Breaking apart carbon dioxide — or extracting carbon dioxide from the air — takes work. Work means energy. It’s the reverse of combustion. There’s a triple problem here: the technology itself, the disposal, and the energy to do the work.

It’s a common saying that you can’t unscramble an egg. Once scrambled, the egg proteins won’t go back to their raw configuration when they cool, and even if they did, it’s impossible to wield a fork in such a way as to separate the yolk from the white. Roomfuls of the latest and greatest laboratory equipment, the best Google algorithms, or even all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not unscramble our egg. The mixing and cooking are irreversible processes.

It’s a familiar impasse. Can we change the way we see the problem?

Feed our scrambled egg to a hen, and tomorrow she’ll lay us a new egg. Her metabolism — a product of evolution, rather than technology — will break down the complex scrambled egg molecules into simpler ones and reconstitute them — with losses, of course — into a new, raw egg.

For many people, this solution will be less than ideal on a number of counts. Somehow, it’s cheating, or it’s just a temporary stopgap until we can do it right, with technology. It may be troublesome to patent the process, and the venture capitalists won’t be interested. The hen won’t win the Nobel. But I want you to notice that we do get success.

The challenging ecological problems we face — climate change, land degradation, the growing scarcity of food and water, and biodiversity loss — are like this. We are going to have to learn how to unscramble eggs, using the metabolisms of soil microbes fed by perennial grasses, for example. Our preference for merely technical solutions that often perpetuate or exacerbate the problems is a moral and ethical issue. This preference determines who has money, and who has power. We’re infatuated with a stainless-steel prince, but if we want success, we’re going to have to kiss some real, live, slimy frogs.

In order to kiss them, we’ll have to be able to recognize them. The examples that some of us have collected (managingwholes.com, for example) have only been of interest to a small minority, those who have a basic grasp of how the carbon cycle, the water cycle, solar energy flow, and succession function at the soil surface. If you don’t have this grasp, start now.

By enhancing these biospheric processes on a large scale — and there are proven, practical examples on individual parcels — we could unscramble the big eggs. The biggest challenge is the widespread belief that it’s impossible, or that it’s only possible with the right technology.

In other words, we might as well try to drive a big wood screw into hard oak with a hammer. Yet the belief that reducing carbon dioxide emissions will have some leverage on the problem is widespread.

To examine our beliefs, which are often hidden from us, I offer two solutions to global warming. Both will likely work, but they are very different.

1. The Earth Bag. Many elaborate and expensive geoengineering proposals have been made, but here is the most practical.

The earth’s overall temperature depends in part on albedo, or reflectivity to solar radiation. Change this by a few percent, and we change the climate.

We manufacture 5 trillion plastic bags each year. All we need to do is to make them all white and bright, and get them into the dark tropical oceans, where they will reflect huge amounts of solar radiation back into space.

No new infrastructure or technology is required, or massive research budgets. The huge area of floating debris in the Pacific already represents proof of concept. All we need to do is to insist to our bag manufacturers: white and bright. (The generic Earth Bag could also contain a small bubble-wrap capsule for better buoyancy.) For coastal areas, storm sewers are existing pathways for the plastic bags to get to the ocean. Elsewhere, rivers would serve. White styrofoam — chunks as well as packing peanuts — could make a contribution, and UPS already functions as a distribution network.

Some change in social norms would be required. Collecting plastic bags or styrofoam peanuts to a landfill would become deviant behavior. We want them broadcast, especially over our darker landscapes and waters. If the climate began to cool too much, we could fine-tune by making the bags and styrofoam darker.

Unlike large floating rafts that have been proposed, the Earth Bag solution makes use existing technology and existing behavior, and would allow whales and other marine life to surface. Instead of large appropriations to a few corporations, we all get to participate in a solution, without new taxes even.

2. Soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is 58 percent carbon by weight. Even in their presently depleted state, soils contain more carbon than the atmosphere and vegetation combined.

Innovators and pioneers of alternative agriculture have discovered rapid ways of increasing soil organic matter at little cost, without material inputs or new technology. If 1.6 percent of the top foot of soil in the world’s crop and grazing lands were to become organic matter, we could be near 300 ppm of atmospheric concentration.

Soil represents the largest and most stable carbon pool that we have the capacity to increase. This enormous opportunity has remained hidden because:

• it is underground and invisible
• it is the result of process, and is not a thing or species
• our agriculture is built around inputs of chemicals and technology, and soil organic matter has long been viewed as irrelevant
• soil organic matter doesn’t represent an economic opportunity to any major sector
• soil organic matter is formed fastest in grasslands, which are of less concern to most environmentalists than forests
• prevailing views of the carbon cycle exaggerate the role of technology and fossil fuels
• most soil organic matter studies have been done in dysfunctional farm belt conditions, where tillage and chemicals make any increases slow and uninspiring
• the discovery of how to create soil organic matter rapidly and cheaply was not made by institutions at the centers of power, but by alternative agriculture innovators from the edges.

There would be enormous side benefits to the soil carbon solution: better human nutrition and health, less floods and droughts, less dependence on chemicals and fossil fuels, more biodiversity, better water availability and quality.

However, to implement the soil carbon solution would require a transformation of both beliefs and behaviors worldwide — from agriculture as a technology or input-output business to biological stewardship of basic ecosystem processes and services. Environmentalism could no longer be protectionist and species based, but must become holistic.

Both of these solutions would likely be effective; both would be cheap. Which one addresses causes and which one symptoms? Which would be easier? Which would correspond most closely to our predilections and habits? And which would correspond most closely to our deeply held values and goals?

Should farmers be able to receive more than $250,000 in subsidy payments? What should the funding be for biofuels, for school lunches? Most of these arguments are about the speed of the battleship, or which flags it should fly, not the direction.

For generations, that direction has been the maintenance and continued acceptability of high-input, industrialized agriculture — “production agriculture” to its defenders. The farm bill is the legislative and financial instrument by which we attempt to turn an agriculture that is economically, socially, and ecologically unsound into something that is politically acceptable. This is getting harder and harder to do.

Since the 1930s, farm bill conservation programs have been based on the recognition (or the assumption) that agriculture tends to be destructive to soils and to water cycling. Farm bill conservation programs seek to modify and mitigate agricultural practices, or take acreage out of production.

On the people side, there have been a whole string of programs to help the some of the victims, especially the farmers themselves. These payments and subsidies are the best-known features of the farm bill. Crop insurance and disaster assistance remove considerable risk from ecologically unsound large monocultures. Programs for beginning farmers try to address the seemingly relentless shrinkage and aging of the farmer population. Food stamps and school lunch programs help the poor (many of them displaced farmers and farm workers) while guaranteeing a larger market for farm commodities and those who process them into junk food. Rural community development programs try to repair some of the social damage. Research and marketing focuses on doing what we’re doing, but harder and faster.

But as more people besides farmers realize how important farm policy is to a host of other social issues and concerns, real dissent has grown. A big one is food and health. "A new politics has sprouted up around the farm bill," notes Michael Pollan in a recent editorial. “Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring.” Daniel Imhoff, author of Food Fight: The Citizens Guide to a Food and Farm Bill, reports that the cost of treating obesity exceeds farm bill expenditures each year.

More and more people are connecting the dots. Sustainable agriculture and environmental interests are pushing hard to change direction. Awareness grows about how American cotton subsidies, for example, impoverish West African cotton farmers by undercutting them in the increasingly global marketplace.

So far, the farm bloc has been able to appease these increasing concerns by allowing them to add some railings and flags to the battleship. But the pressure for a major change of direction will only grow, and the shift from the farm bill into the Healthy Food and Farm Act will only be the beginning. The twin issues of climate change and land degradation will further expand the circle.

Neither technology nor regulation of technology will suffice to stop global warming or address land degradation. We must transform our land management by mimicking and enhancing nature’s processes. The current and proposed farm bills, though they were not conceived as such, represent our main policies and incentives on energy, on water, on carbon, and on biodiversity for most of the nation’s privately owned land (see previous post).

And it is these fundamental biospheric processes that could be a new compass for this battleship that we call the farm bill. With it we could navigate toward something far more fundamental to agriculture, and to our entire civilization, than subsidies or crop insurance. We could set a course toward increasing soil organic matter.

More people are beginning to realize how global warming represents an unparalleled opportunity for us to address poverty, inequality, and conflict, and revitalize our industrial base and infrastructure while switching to energy sources that do not add carbon to the atmosphere. But there is also a huge opportunity in transforming our land management so as to increase soil organic matter, which may be the only rapid, practical, and economic way to reduce atmospheric carbon.

The 2012 farm bill could provide major motion in this direction, while achieving most of the other goals that have come up around the farm bill in past cycles. Instead of a politics of win/lose, of scarcity and zero sum, we would need a politics that addresses causes rather than symptoms and creates multiple, interlocking benefits.

The methods of increasing soil organic matter have been well demonstrated by various practitioners of alternative agriculture, including managed grazing, pasture cropping, no-till, and organic. No new technology is required. With soil organic matter as the primary direction of our farm policy, we would:

Take excess carbon out of the atmosphere, where it is dangerous, and put it back in the soil where it belongs, and where it will enhance every aspect of our lives. Much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been released from our soils via tillage, chemical applications, and exposure (and it’s still going on). In the atmosphere, this carbon contributes to greenhouse warming. If we can get it back into the soil, using free solar energy, we will be able to grow food with fewer inputs and stabilize our climate.

More, better water. Soil organic matter increases infiltration and retention of rainwater, often several hundred percent. Soil holds more water than the atmosphere, more than the reservoirs behind all the dams in the world. Organic matter greatly enhances this storage, which also increases groundwater recharge, and improves water quality both in groundwater and streams.

Moderate floods and droughts. Small increases in organic matter can double soil moisture retention. We reduce flooding at the source, moderate the effects of drought, and ensure more reliable streamflow.

Reduce agricultural inputs and increase real farm income. Soil organic matter is the greatest factor that reduces the need for inputs, including nitrogen fertilizer (the greatest use of fossil energy in agriculture), irrigation water, tillage, and chemicals. Input costs are in turn the single greatest factor in farm profitability.

Increase food quality and human health. Soil organic matter is the basis for food and nutritional quality. More soil organic matter will favor quality over quantity.

Create smaller-scale farming opportunities for young people and beginning farmers. When it takes 28 minutes of high-capital, mechanized “labor” to grow an acre of commodity corn, there is very little opportunity for passionate and creative people to become farmers. If we reward soil carbon, we reward hands-on management, and this is our greatest need on our farmlands. This is also what young farmers have to offer.

A farm program based on soil organic matter would lessen our commodity production, increase the grass base, ensure greater compliance with our trade agreements, help farmers in other countries, provide a safety net to both large and small landholders while maintaining the viability of mid-sized and small farms, give a decisive advantage to sustainability in the production of biofuels and other commodities, and diminish the separation of labor and management that is at the root of farm labor issues.

It would also make the best economic sense. What are the costs of one out of every three children born since 2000 coming down with diabetes? Of floods, of droughts, of rural depopulation, of the current farm labor system, of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico?

Regulation, or 40 different programs pulling in 40 different directions, won’t create the kind of results we need with our farm program. It’s going to take investment in soil organic matter. People who have worked long and hard on farm bill policy may continue to tell us that this is impossible. Given that it is impossible, what can we do to make it happen?

But if everyone stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, global warming will continue for decades. We don’t have an economical technology for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Limiting ourselves to technology-focused solutions doesn’t give us much leverage. It gives us an agenda of "let’s wreck the world slower."

There is another side to global warming, one that existing scientific panels are ill-equipped to recognize and that existing institutions are ill-equipped to act on. Global warming is not just an atmospheric pollution problem caused by fossil fuel burning. It is also the result of changes in basic biospheric processes. Let’s look at some examples.

Carbon

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning represent less than 3% of the net annual flow of carbon into the atmosphere. The other 97% also results from combustion reactions — respiration, decay of organic compounds, and burning of biomass. These reactions emit carbon and yield energy.

The left hand bar below represents the flow out of the atmosphere. This is driven by the photosynthesis of green plants, which is the opposite reaction: consuming solar energy, plants take in carbon, and store both carbon and energy in complex organic compounds.

The difference between the two flows is less than 3%, which makes the fossil-fuel contribution loom large in the ongoing accumulation of atmospheric carbon.

There is also a guilt factor. Fossil carbon is a human add-on to the "natural" cycle of carbon from plants to atmosphere and back again.

But as a wealth of new findings are showing, the rest of the carbon cycle is also controlled or influenced by our decisions. Our human circle of influence is a good deal larger than our concerns over fossil fuels and deforestation.

Because humans exercise such dominion over plant growth, decay, and fire, most of these carbon flows represent our human desire to survive, and to prosper. They are our habits, and may be difficult to change. But they are also our decisions.

For thousands of years, way before we discovered fossil fuels, people have been burning and oxidizing carbon compounds that were formed by photosynthesis. Cutting down and burning trees, or burning grass, brush, or crop residue are obvious examples, and still popular.

Less obvious but more significant is the release of stable soil carbon to the atmosphere through plowing and other forms of soil exposure, whereby aerobic microbes rapidly oxidize or "burn" the carbon compounds. Today our soils still contain twice the carbon that the atmosphere does, and these historic and prehistoric losses of soil carbon to the atmosphere can only be guessed at. And it’s ongoing. Tillage continues worldwide, productive grassland turns to dusty desert, and millions of tons of soil carbon are oxidized into the atmosphere.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Quite a few farmers and graziers have accomplished some spectacular and rapid reversals of this soil carbon loss, at little additional cost. That’s right, reversals. In some cases this is a byproduct of their search for sustainability, for maintaining or increasing production while decreasing their dependence on fossil-fuel inputs such as fertilizers, chemicals, and tillage. Unlike vegetation (even trees), the carbon in soil organic matter is fairly stable, lasting more than a generation on average.

These approaches increase photosynthesis while slowing decay or respiration. No, this isn’t a secret technology. It’s management, enhancing and working with biospheric processes instead of going to war against them. It’s not abandoning all technology and modern knowledge, going back to some mythical past. It’s new knowledge, based on mimicking natural patterns.

Let me repeat that — with good management, it’s possible to take carbon out of the air, rapidly and cheaply. But good documentation is scarce, because in our technology-focused society these achievements, and the tremendous opportunities they represent, are seldom recognized. Instead, we regard land use as a fixed category, and don’t pay attention to how it is managed. Researchers familiar with conventional and industrial agriculture tend to underestimate the soil carbon opportunity.

Many are hoping for some kind of technology to capture carbon out of flue gases or out of the air. So far, it’s not practical or economical. Reversing combustion requires energy, and any recovered carbon or carbon dioxide becomes a disposal problem. But with good management, photosynthesis can turn atmospheric carbon into valuable soil organic matter, using free solar energy.

Energy

As you might guess from the diagram, photosynthesis captures far more energy than all the world’s mechanical power. Even in the industrialized U.S., with all our spinning shafts and gas rings, and with all our plowing, paving, burning, and herbicide spraying, those ridiculously inefficient green plants capture more energy.

The Farm Bill is likely the biggest energy policy we have. It pays farmers to refuse the free gift of solar energy by subsidizing short-season annual row crops such as corn and soybeans, and a style of agriculture that keeps mostly bare ground between plants and between crops. Nebraska and Iowa look impressively green in July and August, but much of the rest of the year they are brown, with few perennial plants growing. Soil is America’s biggest export, far surpassing empty shipping containers even. Much of our agricultural "production" is really consumption.

Instead of free solar energy, the Farm Bill encourages the heavy use of fossil energy in agriculture, again by favoring high-yielding monocultures dependent on nitrogen extracted from the atmosphere by fossil fuels, plus herbicides and pesticides. This nitrogen (usually anhydrous ammonia) contributes to the "burning" of soil organic matter, compounding the debt.

It doesn’t have to be this way. People have figured out how to raise excellent food using mostly solar energy while building soil — but this isn’t at all popular with fossil carbon lobbyists, or with their many influential friends.

Water

Among greenhouse gases, water vapor is the gorilla. There’s more of it, and it traps lots more heat. Yet the world’s soils, even in their currently dried-out state, hold five times as much water as the atmosphere.

With the loss of sponge-like organic matter, soils lose much of their ability to absorb and retain water. With a magnifier, compare a bit of onion skin to a grain of sand. It’s like the difference between a balloon and a brick. You can wet a brick, but you can put a quart in a balloon. Add lots and lots of zeroes.

If the drying of the continents keeps more heat-trapping water vapor airborne, our current rather top-down and linear climate models don’t account for it. Large-scale land clearing and tillage, along with the continued desertification of rangeland soils, lets an invisible Columbia River’s worth of water evaporate skyward from the soils of the American Southwest. Our federal policy either ignores this, or doesn’t care.

Legal protections or land idleness won’t fix this situation, at least not on a timescale that matters to us or our descendants. What has proven to get more water in the soil in these environments is intensive grazing, carefully managed.

The opportunities

We’ve got to reduce fossil fuels. In their new book Break Through, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus have pointed out how transforming both our energy systems and efficiency is a huge opportunity to create millions of good jobs and revitalize our industrial base, and to move toward a positive future rather than merely try and avoid a negative one.

But to really address the problem, we will need to look beyond technology to the way we manage land. We do not have, nor will we be able to afford, technological replacements for photosynthesis, for water cycling, or for the majority of carbon cycling — all of which support and sustain our life.

Transforming human land management is also a tremendous opportunity. It promises engagement, revitalization of rural economies, a better grounded food system, and enhanced human and environmental health. Taking full advantage of this opportunity will involve new paradigms and a new politics.

If we regard nature as a kingdom or category separate from humanity, the human is often seen as a habitual criminal who can be counted on to vandalize nature for personal gain. Many prosperous developed countries have adopted a policing role intended to protect nature from the human criminal.

Though it may be a necessary stage of development or a process of maturity, this cops and robbers game offers little opportunity for creating the kind of land management we need on our working landscapes. For this we need to move in the opposite direction — toward the results we need rather than just punishing what we don’t want. This means incentives and opportunity for the farmer, the villager, the grazier, the peasant to enhance these basic biospheric processes. By tying incentives to results, rather than practices, we could empower people to come up with their own creative, locally adapted, low-cost methods.

The land management we need, and that provides such an opportunity for addressing both desertification and global warming, brings with it a new paradigm, a new understanding of the foundation or center of gravity of what we regard as nature.

This paper is a draft of the first chapter of a forthcoming short book about the opportunities inherent in global warming. See http://managingwholes.net for updates and links to related projects and materials.