Living earth red oak
Ice cores from Greenland, which contain air samples trapped thousands of years ago, reveal increases in greenhouse gases that correspond with the rise of farming in Mesopotamia. The erosion and degradation of soil caused by plowing, intense grazing and clear-cutting has played a significant role in the atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases. Often overlooked, though, is how we use land, which contributes almost as much. And it hinted at something that Wick and Rathmann had yet to consider: Plants could be deliberately used to pull carbon out of the sky.Ĭlimate change often evokes images of smokestacks, and for good reason: The single largest source of carbon emissions related to human activity is heat and power generation, which accounts for about one-quarter of the carbon we put into the atmosphere. It clearly illustrated a concept that Creque had repeatedly tried to explain to them: Carbon, the building block of life, was constantly flowing from atmosphere to plants into animals and then back into the atmosphere. Creque’s quiet observation stuck with Wick and Rathmann. Grasses, he liked to say, were like straws sipping carbon from the air, bringing it back to earth. The carbohydrates that fattened the cows had come from the atmosphere, by way of the grass they ate. He didn’t want medicated livestock excreting drugs that might harm the worms and insects living in his soil - most cows are routinely dewormed - so he tracked down a herd of untreated cows and borrowed them for the summer of 2005.Ĭreque had an answer for him. He even bought a molasses lick to supplement the animals’ diet of dry thatch. He dug wells for water, pounded in steel posts and strung nonbarbed wire. If you simply let them loose and then round them up a few months later - often called the “Columbus method” - your land is more likely to end up hard-packed and barren. If the ruminants move like wild buffalo, in dense herds, never staying in one place for too long, the land benefits from the momentary disturbance. But from Creque’s perspective, how you graze makes all the difference.
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Grazing has been blamed for turning vast swaths of the world into deserts.
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This view ran counter to a lot of conservationist thought, as well as a great deal of evidence. “Our naïve idea was not working out so well.” “Our vision of wilderness was failing,” Wick told me recently.
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The land seemed to be losing its vitality. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. Within months of the herd’s departure, the landscape began to change. The first step they took toward what they imagined would be a more pristine state was to revoke the access enjoyed by the rancher whose cows wandered their property. Wick and Rathmann would often come home and find, to their annoyance, cows standing on their porch. For nearly a century, this had been dairy country, and the rounded, coastal hills were terraced from decades of grazing. So smitten were they with the wildlife, in fact, that they decided to return their ranch to a wilder state. She even trained the resident towhees, small brown birds, to eat seed from her hand. Rathmann loved watching the many animals, including ravens, deer and the occasional gopher, from the large porch. The couple quickly settled into their bucolic new surroundings. He knew the area well, having grown up one town away, in Woodacre, where he had what he describes as a “free-range” childhood: little supervision and lots of biking, rope-swinging and playing in the area’s fields and glens. Wick, a former construction foreman - they met when he oversaw a renovation of her bathroom - was eager to tackle the project. They picked out the 540-acre ranch in Nicasio mostly for its large barn, which they planned to remake into a spacious studio. Rathmann is an acclaimed children’s book author - “Officer Buckle and Gloria” won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 - and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations. When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space.