Carbon Mining

Carbon MiningTurkey TangentialBy Spencer Shaw of Brush Turkey Enterprises
Carbon is the hot topic at present and it’s only likely to get hotter if we keep converting so much of it from a solid into a gas. Of course due to so many of our political leaders being so good at making hot gasses, they’re having problems reducing the Greenhouse effect”!Regardless of wether you believe that global warming is a reality or wether you believe it to be an elaborate hoax (and I’m enough of a conspiracy theorist to question both dogmas) there is one simple truth – the ability of the earth to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into life, into biodiversity, into the soils that support our crops and livestock is being degraded in a downward spiral that is depleting the productivity of the land.Our land management practices in either the rural or residential sectors are extractive, industrial processes. The soils that all life comes from are being mined for the fertility they have accrued over thousands of years.It’s not just the amount of carbon we are releasing through the use of fossil fuels that is a problem, it the loss of forest cover, the clearing of rivers and draining of wetlands and billabongs and the loss of organic matter (carbon) from our soils that will cause greater problems for our society in the near future.You’re all aware I’m sure that loss of forest cover is a contributing factor to the “Green House Effect”, but carrying on from my last article about healthy wetlands and dams, did you realise just how important wetlands are as carbon sinks? Primordial wetlands are the source of all our fossil fuels. When organic matter (carbon) enters a wetland, much of it eventually makes its way to the bottom of the wetland and instead of being burnt or recycled into more life forms or simply oxidising away back into the atmosphere – the bulk of the organic sediments remain at the bottom of the wetland. Peat bogs are made up of the compressed decayed remains of plants and can hold large amounts of carbon, more or less permanently – unless burnt or mined!Wetlands also become resources of fertility to the land down stream and surprisingly in spite of all the organic matter they swallow up, they are also great bio-filters that can clean the waters of soluble nutrients and pollutants that pass through them.Pre-European settlement, the naturally slow moving rivers of our area such as the Mary, Maroochy, Mooloolah and Stanley were full of dead or fallen trees, billabongs were scattered through the floodplains and wetlands were thick with vegetation. All these places held huge quantities of organic matter (carbon). Unfortunately we have spent 200 years “tidying” up our country. Draining swamps, de-snagging rivers, clearing the scrub and treating farming like an extractive industry. Australia due to its aridity and ancient sun bleached soils was a continent poor in organic matter when Europeans arrived and now due to our management practices it is a continent far poorer in organic matter (carbon) in its waterways and soils than it has ever been in the last few million years.If I have stated one too many times that organic matter is carbon, its because I’d realy like you to make that link, too often in the Greenhouse argument, it is easy to begin to think that the burning of fossil fuels is the only source of carbon in the atmosphere. Loss of organic matter should be highlighted even more in the greenhouse debate, because it represents a direct loss of fertility in the land that supports us and also the lands ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere.So what relevance does managing organic matter have in natural area management? Well of course it is fundamentally important – particularly when it comes to the re-establishment and management of wetlands and rainforest. For example woody weeds lock up carbon, so when we are replanting or regenerating rainforest it is best to kill woody weeds where they stand or fell and leave whole so that they slowly release their carbon store back to the developing rainforest. Chipping or worse still burning may clean up the site in the eyes of your average “civilised” Homo sapien, but tidy doesn’t necessarily work for ecosystem rehabilitation. Herbaceous weeds such as Cobblers Pegs and Thistles may look untidy and are generally controlled on reveg sites, but in most cases they don’t slow down the growth of regenerating or revegetated rainforest at all, they can actually increase growth. Especially a year or two down the track when tree growth shades them out and the organic matter (carbon) they have contributed to the soil becomes plant food. The benefit of managing our natural areas so that they become net producers of organic matter will in turn increase the fertility of our whole landscape – the landscape that feeds us and provides our true wealth. If we don’t begin to undertake management processes that increase the organic matter held in our land, it won’t just be an oil based carbon crisis we will be leaving our children and grandchildren to face.