Make Climate Goals Attainable: Remineralize croplands
A truck spreading rock dust on a field. Photo by Ilsa Kantola, University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana Paris Climate Agreement metrics are just out of reach As of July 2021, the top 10 fossil carbon emitting nations are failing to meet their 2030 green-house gas (GHG) reduction goals, as pledged under the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement defines a hard warming limit to 2°C, but current status quo climate initiatives – even if met – will lead to a global warming of 2.6 - 3.1°C. Heating of this magnitude could set forth a cascade of irreversible effects. The ...
Murky Waters: How Sediments Impact Greenland’s Melting Ice Sheets
Image caption: The sediment-rich meltwater river originating from Leverett Glacier in southwest Greenland, pictured in June 2012. Photo credit: Jon Hawkings Few consequences of global climate change are as notorious as melting ice sheets. However, the process responsible for this phenomenon is not as straightforward, or as well-understood, as might be imagined. Ice sheets are masses of glacial ice that form over land, covering a minimum of 50,000 square kilometers (20,000 square miles) [1]. During Earth’s most recent ice ages, ice sheets stretching into the Arctic ...
The Threat of Thawing Permafrost: Further impetus to remineralize the Earth
Photo by Sergey Dolya, sergeydolya.livejournal.com A subterranean threat
A new study, published by a team of geologists at the University of Bonn, has presented scientists with a new worry: thawing permafrost. In the past year, the Taymyr Peninsula in Northern Siberia recorded its hottest summer to date. From May 2020 to March 2021, arctic temperatures rose a whopping 6°C above the typical 1967-2000 baseline. While this rising temperature alone is cause for concern, the deeper issue lies below the Earth’s surface. The Taymyr Peninsula is coated with an imperme...
Peter Jackson on Natural Farming, Ecological Resilience, and the Magic of Minerals and Microbes
Over a span of nearly two decades, self-taught natural farmer Peter Jackson has transformed a plot of rural Washington land into a thriving, bountiful forest garden. When his family first arrived on the land nearly twenty years ago, it contained only a few food-bearing plants: old heirloom apple trees, sickly pear trees, and Chinese plum trees with cherry-sized fruits. Today, the property is home to approximately three hundred fruit and nut trees, as well as assorted berry bushes, and Jackson isn’t finished yet. “I’m trying to get up to about 500 trees on the four ...
Remineralization Goes Mainstream: Major media outlets recognize the power of rock dust
Application of silicate material to cropland. Beerling et al. demonstrate that enhanced rock weathering, achieved by adding crushed basalt or other silicate material to soil, is an effective strategy for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Photo by: Ilsa B Kantola break Last year, the journal Nature published an immensely-popular study on remineralization. With more than 20,000 views, this article may be the most widely-read paper on enhanced weathering to date, and several major media outlets have picked up on it as well. In The Washington Post, Lindsay ...
2021 Online International Nature Farming Convergence
December 2 – December 5, 2021 Tickets: $33 break Join speakers Gil Carandang, Subhash Palekar, Steve Diver, Rei Yoon, Joanna Campe, Paul Oliver, and more for 3 days of talks and discussion. break About this event The focus of this event goes far beyond Nature Farming as a series of recipes, instead bringing in natural philosophy and going back to the traditional roots of farming. Why we are doing this may possibly be to Save the Humans. As the world gets increasingly connected by technology, it is also causing cultural amnesia as homogenous forces of consumerism ...
Prairie Grass Systems: Texan’s Invention Remineralizes Soil While Replenishing Native Flora
Imagine an irrigation system that does not rely on clear water to run through its small tubing orifices, but rather can provide a nutritious ‘dirty’ water, filled with fine rock dust and other particulates that can optimally feed soil microbes. That will be just one of many benefits with David Munson’s Prairie Grass Systems. “We take a water slurry mix and inject it under the plants to provide a little bit of water to the plants, but also food for the soil organisms to attack the rock dust and feed the plants,” he says about his patented invention that ...
Cycling for Change: Oregon Lawyer Bikes to D.C., Promotes GHG Petition
Dan Galpern is bicycling 4,705 miles, through 19 states and two Canadian provinces, to accomplish one goal — pressure the White House to use its full executive authority in order to address climate change. During more than 11 years as a legal and policy advisor to James E. Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, Galpern witnessed little coherence in federal climate change approaches, as the government failed to assume leadership on mitigation efforts. “No legal liability to date has been attached to prior carbon pollution, and there ...
Remineralization Slam Dunk: NYC Dirtball Court Scores One for the Earth
Would you like to combine pickup basketball with offsetting carbon emissions? On Governors Island in New York City, you can! In June 2021, residents of the area gathered on the island for the grand opening of New York City’s first Dirtball court. Dirtball is an interactive environmental art exhibit —a basketball court incorporating remineralizing concrete, a garden, and a birdhouse— designed and executed by Kosmologym, an art and game design collective with the goal of challenging players to build relationships to ecological systems. “There’s all these ...
Rock Dust Key to Club Root Cure, May Unlock 20 million + Acres For Remineralization
This is an update to our previous article: Remineralize the Earth | Plant Nutrition Technologies, Inc: Commercializing Remineralization while Protecting Waterways. Line break Remineralization truly is the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve known for decades that rock dust-based fertilizers are key to regenerative agriculture: in addition to eliminating the ills of artificial fertilizers, they foster healthy soils, grow nutrient-dense foods, and sequester carbon. But new research has discovered another application for rock dust that could protect farmlands and save the ...
