In the late 1700s and early 1800s, industrialization took off. The first textile mills replaced handcrafts. The human population exploded. Inventions replaced animal and water power with fossilized plant life — coal became the principal energy source.
But burning coal and other fossil fuels put carbon into the atmosphere, creating a blanket-like layer that, since then, has caused Earth’s heat to rise and oceans to overheat, rising tides, melting glaciers and flooding lowlands, among other things.
The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, has been recently measured in Massachusetts at 420 parts per million. To avoid devastating results of climate change, we first have to stop adding to the emissions. Then, we must pull carbon out of the atmosphere to return to its previous measurement of 350 parts per million.
The state’s new law, “An Act Creating a Next Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy,” passed March 26, is a step in the right direction. It’s guided by regular measurements of greenhouse gas and reevaluating goals every five years to make sure we stay on track to bring emissions down to net-zero by 2050. How? By replacing fuels like coal, oil and natural gas with clean energy using pathways outlined in the law.
By codifying such a plan into law, Massachusetts is boldly taking a lead.
On this Earth Day 2021, Thursday, I’d like to introduce the builders that pull carbon out of the atmosphere and concentrate it in the soil. Most of us know them as plants of all kinds, especially trees. Their leaves collect the sun’s energy (photosynthesis). By taking carbon from the atmosphere, trees become nature’s storage system for carbon. The bigger the tree, the more carbon they store, benefitting from a reciprocal relationship with the fungi and bacteria living among tree roots and feeding on decomposing leaves.
Fewer know the story of grasslands.
Earth’s grasslands once supported millions of herd animals, which were able to digest grass and other prairie plants. Pursued by predators, the herds stuck together and kept moving, munching and trampling the grass. They left gifts: their waste fertilized the soil while the plant roots pumped out carbon compounds to the soil around the grassroots. The carbon, in turn, built thick webs of microscopic life like bacteria and fungi underground, creating the deep, water-absorbing topsoil of the plains.
But in the 1800s, colonial farmers killed millions of Indigenous people and their principal food, buffalo.
Then, colonists plowed the prairies, opening carbon-laden soil to wind and rain. Few realized that buffalo were key links to keeping soil covered with grasses, avoiding nitrous oxides and carbon released to the air.
Our path now will be to harness systems evolved by Mother Nature with regenerative agriculture and forestry. Careful observers — indigenous people, farmers, scientists, legislators — are helping us find this way back from the brink of climate crisis.
Fast forward to our present time. Lynn Pledger and Ridge Shinn, partners at Big Picture Beef in Hardwick, an agricultural organization that promotes grass-fed beef through a network of farms, are using cattle instead of buffalo to sequester carbon. They met 45 years ago while working at the outdoor history museum in Old Sturbridge Village, both students of that historic period. He was acting as an 18th-century farmer plowing with big red-Devon cattle; she was a writer and gardener.
While the herd animals are different, the results are the same. Carbon is removed from the atmosphere, creating topsoil and thriving grasslands. The practice is called “regenerative grazing,” and is used by progressive farmers and ranchers globally.
Through Big Picture Beef, Pledger and Shinn market beef raised by farmers in the Northeast whose practices protect the web of life: cattle, plants, soil microbes. They are fostering one of the few ways to remove the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere, storing it in trees and the ground.
This Earth Day, let’s be grateful for trees and grasslands, which can help us restore the balance. In a deeper sense, let’s return to a way of thinking that prioritizes learning from nature, which can provide ways that humanity can rebalance.
Pam Kelly is a 20-year resident of Greenfield, retired director of the national Unitarian Universalist econom ic justice network. Contact:
pamelaskelly@comcast.net.