Coal in your stocking? Not necessarily a bad thing.

Finding a lump of coal in your stocking may be Santa's way of encouraging you to sequester carbon this holiday season. Consider this: if you take those lumps outside and put them under your garden you'll be doing a small part to keep carbon from entering the atmosphere for eons to come. But what if you want to do more than just MINIMIZE your greenhouse gas emissions? What if you want to MAXIMIZE capture in your next landscape-scale project? 

While the goal of many projects is to simply reduce negative impacts, this approach does not address the need to recapture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and to sequester carbon before it is emitted into the air.  The following are eight practices we use at One Nature to accomplish carbon negative landscapes:
 

MAKE HEALTHY SOILS THAT FIX CARBON.

Healthy soils that contain organic matter will uptake and store carbon. Soil organic matter is made of compounds that are highly enriched in carbon. The more organic matter in the soil, the higher the level of carbon stored. Keep piling on the mulch and building your soils over the years to maintain and increase what you have sequestered. For some great research on this topic check out the Savory Institute's submission to the Virgin Earth Challenge. Planting trees, grasses, and shrubs normally helps too. All those plants suck in CO2 and keep it there for as long as they live. 

REDUCE, RE-USE, RECYCLE. 

By choosing materials that are reclaimed and as local as possible, you can reduce energy and fuel used for production and transportation. This also prevents these reclaimed materials from ending up unused and discarded. This web page by the EPA explains the waste created by new products. 

QUESTION "GREEN" PRODUCTS. 

Some companies make misleading claims about the environmental benefits of their products or service.  By embracing a healthy skepticism of products that claim to be “green,” we can push ourselves to always be seeking the most carbon-neutral (or carbon-negative) options and not to be swayed by “greenwashing". Old-fashioned wood products, for example, are great at sequestering CO2- especially when paired with responsible forestry operations. Have a look at this reasearch out of Yale and University of Washington. 
 

RESTORE & RECONSTRUCT ECOSYSTEMS. 

The earth's living communities are the first step towards greenhouse gas sequestration. Even if you only have a little patch of land, you can do your small part to help bring back your locally important habitat. This simple article by Grid-Arendal is a good overview no matter where you live in the world. 

FILTER RUNOFF. 

We design sites to reduce, capture, slow, and filter stormwater runoff by creating systems based on healthy soils and plants.  Integrating permeable surfaces helps to prevent excess runoff, erosion, and flooding.  Remember, healthy soils are fixing and storing carbon!  By capturing and directing rainwater appropriately, we can reduce erosion of our soils and pollution damages that damages ecosystems thereby limiting their ability to absorb and sequester greenhouse gases.  But don't forget to manage the materials you use to capture runoff or the cure may be worse than the disease. This article from Geosynthetics Magazine shows how not all materials are created equal. 

EMBRACE DETRITUS. 

That huge pile of wood chips from your large project is an asset! Use it on your land to avoid trucking and encourage surface level organic matter. For cooler climates,  let the leaves that fall in your yard be, or at least pile them up in a compost pile (with a  rake, not a high impact leaf blower). If you must move your leaves, here are "Five Greener Alternatives to gas powered Leaf Blowers". 

HIRE LOCAL.

The less distance we have to drive (or fly) to work, the less CO2 we are emitting into the atmosphere through the burning of gasoline.  By hiring local you reduce the miles traveled for a project, and can encourage walking, biking, and the use of mass transit. Some high profile, large scale projects have consultant teams from all over the world who burn more fossil fuel on their plane trips than the trees they plant. Check out this graphic on fossil fuels and travel by the NY Times. 

BUILD IT TO LAST SEVEN GENERATIONS.

Depending on the length of time between human reproduction, seven generations is about 140 to 210 years in the future. By implementing  designs that are carbon-negative and built to last, we can help our lands to sequester carbon and benefit the earth in the year 2224. It sounds like a long way off, but that is a fraction of the time it takes to make a mature old growth habitat. Take a stand and plant a tree for your great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren. By then let's hope she'll be living in an ecotopic future beyond the current environmental crisis.