Can Soil Solve the Climate Crisis?
When Rattan Lal was awarded the Japan Prize for Biological Production, Ecology in April—the Asian equivalent of a Nobel—the audience at Tokyo's National Theatre included the emperor and empress. Lal's acceptance speech, however, was down-to-earth in the most literal sense.
Carbon, in its proper place, holds landscapes and ecosystems together.
"I'd like to begin, rather unconventionally, with the conclusion of my presentation," he told the assembled dignitaries. "And the conclusion is four words: In soil we trust."
That statement could serve as the motto for a climate crisis-fighting strategy that has gained remarkable momentum over the past five years or so—and whose rise to international prominence was reflected in that glittering award ceremony. Lal, a septuagenarian professor of soil science at Ohio State University, is one of the foremost exponents of carbon farming, an approach that centers on correcting a man-made, planetary chemical imbalance.
A Solution to Several Problems at Once?
The chemical in question is carbon. Too much of it in the atmosphere (in the form of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas) is the main driver of global heating. Too little of it in the soil is the bane of farmers in many parts of the world, and a threat to our ability to feed a ballooning global population. Advocates say agriculture can mitigate both problems—by adopting techniques that keep more soil carbon from escaping skyward, and draw more atmospheric carbon down into fields and pastures.
The potential impacts go beyond slowing climate change and boosting food production. "There are so many benefits," says Lal. "Water quality, drought, flooding, biodiversity—this is a natural solution for all these problems." That's because carbon, in its proper place, holds landscapes and ecosystems together. Plants extract it from the air and convert it into sugars for energy; they also transfer it to the soil through their roots and in the process of decomposition. In the ground, carbon feeds microbes and fungi that form the basis of complex food webs. It helps soil absorb and retain water, resist erosion, and hold onto nitrogen and phosphorous—keeping those nutrients from running off into waterways and creating toxic algal blooms.
Government and private support for research into carbon-conscious agriculture is on the rise, and growing numbers of farmers are exploring such methods. How much difference these methods can make, however, remains a matter of debate. Lal sees carbon farming as a way to buy time until CO2 emissions can be brought under control. Skeptics insist that such projections are overly optimistic. Some allies, meanwhile, think Lal's vision is too timid. "Farming can actually fix the climate," says Tim LaSalle, co-founder of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at California State University, Chico. "That should be our only focus."
Yet Can soil solve the climate crisis? may be not be the key question in assessing the promise of carbon farming, since it implies that action is worthwhile only if a solution is ensured. A more urgent line of inquiry might be: Can the climate crisis be solved without addressing soil?
A Chance Meeting Leads to the Mission of a Lifetime
Lal was among the earliest scientists to grapple with that question. Born in Pakistan, he grew up on a tiny subsistence farm in India, where his family had fled as refugees. The only one of his siblings who learned to read and write, he attended a local agricultural university, then headed to Ohio State on scholarship for his PhD. In 1982, he was working at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Nigeria, trying to develop sustainable alternatives to Africa's traditional slash-and-burn farming, when a distinguished visitor dropped by: oceanographer Roger Revelle, who 25 years earlier had published the first paper warning that fossil fuel combustion could throw the climate dangerously off-kilter.
Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science at Ohio State, received the Japan Prize at a ceremony in April.
(Photo: Ken Chamberlain. CFAES.)
Lal showed Revelle the soil in his test plots—hard and reddish, like much of Africa's agricultural land. Then (as described in Kristin Ohlson's book The Soil Will Save Us), he led the visitor to the nearby forest, where the soil was dark, soft, and wriggling with earthworms. In the forest, the soil's carbon content was 2 to 3 percent; in Lal's plots, it had dwindled to 0.5 percent. When Revelle asked him where all that carbon had gone, Lal confessed he didn't know. Revelle suggested that much of it might have floated into the atmosphere, adding to the burden of greenhouse gases. "Since then," Lal told me, "I've been looking for ways to put it back."
Back at Ohio State, Lal found that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were also interested in the connection between soil carbon and climate change. With a small group of other scientists, he began investigating the dimensions of the problem, and how it might be solved.
Comparing carbon in forested and cultivated soils around the globe, the researchers calculated that about 100 billion tons had vanished into the air since the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The culprits were common practices—including plowing, overgrazing, and keeping fallow fields bare—that exposed soil carbon to oxygen, transforming it into carbon dioxide. Yet the process could also be reversed, Lal and his colleagues argued. Although there was a limit to the amount of carbon that soil could hold, they theorized that it would be possible to sequester several billion tons of global CO2 emissions each year for decades before reaching maximum capacity.
Lal set up projects on five continents to explore practices that could help accomplish that goal, such as minimizing tillage, planting cover crops, and leaving residue on fields after harvest. He organized conferences, pumped out papers and books. As other researchers launched similar efforts, policymakers worldwide took notice.
But before long, recalls Colorado State University soil scientist Keith Paustian (a fellow carbon-farming pioneer, who served with Lal on the UN's International Panel on Climate Change), official attention "kind of faded away. The bigger imperative was to cut emissions." And because agriculture accounted for only about 13 percent of greenhouse gas pollution, Paustian says, the sectors that emitted the most—energy and transportation—got the bulk of funding.
A Movement on the Rise
In recent years, however, carbon farming has begun to look like an idea whose time has come. One factor is that efforts to reduce emissions haven't worked; in 2018 alone, global CO2 output rose by an estimated 2.7 percent, according to the Global Carbon Project. Last month, researchers from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography reported that atmospheric CO2—under 350 ppm when Lal began his quest—had reached 415 ppm, the highest in 3 million years. And with the world's population expected to approach 10 billion by 2050, the need for sustainable technologies to augment food production has grown increasingly pressing.
Today, carbon-conscious methods are central to the burgeoning movement known as "regenerative agriculture," which also embraces other practices aimed at improving soil health and farming in an ecologically sound (though not always strictly organic) manner. In the United States, the latest Farm Bill includes $25 million to incentivize soil-based carbon sequestration. State and local governments across the country are supporting such efforts, as are at least a dozen nonprofits. The Department of Energy's Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA-e) is working to develop crops and technologies aimed at increasing soil carbon accumulation by 50 percent. General Mills recently announced plans to advance regenerative farming on 1 million acres by 2030, and many smaller companies have made their own commitments.
The toughest challenge, Lal suggests, may be persuading farmers to change their ways.
Internationally, the biggest initiative is the French-led "4 per 1,000" initiative, which aims to increase the amount of carbon in the soil of farms and rangelands worldwide by 0.4 percent per year—a rate that the project's website contends would "halt the increase of CO2 (carbon dioxide) concentration in the atmosphere related to human activities."
Given the current pace of research, Lal believes that goal—which equates to sequestering 3.6 billion tons of CO2 annually, or 10 percent of global emissions—is doable. The toughest challenge, he suggests, may be persuading farmers to change their ways. Although carbon farming can reduce costs for chemical inputs such as herbicides and fertilizers, while building rich topsoil, agriculturalists tend to be a conservative lot.
And getting low-income farmers to leave crop residue on fields, instead of using it for fuel or animal feed, will require more than speeches about melting glaciers. Lal proposes a $16 per acre subsidy, totaling $64 billion for the world's 4 billion acres of cropland. "That's not a very large amount," he says, "if you're investing in the health of the planet."
Experimental Methods Attract Supporters and Skeptics
Some experts question whether enough CO2 can be stashed in the soil to prevent the rise in average global temperature from surpassing the 2º C mark—set by the 2016 Paris Agreement as the limit beyond which climate change would become catastrophic. But others insist that carbon farming's goal should be to reverse climate change, not just to put it on pause.
"That's the only way out of this predicament," says Tim LaSalle, whose Center for Regenerative Agriculture supports the use of experimental methods ranging from multi-species cover cropping to fungal-dominant compost solutions. Using such techniques, a few researchers and farmers claim to be able to transfer carbon to the soil at rates many times higher than with established practices. Although several of these methods have yet to be documented in peer-reviewed studies, LaSalle believes they point the way forward. "We can't fix the climate, or even come close to it, using Rattan's numbers," he says, referring to Lal. "If we can replicate these experiments, we can fix it."
Even scientists sympathetic to regenerative ag warn that relying on unproven techniques is risky. "Some of these claims are beyond anything we've seen in agricultural science," says Andrew McGuire, an agronomist at Washington State University. "They could be right, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Still, the assorted methods currently being tested—which also include amending soil with biochar (made by heating agricultural wastes with minimal oxygen), planting long-rooted perennial crops instead of short-rooted annuals, and deploying grazing animals in ways that enrich soil rather than depleting it—offer a catalogue of hope at a time when environmental despair is all too tempting.
Last October, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report acknowledging that it was too late to stave off apocalyptic overheating just by reducing CO2 emissions; removing carbon from the atmosphere would be necessary as well. The document laid out several options for doing so—most of which, it cautioned, had serious limitations.
"Soil is a bridge to the future. We can't do without it."
One possibility was planting more forests. To absorb enough carbon dioxide, however, trees might have to replace areas of farmland, reducing the food supply. Another option was creating biomass plantations to fuel power plants, whose emissions would be stored underground. But land use would be a problem: "You'd need to cover an area the size of India," explains Paustian, who was a co-author of the report. Yet another alternative was direct-air capture, in which chemical processes would be used to extract CO2 from the air. The technology was still in its infancy, though—and the costs and power requirements would likely be astronomical.
The report took up agriculture-based methods on page 95. Those needed further research as well, the authors wrote, to determine which approaches would be most effective. But of all the alternatives, this one seemed the least problematic. "Soil carbon is probably what you can do first, cheapest, and with the most additional co-benefits," says Paustian. "If we can make progress in that area, it's a huge advantage."
In any case, he and other researchers agree, we have little choice but to try. "Soil is a bridge to the future," Lal says. "We can't do without it."
Niklas Anzinger is the founder of Infinita VC based in the charter city of Prospera in Honduras. Infinita focuses on a new trend of charter cities and other forms of alternative jurisdictions. Healso hosts a podcast about how to accelerate the future by unblocking “stranded technologies”.This spring he was a part of the network city experiment Zuzalu spearheaded by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin where a few hundred invited guests from the spheres of longevity, biotechnology, crypto, artificial intelligence and investment came together to form a two-monthlong community. It has been described as the world’s first pop-up city. Every morning Vitalians would descend on a long breakfast—the menu had been carefully designed by famed radical longevity self-experimenter Bryan Johnson—and there is where I first met Anzinger who told me about Prospera. Intrigued to say the least, I caught up with him later the same week and the following is a record of our conversation.
Q. We are sitting here in the so-called pop-up network state Zuzalu temporarily realized in the village of Lusticia Bay by the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. To me this is an entirely new concept: What is a network state?
A. A network state is a highly aligned online community that has a level of in-person civility; it crowd-funds territory, and it eventually seeks diplomatic recognition. In a way it's about starting a new country. The term was coined by the crypto influencer and former CTO of Coinbase Balaji Srinivasan in a book by the same title last year [2022]. What many people don't know is that it is a more recent addition or innovation in a space called competitive governance. The idea is that you have multiple jurisdictions competing to provide you services as a customer. When you have competition among governments or government service providers, these entities are forced to provide you with a better service instead of the often worse service at higher prices or higher taxes that we're currently getting. The idea went from seasteading, which was hardly feasible because of costs, to charter cities getting public/private partnerships with existing governments and a level of legal autonomy, to special economic zones, to now network states.
Q. How do network states compare to charter cities and similar jurisdictions?
A. Charter cities and special economic zones were legal forks from other existing states. Dubai, Shenzhen in China, to some degree Hong Kong, to some degree Singapore are some examples. There's a host of other charter cities, one of which I'm based in myself, which is Prospera located in Honduras on the island Roatán. Charter cities provide the full stack of governance; they provide new laws and regulations, business registration, tax codes and governance services, Estonia style: you log on to the government platform and you get services as a citizen.
When conceptualizing network states, Balagi Srinivasan turns the idea of a charter city a bit on its head: he doesn't want to start with this full stack because it's still very hard to get these kinds of partnerships with government. It's very expensive and requires lots of experience and lots of social capital. He is saying that network states could instead start as an online community. They could have a level of alignment where they trade with each other; they have their own economy; they meet in person in regular gatherings like we're doing here in Zuzulu for two months, and then they negotiate with existing governments or host cities to get a certain degree of legal autonomy that is centered around a moral innovation. So, his idea is: don't focus on building a completely new country or city; focus on a moral innovation.
Q. What would be an example of such a moral innovation?
A. An example would be longevity—life is good; death is bad—let's see what we can do to foster progress around that moral innovation and see how we can get legal forks from the existing system that allow us to accelerate progress in that area. There is an increasing realization in the science that there are hallmarks of aging and that aging is a cause of other diseases like cancer, ALS or Alzheimer's. But aging is not recognized as a disease by the FDA in the United States and in most countries around the world, so it's very hard to get scientific funding for biotechnology that would attack the hallmarks of aging and allow us potentially to reverse aging and extend life. This is a significant shortcoming of existing government systems that groups such as the ones that have come together here in Montenegro are now seeking alternatives too. Charter cities and now network states are such alternatives.
Q. Would it not be better to work within the current systems, and try to improve them, rather than abandon them for new experimental jurisdictions?
A. There are numerous failures of public policies. These failures are hard, if not impossible, to reverse, because as soon as you have these policies, you have entrenched interests who benefit from the regulations. The only way to disrupt incumbent industries is with start-ups, but the way the system is set up makes it excessively hard for such start-ups to become big companies. In fact, larger companies are weaponizing the legal system against small companies, because they can afford the lawyers and the fixed cost of compliance.
I don't believe that our institutions in many developed countries are beyond hope. I just think it's easier to change them if you could point at successful examples. ‘Hey, this country or this zone is already doing it very successfully’; if they can extend people’s lifespan by 10 years, if they can reduce maternal mortality, and if they have a massive medical tourism where people come back healthier, then that is just very embarrassing for the FDA.
Q. Perhaps a comparison here would be the relationship between Hong Kong and China?
A. Correct, so having Hong Kong right in front of your door … ‘Hey, this capitalism thing seems to work, why don't we try it here?’ It was due to the very bold leadership by Deng Xiaoping that they experimented with it in the development zone of Shenzhen. It worked really well and then they expanded with more special economic zones that also worked.
Próspera is a private city and special economic zone on the island of Roatán in the Central American state of Honduras.
Q. Tell us about Prospera, the charter city in Honduras, that you are intimately connected with.
A. Honduras is a very poor country. It has a lot of crime, never had a single VC investment, and has a GDP per capita of 2,000 per year. Honduras has suffered tremendously. The goal of these special economic zones is to bring in economic development. That's their sole purpose. It's a homegrown innovation from Honduras that started in 2009 with a very forward-thinking statesman, Octavio Sanchez, who was the chief of staff to the president of Honduras, and then president. He had his own ideas about making Honduras a more decentralized system, where more of the power lies in the municipalities.
Inspired by the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Paul Romer, who gave a famous Ted Talk in 2009 about charter cities, Sanchez initiated a process that lasted for years and eventually led to the creation of a special economic zone legal regime that’s anchored in the Hunduran constitution that provides the highest legal autonomy in the world to these zones. There are today three special economic zones approved by the Honduran government: Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea.
Q. How did you become interested and then involved in Prospera?
A. I read about it first in an article by Scott Alexander, a famous rationalist blogger, who wrote a very long article about Prospera, and I thought, this is amazing! Then I came to Prospera and I found it to be one of the most if not the most exciting project in the world going on right now and that it also opened my heart to the country and its people. Most of my friends there are Honduran, they have been working on this for 10 or more years. They want to remake Honduras and put it on the map as the place in the world where this legal and governance innovation started.
Q. To what extent is Prospera autonomous relative to the Honduran government?
A. What's interesting about the Honduran model is that it's anchored within the Honduran constitution, and it has a very clear framework for what's possible and what's not possible, and what's possible ensures the highest degree of legal autonomy anywhere seen in the world. Prospera has really pushed the model furthest in creating a common law-based polycentric legal system. The idea is that you don't have a legislature, instead you have common law and it's based on the best practice common law principles that a legal scholar named Tom W. Bell created.
One of the core ideas is that as a business you're not obligated to follow one regulatory monopoly like the FDA. You have regulatory flexibility so you can choose what you're regulated under. So, you can say: ‘if I do a medical clinic, I do it under Norwegian law here’. And you even have the possibility to amend it a bit. You're still required to have liability insurance, and have to agree to binding arbitration in case there's a legal dispute. And your insurance has to approve you. So, under that model the insurance becomes the regulator and they regulate through prices. The limiting factor is criminal law; Honduran criminal law fully applies. So does immigration law. And we pay taxes.
Q. Is there also an idea of creating a kind of healthy living there, and encourage medical tourism?
A. Yes, we specifically look for legal advantages in autonomy around creating new drugs, doing clinical trials, doing self-medication and experimentation. There is a stem cell clinic here and they're doing clinical trials. The island of Roatán is very easily accessible for American tourists. It's a beautiful island, and it's for regulatory reasons hard to do stem cell therapies in the United States, so they're flying in patients from the United States. Most of them are very savvy and often have PhDs in biotech and are able to assess the risk for themselves of taking drugs and doing clinical trials. We're also going to get a wellness center, and there have been ideas around establishing a peptide clinic and a compound pharmacy and things like that. We are developing a healthcare ecosystem.
Q. This kind of experimental tourism raises some ethical issues. What happens if patients are harmed? And what are the moral implications for society of these new treatments?
A. As a moral principle we believe in medical freedom: people have rights over their bodies, even at the (informed) risk of harm to themselves if no unconsenting third-parties are harmed; this is a fundamental right currently not protected effectively.
What we do differently is not changing ethical norms around safety and efficacy, we’re just changing the institutional setup. Instead of one centralized bureaucracy, like the FDA, we have regulatory pluralism that allows different providers of safety and efficacy to compete under market rules. Like under any legal system, common law in Prospera punishes malpractice, fraud, murder etc. This system will still produce safe and effective drugs, and it will still work with common sense legal notions like informed consent and liability for harm. There are regulations for medical practice, there is liability insurance and things like that. It will just do so more efficiently than the current way of doing things (unless it won’t, in which case it will change and evolve – or fail).
A direct moral benefit ´to what we do is that we increase accessibility. Typical gene therapies on the market cost $1 million dollars in the US. The gene therapy developed in Prospera costs $25,000. As to concern about whether such treatments are problematic, we do not share this perspective. We are for advancing science responsibly and we believe that both individuals and society stand to gain from improving the resiliency of the human body through advanced biotechnology.
Q. How does Prospera relate to the local Honduran population?
A. I think it's very important that our projects deliver local benefits and that they're well anchored in local communities. Because when you go to a new place, you're seen as a foreigner, and you're seen as potentially a danger or a threat. The most important thing for Prospera and Ciudad Morazan is to show we're creating jobs; we're creating employment; we're improving people's lives on the ground. Prospera is directly and indirectly employing 1,100 people. More than 2/3 of the people who are working for Prospera are Honduran. It has a lot of local service workers from the island, and it has educated Hondurans from the mainland for whom it's an alternative to going to the United States.
Q. What makes a good Prosperian citizen?
A. People in Prospera are very entrepreneurial. They're opening companies on a small scale. For example, Vehinia, who is the cook in the kitchen at Prospera, she's from the neighboring village and she started an NGO that is now funding a school where children from the local village can go to instead of a school that's 45 minutes away. There's very much a spirit of ‘let's exchange and trade with each other’. Some people might see that as a bit too commercial, but that's something about the culture that people accept and that people see as a good thing.
Q. Five years from now, if everything goes well, what do we see in Prospera?
A. I think Prospera will have at least 10,000 residents and I think Honduras hopefully will have more zones. There could be zones with a thriving industrial sector and sort of a labor-intensive economy and some that are very strong in pharmaceuticals, there could also be other zones for synthetic biology, and other zones focused on agriculture. The zones of Prospera, Ciudad Morazan and Orchidea are already showing the results we want to see, the results that we will eventually be measured by, and I'm tremendously excited about Honduras.
How to Measure Your Stress, with Dr. Rosalind Picard
Today’s podcast guest is Rosalind Picard, a researcher, inventor named on over 100 patents, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer. When it comes to the science related to endowing computer software with emotional intelligence, she wrote the book. It’s published by MIT Press and called Affective Computing.
Dr. Picard is founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group. Her research and engineering contributions have been recognized internationally. For example, she received the 2022 International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research, considered by many to be the Nobel prize in computer science.
Through her research and companies, Dr. Picard has developed wearable sensors, algorithms and systems for sensing, recognizing and responding to information about human emotion. Her products are focused on using fitness trackers to advance clinical quality treatments for a range of conditions.
Meanwhile, in just the past few years, numerous fitness tracking companies have released products with their own stress sensors and systems. You may have heard about Fitbit’s Stress Management Score, or Whoop’s Stress Monitor – these features and apps measure things like your heart rhythm and a certain type of invisible sweat to identify stress. They’re designed to raise awareness about forms of stress such as anxieties and anger, and suggest strategies like meditation to relax in real time when stress occurs.
But how well do these off-the-shelf gadgets work? There’s no one more knowledgeable and experienced than Rosalind Picard to explain the science behind these stress features, what they do exactly, how they might be able to help us, and their current shortcomings.
Dr. Picard is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a popular speaker who’s given over a hundred invited keynote talks and a TED talk with over 2 million views. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband, where they’ve raised three sons.
In our conversation, we discuss stress scores on fitness trackers to improve well-being. She describes the difference between commercial products that might help people become more mindful of their health and products that are FDA approved and really capable of advancing the science. We also talk about several fascinating findings and concepts discovered in Dr. Picard’s lab including the multiple arousal theory, a phenomenon you’ll want to hear about. And we explore the complexity of stress, one reason it’s so tough to measure. For example, many forms of stress are actually good for us. Can fitness trackers tell the difference between stress that’s healthy and unhealthy?
Show links:
- Dr. Picard’s book, Affective Computing
- Dr. Picard’s bio
- Dr. Picard on Twitter
- Dr. Picard’s company, Empatica - https://www.empatica.com/ - The FDA-cleared Empatica Health Monitoring Platform provides accurate, continuous health insights for researchers and clinicians, collected in the real world
- Empatica Twitter
- Dr. Picard and her team have published hundreds of peer-reviewed articles across AI, Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Digital Health, and Human-computer interaction.
- Dr. Picard’s TED talk
Rosalind Picard