Burn

Using Fire to Cool the Earth

By: Albert Bates, Kathleen Draper

Narrated by: Tia Rider

Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

New Exclusive Content: Author Albert Bates in conversation with Soil Association’s Head of Horticulture Ben Raskin during the 2019 Hawkwood Seed Festival.

How we can harness carbon to help solve the climate crisis in order to rescue ourselves from climate catastrophe.

We need to radically alter how humans live on Earth. We have to go from spending carbon to banking it. Employed to its full potential, it can run the carbon cycle in reverse and remake Earth as a garden planet. Burn looks beyond renewable biomass or carbon capture energy systems to offer a bigger and bolder vision for the next phase of human progress, moving carbon from wasted sources into soils and agricultural systems to rebalance the carbon, nitrogen, and related cycles; enhance nutrient density in food, rebuild topsoil, and condition urban and agricultural lands to withstand flooding and drought; to cleanse water by carbon filtration and tropic cascades within the world’s rivers, oceans, and wetlands; to shift urban infrastructures such as buildings, roads, bridges, and ports, incorporating draw-down materials and components, replacing steel, concrete, polymers, and composites with biological carbon to drive economic reorganization by incentivizing carbon draw down. 

Fully developed, this approach costs nothing; to the contrary, it can save companies money or provide new revenue streams. It contains the seeds of a new, circular economy in which energy, natural resources, and human ingenuity enter a virtuous cycle of improvement. Burn offers bold new solutions to climate change that can begin right now.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Albert Bates, Kathleen Draper (P)2019 Chelsea Green Publishing

Fantastic book!

What an invaluable and critically needed wealth of information affirming that there is a pathway to combat climate change! We can't wait to implement the solutions and ideas presented in this book. With gratitude - AlphaSource Climate Fund

"Cooling the Earth" is just the beginning

This book is about removing carbon from the atmosphere and using the resulting biocarbon to improve the environment, to mitigate toxicity and eventually leave an Earth (the one that homo sapiens evolved to inhabit) an environment where the weathers not weird. Old Earth is slipping away -- unless we turn things around pronto.

The practical implications of an essentially novel raw material consisting mostly of pure carbon will be felt within thousands of uses. I think it is as revolutionary as the development of aluminum -- less than 100 years ago, aluminum was an extremely high cost curiosity, until science brought its costs down. Carbon is the element of the gods and there are many great things coming.

There are huge implications in using biocarbon to clean our water and air from carcinogens and the minerals that cause algae blooms and kill aquatic life. The substance can be fortified by co-composting with all the things that plants need -- which sharply reduces the need for annual applications of commercial fertilizer. That's just the first chapter.

Special note to young people:
1) As a boomer, I want you and your descendants to know that some of your elders feel responsible to you and that we are seriously trying to leave your generation a sustainable path to restore the Earth you inhabit and pass along.

2) This book is a goldmine if you are thinking about your life's work. There are literally hundreds of career paths described inside of "Burn". Many fortunes will be made. Go for it.

Half Snake-Oil Sales Half Great Climate Book

The first half of this book is an endless sales pitch for biochar. As good as biochar may be, this gets very annoying. There are a lot of good facts, but they're lost in the smell of Snake-Oil salesmanship. But eventually, the book settles into a well- researched climate book.

Matt Wilson

The ideas in this book are potentially world-changing and are presented in a way that is hopeful and straightforward. As someone interested in agroforestry and regenerative agriculture, Biochar offers a compelling complementary technology.

Unfortunately, the narrator seemed to mispronounce several key words that made the listening experience frustrating, not least because it lends a feeling of amateurism to an important topic.

The cure for Rotting Dinosaur Greed

This is a comprehensive outline of how we can turn biowaste of all kinds into captured carbon & profitable products by converting waste organic material into biochar, then into profitable products for almost every industry.

tim #bgreen

Really important information

Overall this book is pretty solid. I disagree with some of the philosophy of the authors, but absolutely do agree with the beneficial use of biochar in all the possible areas. It will revolutionize the way that most industries work. At its very minimum, it will help to clean up our environment and aid in protecting ecosystems. Combining biochar, permaculture, agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, and the focus on biodiversity within our built/natural ecosystems, we can absolutely create a different world. We are a long way from that utopia, but things like biochar can expedite that process. The book is well written and the narration is easy to listen to. There is a lot of information, so this is one I may listen to again.