Down and Dirty: How Carbon Farming, the Practice of Putting CO2 Back into the Soil, Can Help Fight Global Warming

By Jay Walljasper

Of all the potential solutions for global warming, this has to be one of the, well, most unusual: “Eat a local grass-fed burger.” Yet John Wick is entirely serious when he suggests it on an unseasonably warm and sunny winter morning—the kind that lulls you into thinking climate change can’t be all bad—during a meeting of environmentalists and sustainable agriculture advocates at his California ranch.

It’s a diverse group—longtime ranchers, a forestry professor from Berkeley, organic food activists, the author of a new book on global warming, a Vermont dairy farmer, the author of a famous children’s book—united in their belief that current proposals to address the climate crisis simply don’t go far enough.

“We now have 380 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere compared to 280 before the industrial revolution,” notes Wick, echoing the conclusions of a report released in 2007 by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore. “Even if we stopped all emissions today, which is a long way from happening, it would still be 345 a century from now.”

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