The thesis of this book is that the Arctic is not a region to be studied at an objective remove, or subjected to policy decisions and industrial developments designed to protect southern notions of economic development and sovereignty, but a being who demands of us a relationship that is both ethical and spiritual. That being, in the language of those who have lived there the longest, goes by the name Sila, as the shaman Najagneq told anthropologist Knud Rasmussen in 1924:

Sila [is] a strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact all life on Earth – so mighty that his speech to man comes not   through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the sea, through all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas or small, innocent children.

This is, as you may have guessed by now, a deeply unorthodox book. Its many lessons are folded into a story Leduc recounts about the Western climate researcher George Wenzel and an incident that took place while on a three-day hunt with an Inuit companion from Baffin Island. The two men came across a polar bear that acted in a strange manner when it emerged from its den. Wenzel was intrigued by the fact that his Inuit companion spent three hours studying the bear’s behaviour, as if it was a piece of changing, and increasingly uncertain, polar bear activity across the North.

Because the world around us is beginning to act in non-ordinary ways, Leduc infers from this story that human beings of diverse backgrounds need to come together to talk through the ramifications of what is happening. And, before responding to Sila’s changes, our first move might actually consist of bearing witness and recalibrating our own worldviews.

Leduc sees climate change as an occasion for new thinking, and – in one of the book’s many mythic turns – the basis for an initiation back into the old-world idea of the Earth as full of agency and active powers. He implores us to take Inuit cultural authorities at their word: that Sila is not a metaphor, but an entity whose existence has been confirmed through a non-Western- epistemology as rigorous as our own. He proposes that even if we reject such ideas, our consumerist behaviour still contributes towards one half of a dialogue with the North – albeit a dysfunctional one.

Ultimately, this book has less to do with the Inuit with whom Leduc himself conversed than it has to do with how we need to change the ways in which we think. Leduc’s radical, to-the-root rethinking and reframing of the climate crisis is uncompromising and exhilarating.

This is also a difficult book, written in an academic language that in places may frustrate the intelligent beginner. Hopefully, he will address this in the future because his work aspires to an important place in the ecosystem of environmental ideas. A contract professor in York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, Leduc is one of the only intellectual decendents of a whole generation of ecological philosophers – the likes of Vine Deloria Jr., George Sessions, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, and, in a Canadian context, John Livingston and Neil Evernden. Their critiques do away with light tinkering around the edges of the modern industrial paradigm in order to challenge its ground-floor assumptions about reality and the place of human beings in it. How come Leduc is one of the few left to hold the ground?

The take-home message of this book is this: Finding our way through the climate crisis will involve a lot more than negotiating where to plant wind turbines, or remembering to take the blue box out to the curb. We arrive at Sila’s historic challenge dragging a lot of baggage with us, much of it inherited from Enlightenment thought patterns. We’ve been conditioned on so many levels to see the Earth as a set of resources, subject to human management and manipulation. The idea of the North as a living being – Leduc’s main point – may simply not make sense within the assumptions we live by. In other words, even if there is a way out of the climate crisis, will we recognize it?

Mark Dickinson teaches courses in the ecological humanities at Trent University and the Ontario College of Art and Design University. He is co-editor of Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky.

For some, active citizenship might mean founding a non-profit organization. Others may find their calling in joining Teach for America, making a midlife career change and getting into the non-profit sector, or volunteering online with a collective intelligence project. In Citizen You: How Social Entrepreneurs are Changing the World (http://www.citizenyou.org/), co-authors Jonathan Tisch and Karl Weber explore an option for every lifestyle. The book is filled with the stories of numerous active citizens, as well as practical tips, “food for thought,” and “seeds for action” to help individuals make a difference.

In an active citizens’ society, anyone can – and everyone should – be socially engaged. The varied examples offered in Citizen You do much to support this argument. Students may identify with the young woman whose volunteer work researching poverty in Guatemala inspired her to attend law school. Professionals might enjoy reading about a “citizen engineer” who takes a holistic approach to his work, transforming technical fields into opportunities for  social, economic and political reform. Business people will be interested by the corporate citizenship of Loews Hotels, which includes a Green Policy and a Minority Business Enterprise Program.

Tisch, the successful chief executive with Loews Corporation and Loews Hotels, is known for his corporate responsibility and philanthropic work (such as his creation of the Loews Hotels Good Neighbor Policy), and for his service on the Board of Trustees at Tufts University. Throughout his career, Tisch has demonstrated the possibilities of uniting for-profit business and social responsibility. In Citizen You, he and Weber describe unlikely means of merging the two.

Some say a business is only responsible for earning a profit by legal means. Yet social responsibility for businesses has its own benefits, such as good publicity and increased sales. Corporate social responsibility does not need to stop at donations to charity or “greening” the company; business acumen can also be combined with social goals. Non-profits can learn from and adapt business methods, such as when charities use metrics to measure their programs’ efficiency and impact. From the other side, divisions of for-profit organizations can contribute resources to social and civic causes.

Citizen You‘s greatest strength may also be its weakest point. As mentioned earlier, the book is packed – some might say padded – with examples. These examples easily take up as much space as their theoretical underpinnings, sometimes becoming tedious. Worse, the authors rarely reflect on them or adequately explain their significance.

Canadian and international readers may also find the book rather US-centric. The chapter dedicated to New York’s NYC Service initiative is interesting as an example of what a city can do on its own, but the chapter on government, which focuses exclusively on American government, could easily have been given a broader scope. There are occasional references to active citizenship overseas, but the vast majority of the book is about Americans’ work and would not apply to developing countries. Working within a capitalist framework is particularly taken for granted.

Citizen You illuminates and inspires with its detailed descriptions of how anyone can get involved in active citizenship. It makes a convincing argument that it is possible to both “do well” and “do good.” The face of activism is changing to reflect active citizenship; Tisch and Weber’s book provides a useful guide to what is happening and how you can get involved.

C.E. Pierre recently received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies and English from the University of Waterloo. 

E is For Environment contains 26 short stories about a couple of kids named Elliott and Lucy who learn valuable lessons about re-usable shopping bags, using both sides of a piece of paper, litterless lunches, fixing leaky faucets, and much, much more. Each of the stories is accompanied by follow-up questions and discussion points to keep the conversation going. Illustrator R.A. Holt has created endearing renderings of Elliott and Lucy that add a touch of whimsy at the start of each chapter.

Ian James Corlett has gone down this road before. His previous book, E is For Ethics used the same formula to great effect. His writing is breezy and effective, delivering moral lessons without being overbearing. Corbett has really hit on something here, and the world of children’s literature will be made all the richer if he continues with more books in this style. If Corbett keeps the ‘E’ series going, we will certainly be buying them.

Sara Hart is homeschooling mom of four and owner of Hart Home Daycare (www.harthomedaycare.com), the first daycare in Ontario to be endorsed as Eco-Healthy by the Oregon Environmental Council.

The book’s main insight is that we have been barking up the wrong tree when it comes to stemming urban sprawl. We put our faith in planners and planning institutions to undo sprawl’s litany of predations. We create regional plans, draw growth boundaries around cities and zone for higher-density housing. Yet Canada continues to sprawl like there is (literally) no tomorrow.

The planning approach would make sense if poor planning policies were the main cause of sprawl. But, as Blais points out, this is only one source of the problem. The Toronto-based consultant argues that economic signals are a more fundamental driver.

Blais brings this assertion down to Earth with a plethora of examples. Development charges are the fees that municipalities slap on developers of new real estate projects so that they can provide the infrastructure (water, sewage, roads) needed to service the new community. However, the same per-unit fee is paid whether a project is infilling an empty space in the city centre where services are already nearby, or clinging onto the periphery of the city where new infrastructure has to travel a long way. Since these charges can reach $30,000 to $40,000 on a residential unit, they represent a hefty subsidy to sprawl.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.6: 40th Anniversary Issue, published in October 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

The same applies to a slew of other price signals: property taxes, network service rates (water, electricity, gas, telephone, cable, postal services, internet connectivity), municipal service charges (garbage collection, snow removal, recycling), mortgage rates and parking fees. Blais convincingly shows how a new approach to pricing, based on the true cost of supplying infrastructure and services to different locations and for different types of land use, would transform these price signals from sprawl-makers into sprawl-busters.

Short listed for the 2011 Donner Prize, awarded each year to the best book on Canadian public policy, Perverse Cities is generally well written (although a little rambling in the early parts, and repetitive in later sections) and makes interesting reading (especially for policy wonks). Nonetheless, it suffers from a few weaknesses.

First, urban planning is not quite the failure that Blais makes it out to be. Early results suggest that the ambitious urban planning effort in Southern Ontario’s Greater Golden Horseshoe, where Blais lives, is helping rein in sprawl. And planning success in Vancouver and Portland, Oregon, receive short shrift.

Perverse Cities proposes that if we juggled the fiscal system so that property taxes, service fees and utility charges accurately reflected the cost of delivering infrastructure and services in different locations and at different densities, then we would not need urban planning at all – sprawl would solve itself. If this were the case, however, we would expect Canada to be more sprawling than the US, where planning systems are weaker and property rights are sacrosanct. But the opposite is true: Canadian cities (and suburbs) are generally denser, more compact and contiguous than their US counterparts.

Another of the book’s shortcomings is its political naiveté. Homeowners have invested in their location and transportation choices (suburban homes and multiple vehicles) based on the existing constellation of price signals. Wholesale changes to this system would require massive dislocations in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Large suburban homes would lose value and driving to work from a distant suburb would become prohibitively expensive. Politicians would be understandably hesitant to make the changes required to bring this about.

Finally, the author is sometimes a little cavalier with the evidence. For example, to support her contention that planning is part of the problem, Blais claims that the massive new greenbelt around Toronto and Hamilton is having the disastrous effect of causing development to leapfrog outside the greenbelt. As evidence, she refers the reader to a Neptis Foundation report that was published in 2004, a year before the greenbelt was created.

Blais’ focus on the idea that the drivers of sprawl are hidden in our utility and tax bills might gradually tame some of the economic forces that are grinding against the planning system. However, the author seems to have been carried away by the seductive logic of free-market thinking, a logic that ultimately impugns urban planning. And that, as they say, is a pity.

Ray Tomalty, an urban-sustainability consultant, is an adjunct professor in the School of Urban Planning at McGill University.

His new book, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, begins with the obligatory dissection of the full crisis before us, which Rifkin describes in a nutshell as peak globalization. “We have reached the outer limits of how far we can extend global economic growth within an economic system dependent on oil and other fossil fuels,” he writes. He also cites climate change as another major threat that could be “cataclysmic” if left unchecked.

These crises — peak oil and climate change — are the natural result of an economy predicated on endless growth, one which is blind both to the limits of finite resources and to the vast opportunities for harnessing boundless, free energy from the sun.

For Rifkin, we are on the verge of finally turning the corner on this carbon-based era, and about to begin a 40-year roll-out of the Third Industrial Revolution, defined by a “merging of Internet technology and renewable energies.” This vision is far from pie-in-the-sky. A key advisor for the European Union for the past decade, he helped craft the EU’s long-term plan for sustainability, which ultimately convinced diverse political leaders to commit to an aggressive reduction of fossil fuel use over the next 10 years.

Long-term sustainability, argues Rifkin, entails a “profound shift in the very way society is structured, away from hierarchical power and toward lateral power.” It’s a shift that would transform the energy economy (and the global economy along with it) from being centralized, inefficient and inherently wasteful, to a system that mimics the distributed and collaborative structure of the Internet.

The book lays out a five-pillar plan that would get us there. It is based on a strong commitment to local, distributed and renewable power, such as solar, wind and geothermal. Rifkin goes beyond traditional calls to ramp up renewable power capacity: He calls for turning buildings into “micro power plants,” producing power with rooftop solar panels and other technologies, and combining that with enough storage capacity to ensure a reliable energy source.

Such a system, writes Rifkin, could be linked together on a smart-power grid that would stretch across continents, just like the Internet. He also argues for a full, green overhaul of our transportation systems using electric and fuel-cell technologies that would be fully plugged into the new power grid.

Is it possible? Rifkin thinks so. But it all depends on integration, with all elements coming to the fore at the same time, and not in isolation. “If any of the five pillars fall behind the rest in development, the others will be stymied and the infrastructure itself will be compromised.”

Rifkin recognizes the enormity of the task at hand, which perhaps accounts for the book’s grandiose title. It also explains one of the book’s final chapters, and its call for a revolution in education. Rebuilding our society for sustainability will take more than grand plans and economic tinkering, suggests Rifkin. How we educate will also need to change, not just to train a new green workforce, but also to cultivate a “biosphere consciousness” based on empathy for the planet and for fellow creatures.

We’ve already experienced two Industrial Revolutions, both of which transformed society in fundamental ways. The third will be just as transformational, but green, insists Rifkin. Let’s hope he’s right.

(Book published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 304 pages.)

This review first appeared on TheGreenPages.ca.

Thurman swims upriver, where he will do… something. Along the way he encounters more garbage, finally winding up stuck in a discarded soda bottle. (Spoiler alert:) Rescued by a group of young students on a field trip, his story broadcast by a local TV station, Thurman becomes the inspiration for other schools to send students into the countryside to help clean it up. Meanwhile, Thurman returns to his family having learned the valuable lesson that one turtle can make a difference.

Artie Knapp’s Living Green is pleasant enough. Its characters and story are simple and relatable, and its message is positive and worthwhile. More cynical children and adults might be a little put off by the didacticism and heavy-handedness of the storytelling, but the book will be well-enjoyed by younger children. The illustrations and design look polished and professional, but oddly derivative of popular Children’s Lit icon, Franklin the Turtle. One wonders if this was intentional, or if there are simply not that many different ways to draw a turtle. Still, Living Green is a well-meaning and inoffensive introduction to environmental issues. for kids who are beginning to learn about the world around them.

Sara Hart is homeschooling mom of four and owner of Hart Home Daycare (www.harthomedaycare.com), the first daycare in Ontario to be endorsed as Eco-Healthy by the Oregon Environmental Council.

The book is based on the author’s four decades of direct experience in social issues and community organizing in Canada, Africa, Central America, Europe and Japan, as well as a comprehensive reading of the important literature on the subject. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of the history and the conceptual basis of community organizing before launching into the specifics of the practice. It this practical nature of the book as a “how to” tool for community organizers that is its greatest strength. The practitioner is provided with specific tools: how to recognize the motivations of the funding body, how to work with the community – set up a meeting, run a meeting, identify and address the issues – how to deal with conflicts within the community group, and how to disengage positively once the mission has been achieved and the group has built up internal strengths.

This is a practical book, but it is not short on guiding principles, most obviously: social justice, non-violence, environmental consciousness, respectfulness and humility.

Not coincidentally, Lee quotes the classic work The Great Transformation, by Karl Polyani on several occasions. Polyani was concerned with the pendulum swings from right to left and back again since the early days of the Industrial Revolution in England. He was also concerned about the potentially negative effects of capitalism on the environment. Lee is no less concerned with these swings and his overall thesis is that community organizing, if done effectively and with knowledge of the wider social, economic, political and environmental realities, can be an important force in redressing the current swing to the right.

The author ends the book with a section that asks the bigger questions about community organizing in what is primarily a capitalist society, one in which the rich seem to be getting richer and the marginalized are increasingly pushed to the margins; a world where responsibility to the community is seen as increasingly irrelevant to many economic decision-makers.

This book is primarily addressed to the student or practitioner of community organizing: They will find it an invaluable tool in honing the wide diversity of skills and understandings so essential to the effective practice of community organizing. A more general audience of readers will find this book enlightening and useful, particularly those interested in how change at the local level can be linked to wider systemic change, especially change that leads towards greater social justice for marginalized populations such as those living in poverty and racialized groups. This is also relevant for environmentalists. Bill McKibben, the American environmentalist and author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and many other books on environmental issues, has said that addressing the environmental crisis is no longer simply a problem of science but is also a political problem. Accordingly, the pragmatics of organizing at the community level will increase the effectiveness of every environmentalist by helping him or her directly address the political dimensions of environmental issues.

Pragmatics of Community Organizing should be in the hip pocket of every community organizer and every student who wishes to become one.

(Book published by CommonAct Press, Toronto, 2011. 304 pages.)

Jim Ward, PhD, has been developing community organizing strategies with numerous stakeholder groups since the early 1970s. An educator, consultant, public speaker and book author, he lives in Toronto with his wife Catherine.

Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean By Julia Whitty

One of the greatest limitations we face as a species is that we react to events as opposed to prepare for them. For examples, a heart attack often leads to a complete change of lifestyle, but only after the fact. Collectively we are much the same, so it is a good thing that books come along that alert us to the fact that one of the Earth’s essential organs, the ocean, is in trouble. And if the ocean is in trouble, so are we.

In Sea Sick, talented Canadian journalist Alanna Mitchell paints a vivid picture of the peril to planetary life if the seas fail. In her award-winning book, Mitchell successfully connects us to the mysterious hidden ocean in a way that works even for ordinary citizens who are preoccupied with simple survival in troubled times. Plankton, while unspectacular and often almost invisible to the naked eye, produce half of the world’s oxygen, Mitchell notes. Then the drive the punch home: Ocean plankton supply every second breath we take. Mitchell admits that she is no scientist, but she is adroit in deploying stark, realistic and eminently understandable analogies.

A bleak read at times, Sea Sick nonetheless conveys a message of hope, albeit sone that is tinged with fear. While the clock may be ticking, she tells us that it hasn’t run our – yet. Mitchel warns us that we need to change. Her book doesn’t preach, it simply reminds its readers: you are part of the ocean, not apart from it. Then it asks: So what are you going to do about it?

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.3: EcoBooks, published in May 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Julia Whitty’s Deep Blue Home feels more fictional than Mitchell’s Sea Sick. In fact, Deep Blue Home’s idiosyncratic language occasionally obscures its message. Some words rooted in Latin and Greek are explained in brackets, which is distracting. Likewise, some species are identified with their scientific name and threatened status in brackets; others are not, or are so identified only after being mentioned several times.

Whitty is at her best when she prunes her excessive language and simply tells it like it is – as she does in narrating the heart-wrenching dangers facing leatherback sea turtles. Fascinating and perturbing in equal measure is the author’s explanation of how the popularity of feathers has resulted in a massive reduction in bird colonies, and her eye-opening account of the decline of cod. When Whitty juxtaposes such stark realities to the beauty she describes, emotions swell.

But Whitty is not trying to change how we see the ocean. Moving passages certainly describe humanity’s negative impacts on other species, but for the most part, this is a well-written account of the time the author spent at sea, largely in the Gulf of California and Newfoundland. Deep Blue Home is not solely about the sea either. The first section is mostly about birds, inexorably linked though they may be with the sea. When she visits Newfoundland, she dives more deeply into the world of seals, fish, whales and moon jellies.

The ocean is so out of sight to most of us, so remote and mysterious even to those who spend their lifetime exploring it, that we easily neglect its pivotal role in our planet’s systems and in our daily lives. Whitty attempts to engage our emotional connection to oceans, occasionally shocking us with what we are doing to that beauty, whereas Mitchell tells us directly what we are doing to them – and explains the consequences.

The ocean is experiencing the symptoms that come with a life-changing heart attack. The doctor has told us we are a ticking time bomb. Do we want to change course? These two passionate, though very different, accounts won’t change the world, but they remind us that change is still possible.

(Sea Sick published by Emblem Editions, Toronto, 2010. 248 pages.)
(Deep Blue Home published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2010. 256 pages.)

Jim Cornall works in communications and at the aquarium at the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, New Brunswick.

How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate By Jeff Goodell

In the movie adaptation of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker, Burt Lancaster plays a flamboyant confidence man who promises to bring rain to drought-stricken Texas. How? By using sodium chloride to “barometricize the tropopause” and “magnetize occlusions in the sky.” Are today’s climate engineers the modern equivalent of steam-era rainmakers, mixing dubious science with questionable motives to sell a desperately needed quick fix? Or is their mission a timely and necessary exploration of what may soon be our only remaining option for keeping the planet habitable?

Historically, weather-making and snake oil shared the same murky scientific bottle and were met with matching public derision. But as we move into the new millennium, prospects for reducing carbon emissions are dim. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise even as Arctic ice melts more quickly than our best models predicted.

With each failed effort, once-ridiculed fringe ideas – like fertilizing the ocean to create carbon-eating algae blooms, or spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect heat – gain new, mainstream attention.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.3: EcoBooks, published in May 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

Both Fixing the Sky and How to Cool the Planet explore the controversial idea of geoengineering. While one author is doggedly skeptical and the other cautiously optimistic, both conclude that geoengineering may be a necessary but potentially perilous undertaking.

James Rodger Fleming’s Fixing the Sky is a historical account of our romantic and sometimes sinister infatuation with weather control. Fleming, a science historian, is unapologetically dubious of efforts to meddle with the weather. Using detailed examples of past follies, Fleming traces humanity’s weather-controlling ambitions from mythology to rain-making scams of the 1800s and cover military efforts to use weather as a weapon. We don’t have the knowledge or tools to accurately predict the effects of climate modification, he finds, so geoengineering should proceed only if it is accompanied by a more robust understanding of its scientific, ethical, social and legal implications. Stopping short of actually proposing how this might come about, he has assembled a potent set of parables that discourage hastily conceived climate-engineering exploits.

While Fleming’s book stands as a warning against geoengineering hubris, Jeff Goodell’s How to Cool the Planet is a thoughtful lay exploration of the subject. A journalist, Goodell’s perspective is balanced. He invites the reader on a three-year journey of inquiry as he surveys geoengineering options and interview leading thinkers on the topic.

Goodell discards the more fanciful geoengineering schemes (mirrors in space aren’t going to work any time soon) and focuses on those that show promise, such as cloud brightening, ocean fertilization and the option he finds most workable: adding aerosols to the stratosphere. He illuminates the ethical issues these ideas raise through revealing discussions with the likes of Gaia-theorist James Lovelock, global-ecologist Ken Caldeira and Lowell Wood, a Pentagon nuclear-weapons guru turned climate engineer.

Geoengineering prompts no shortage of ethical questions, on top of the inherent technical challenges: Who decides if global engineering is appropriate? And if it is, who controls the global thermostat? Will geoengineering become a substitute for carbon reduction, allowing us to continue our over-consumptive lifestyles?

Goodell wrestles with two questions in particular: Should we be pursuing geoengineering, given how little we know about its effects? And can we afford not to? His conclusion is straightforward: The risks of catastrophic climate change are too great to ignore geoengineering. And if there are technical, ethical, legal and political bugs to work out, then we had better start addressing them now.

These books come as science and policy makers are shifting their views. We face the unfortunate reality that even aggressive carbon reductions can’t reverse damage already done to the Earth’s climate. Our climate will take centuries to recover. Fleming and Goodell point out that we have actually been inadvertently geoengineering the climate for over a century. The difference is that for the first time in history, we are on the cusp of developing technology that can change the climate purposefully. Proceed with caution, the authors warn.

Tom Bird has worked in the fields of social marketing, environment and health, energy conservation and green energy development. He is currently working with a renewable energy development company.

(Fixing the Sky published by Columbia University Press, New York, 2010. 344 pages.)
(How to Cool the Planet published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2010. 272 pages.)

Tom Bird has worked in the fields of social marketing, environment and health, energy conservation and green energy development. He is currently working with a renewable energy development company.

Charcoal is produced when organic material, usually wood, is heated at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. The process produces waste heat, gas and char, which has traditionally been used as a fuel. Biochar is made using a similar process, however the source material ranges from crop residues to animal manure rather than wood. When the final product is crushed into a fine powder and added to soil, it is reported to increase water retention, soil pH and fertility. And because it doesn’t break down in soil, it is also touted as a way to build up the carbon content of earth, making it a sink for carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas. As a result, biochar production has been dubbed “coal mining in reverse” and has potential as a biofuel.

** This review first appeared in Alternatives Journal 37.3: EcoBooks, published in May 2011.
Click here to see more of that issue. **

In his small but ambitious briefing, The Biochar Debate, James Bruges explains the science, technology and potential uses of biochar for a broad audience. An architect turned environmentalist and author, Bruges has unbridled enthusiasm for his topic. In non-technical language, he emphasizes biochar’s potential to restore fertility to degraded land, and champions its use by rural communities in developing nations.

The “debate” in Bruges’ briefing lies primarily in his concerns about carbon-credit schemes for biochar, and the role of large agribusiness in generating biochar for fuel. He argues that such approaches favour large business interests, allowing them to buy carbon credits while continuing to emit greenhouse gases. He suggests that biochar production may divert arable land from food to fuel production, thereby raising food prices and chasing small farmers from their land.

The Biochar Debate’s most interesting ingredients are a number of case studies. They describe how farmers, who range from those producing chickens to others who grow bananas, are generating biochar from their agricultural waste streams and applying it to their land, thereby reducing irrigation and fertilization needs.

In spite of being packed with interesting examples and information, the book occasionally fractures into subtopics, subjecting the reader to rapid-fire asides of marginal relevance. These range from rebuilding aging UK infrastructure to animal cruelty, cap-and-trade strategies and global climate change, none of which receive suitable exploration in the 128-page text. By doing so, Bruges sacrifices precious space that could instead have been devoted to his central focus.

Although the book is intended for a general audience, a far better description of the science and biochar’s potential uses in combating climate change can be found at the International Biochar Initiative’s website (biochar-international.org), in language that a non-expert can easily understand.

The Biochar Debate is a bit like having a conversation with a good friend who has just had a new child and is enthusiastically trying to describe all the great things about parenthood – with the important difference that biochar is new to most of us.

(Book published by Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont, 2010. 128 pages.)

Jeri Parrent, an ecologist gardener and craft cider maker, studies the repercussions of global environmental change on plants and their associated soil biota.