolutions. We have to consciously practice restraint to end our “use it till it’s gone” way of life. We have to stop deficit spending of the ecosphere and reduce our numbers if we hope to prevent widespread sociopoliti-cal upheaval.

Visit energy-reality.org for book excerpts, shareable content, and more.

The ENERGY Reader

ENERGYEdited by Tom Butler and George Wuerthner

Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth

Edited by Tom Butler, Daniel Lerch, and George Wuerthner

What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal mining, and natural gas “fracking” to wind power projects and solar power plants, every source of energy has costs. Featuring the essays found in ENERGY plus additional material, The ENERGY Reader takes an unflinching look at the systems that support our insatiable thirst for more power along with their unintended side effects.

We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy... The essential problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful and inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature. — from the Introduction, by Richard Heinberg

In a large-format, image-driven narrative featuring over 150 breathtaking color photographs, ENERGY explores the impacts of the global energy economy: from oil spills and mountaintop-removal coal mining to oversized wind farms and desert-destroying solar power plants. ENERGY lifts the veil on the harsh realities of our pursuit of energy at any price, revealing the true costs, benefits, and limitations of all our energy options.

Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. 336 pages, 11.75” x 13.4”, 152 color photographs, 5 line illustrations.$50.00 hardcover, ISBN 978-0970950086, Fall 2012.

Published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology in collaboration with Watershed Media and Post Carbon Institute. 384 pages, 6” x 9”, 7 b/w photographs, 5 line illustrations. $19.95 paperback, ISBN 978-0970950093, Fall 2012.