Sunday 26 May 2019

The Origins of the Biochar Idea


"There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast."



I only happened to come across the subject of biochar through following the work of Albert Bates, an American permaculture teacher, among other things. He was a prominent figure in the 'peak oil' movement that gained some traction in the public consciousness around a decade ago, which I followed intently at the time.

(I think that the peak oil mindset remains my basic orientation to our economic situation, even though a lot of the predictions from that movement ended up to be quite inaccurate, and almost all of the main peak oil writers have moved on to other things.

(When I consider my adherence to this dissolved movement, I think of a line from Bob Dylan's Ain't Talkin':

I practice a faith that's been long abandoned...)

Albert Bates had a long history in environmentalism before peak oil. He was law graduate who came of age in the late 1960s, abandoning his fledgling career to become a resident of a hippie commune/pioneering eco-village in Tennessee. He resumed his law practice to defend the water supply of that eco-village against encroachments from the nuclear power industry, and it was the research for that defense that led him to become a very early author on the issue of climate change, publishing Climate in Crisis in 1990.

After the peak oil moment pretty much dispersed several years ago (John Michael Greer wrote a moratorium for the movement in 2016), Bates continued on in his engagement with the issue of climate change and the promotion of eco-villages. One of his main areas of focus was biochar, publishing The Biochar Solution in 2010 and, with co-writer Kathleen Draper, another pioneer in the biochar field, releasing Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth earlier this year.

A "Toucan" Stove on  my Balcony
A few years ago, I was looking for some small projects related to sustainability and resilience to undertake, so that I could immerse myself more fully in these topics. I heard some podcasts in which Albert Bates discussed biochar, and I wondered if this was something that I could attempt making on my own? Maybe I could also try mixing the powdered char into compost, and then that compost into soil, to test the benefits it might provide in a garden bed?

I am confused as to why biochar isn't more well known among people concerned with climate change. True, there are many doubts surrounding the idea, and arguments from against employing biochar production as a wide-scale strategy to draw down carbon from the atmosphere. There are also responses to these criticisms, so long as the biochar is produced responsibly. (And Bates argues that there really aren't incentives to produce biochar irresponsibly, outside perhaps of certain possible governmental subsidy arrangements.)

Paul Hawken's "Project Drawdown" published a book comprised of a list of methods to prevent runaway global warming, compiled by a multi-disciplinary team of seventy researchers and scientists. They listed biochar as #72 out of one hundred technologies and techniques that could be used to avert catastrophic climate change.

It is a complex issue. Biochar is a subject that cuts across climate science, ecology, agriculture, industry and economics, so there are a lot of unknowns, and a lot of testing and research to be done.

https://www.drawdown.org/

Still, I think that biochar holds so much promise because it is ultimately so simple and so fundamental. I think at its root, the practical process of making biochar is almost also a symbolic action, and a representation of the carbon drawdown effort as a whole.

A "kon tiki" biochar kiln.
Biochar is almost entirely carbon, as black as coal or petroleum, being the charred the remnants of wood or other organic wastes. The carbon that composes it was once carbon dioxide, drawn from the air by the leaves of plants and trees.

The plants embed some of this carbon in their own physical structures, as well as giving off a portion of the carbon as exudates into the soil from their roots, feeding the soil microbiome.

When these plants die or are harvested, that carbon can be transformed, by a pyrolytic fire, in to a dark powder, resistant to decay. It's stirred into compost, and returned into the soil, sequestering that carbon in the ground for ages.

Or, that carbon powder can be mixed into lime mortar, and used to construct a stone or a brick wall that can last for hundreds of years, while new generations of plants draw out more of the excess carbon in the air, once released by the combustion of coal and oil. What was collected and released by mining and pumping and combustion can be collected again, and returned to the land and the buildings we live in, just by tending to our wastes and making use of them.

An biochar pit dug into the ground.
I'd like to use this series of posts to organize my thoughts on the subject of biochar, which has developed rapidly in the few years since I came across it. When I first looked into it, all I could find online was Albert Bates' book, another book called The Biochar Debate, and one expensive textbook on the subject.

Recently, I've checked again, and there's now a wide range of popular books, as well as t-shirts and aprons with biochar slogans on them, containers to make biochar in your fireplace, and bags of fertilizers with biochar mixed in them, all available online. Albert Bates has been busy researching efforts to include biochar in concrete, asphalt, paper, plaster, paint, mixing it with waste styrofoam to make sturdy roof tiles, mixing it into cattle feed, testing its ability to absorb EMF. Large biochar plants have been erected in China. It's a lot of detail to keep a handle on!

At the same time, I think there's no necessity to look into all that, if a person simply wants to incorporate biochar into their garden or farm. I think that's why I gravitate to the idea of biochar.

I've had the thought that maybe it's best for the economy and the environment when the things that we do can be done on every level of complexity (like a fractal pattern) rather than just at the highest levels of the industry.

A basic fractal pattern from Wikipedia.

For an example, take food: I think its best when people are gardening vegetables and herbs in their yards, or in community gardens, while market gardens produce more intensively at the local level, and large-scale farms producing things like grain crops at the regional level, or for international export. Or for clothing: a fair number of people can sew and repair clothes at home, with more complicated garments being made by local craftspeople, as well as some mass produced fabric and clothes items being made on a larger scale.

It strikes a balance between efficiency and resilience, and a society can allocate its resources at a higher or lower on that scale, depending on the economic situation of the time (as long as no level of production, from the local craftsperson to the businesses that trade internationally, has been allowed to wither away.) I think it also helps to maintain a healthy democracy: if the average person has a feel for the kinds of processes that are occurring on every level of society, I have to think that the decisions made by that society will tend to be better overall.

Along these lines, biochar seems to me to be a carbon sequestration method that could be implemented at all scales (similar to other carbon draw down measures like tree planting or building healthy soils) as opposed to high-tech carbon capture and storage plants (though I'm not against those in principle, being build in addition to these simpler methods.)

So, a small biochar cooker could be making biochar while providing fire light for a patio on a Friday evening.

A farmer could make biochar from brushwood in a 55-gallon barrel, or an open, cone-shaped kon-tiki kiln.

A municipality could have a biochar plant at the landfill, to char organic wastes, to add to composting food wastes and sewage sludge (if they weren't charring those as well.)

Large scale plants can make biochar from things like rice husks, corn stalks, or forestry residues, to produce energy streams (electricity, hot water, etc.) and biochar that can be applied as fertilizer en masse. (Interesting too that biochar itself is composed of something like a fractal design, with, as Bates says, "pores on the walls of the pores on the walls...")

For this initial post, I'd like to start with the history from which the idea of biochar was drawn: the 'terra preta' (dark earth) soils of the Amazon river basin. At various sites along the Amazon river, archeologists and soil scientists have worked to decode the ingredients left behind in these soils, and from what they have discovered, maybe some remnants of long lost wisdom cand be drawn and applied to the problems of our own times.


*  *  *  *  *

We don't need plantations or crops planted for biochar, what we need is a charcoal maker on every farm so the farmer can turn his waste into carbon.



If history is confined to the parts of the past for which we have written records, then the history of the civilizations that once lived in the rain-forests along the Amazon river can be known to us only from the thinnest shreds of documentation.

These documents are not from the peoples of these forest-dwelling cultures themselves, but from the sparse accounts of the Spanish, conquistadors and missionary priests of the 15th century, who were involved in the exploration and colonization of the Americas.

These brief encounters between these few Europeans and the peoples who lived along the Amazon brought to them the infectious pandemics that decimated the indigenous populations. The few who manage escaped these illnesses were forced to abandon their traditional practices, and formed small bands of hunter-gatherers to survive the collapse of their civilization. When Europeans next returned to these areas along the Amazon, almost a hundred years later, the civilizations there had been so completely dispersed, their housing subsumed by the rainforest, that the original European accounts of these populations were dismissed as lies and fabrications.

We rely on archeologists to study the physical record left by these civilizations, and apparently their findings have largely verified the accounts of the Spanish who first came across the peoples of the Amazon river basin. What they have pieced together gives us glimpses into a unique and fascinating civilization, whose methods of building and growing food seem possible quite different than many others of the ancient world.

I have to admit that don't know much about the findings of these archeologists outside what has been included in various books written specifically on the topic of biochar. I think that could slant one's perspective and, in particular over-emphasize the role of charcoal in the full range of practices these civilizations developed.

Most of the books I've looked at do freely admit that they are speculating about how the peoples of the Amazon basin might have used charcoal in their daily life, and in their soil building practices. Nonetheless, for someone who is interested in appropriate technology and resilient ways of living, even these speculations are full of ideas that might be useful for our own times.

As I understand it, the only account of European contact with the peoples of the Amazon river basin is the diary of a Spanish missionary, Father Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied an expeditionary crew of 57 men lead by the conquistador Francisco de Orellana.

Orellana had been involved with the colonization of the Peru since his youth, and learned several indigenous languages. Historians think he was possibly a cousin of Pizarro. He was charged with an expedition down the Amazon river, in search of gold, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The journey was inspired by stories of the "El Dorado" legend circulating among the Spanish, related to the chieftain of the Chibcha people, who was said to have been rolled in gold leaf and then ritually bathed in a sacred lake.

The journey down the river, the severe trials they faced (at one point they apparently boiled shoe leather and grass to avoid dying of starvation, at another they set up an impromtu iron foundry to make nails for repairing their ship), the raids they made on various settlements, the skirmishes they had with the indigenous peoples there, who sometimes followed them along the river for days: it seems like a complicated and involved story, hard to fully grasp from the accounts included in books on biochar.

Still from Apocalypse Now, director of photography Vittorio Storaro







Reading these excerpts from the story of their journey, of a ship sailing slowly down a river in a foreign land, told entirely from the European perspective, I can't help but be reminded of scenes from Apocalypse Now (which should probably remind me of one of its main sources, Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, if I had ever read it.) Seeing that both the film and novel both focus on Western individuals entangled in an imperialist project, Vietnam and the Congo respectively, connections could probably be made with Father Carvajal experiences in Orellana's expedition. (I'm learning now that there is a popular book on Orellana's expedition titled River of Darkness, so I'm guessing I'm not the first to make this connection!) I'll have to get back to Conrad's novels some day.



Carvajal reported seeing many densely populated cities, houses side-by-side, with roads and highways connecting them, and leading from the river to inland.

There was one town that stretched for fifteen miles without any space from house to house, which was a marvelous thing to behold. There were many roads that entered into the interior of the land, very fine highways. Inland from the river, to a distance of six miles more or less, there could be seen some very large cities that glistened in white and, besides this, the land is as fertile and as normal in appearance as our Spain.

For one stretch of around 275 miles, Carvajal reported that most towns were so close to each other that "a crossbow shot could connect town to town" and that the largest gap he saw between towns was as around 3.5 miles. He also counted at least five towns where there was almost no separation between houses for over 7 - 10 miles. He reported seeing glistening white cities, set back several miles from the river.

A Roman oil lamp
There was apparently a common language among these peoples. Food was in great abundance: game meats, hunted poultry, fish and turtles, a great variety of fruits, cakes made from maize and ayuca. At one stop Carvajal noted that there "was so much abundance to eat it could have fed a thousand men for a year."

Details from Carvajal's notes also describe a civilization had great skill in building and in their craft work. Regarding their pottery, he was very impressed with their shapes and their glazing, as well as the figures and scenes drawn on their stoneware, of fearsome divine figures and pleasant scenes of nature, as well as with their household figurines and local statues.

In this town were houses of pleasing interiors with much stoneware of diverse forms. There were enormous pitchers and vases, and many other smaller containers, plates, silverware, and candlesticks. This stoneware is of the best quality that has ever been seen in the world [...] It is all enameled with glass, of all colors and the brightest hues [...] They craft and draw everything like the Romans. [...] There were giant statues and in one there were working arms and knees, run by gears and wheels.

*  *  *  *  *

Francisco de Orellana died just before attempting a second expedition of the Amazon River. The diaries of Father Gaspar de Carvajal were the only record of the first voyage, and when later explorers returned to these areas, they saw no evidence of the glistening white cities that Carvajal reported. It was left to modern day archeologists and soil scientists to affirm Carvajal's account, that there was once a thriving and unique horticultural civilization that lived along the Amazon river.

The primary artifact left behind by these civilizations was a sort of very fertile soil, called "terra preta" by local people, which is Portuguese for "dark earth."

Whereas soils in the rainforest apparently tend to be depleted, acidic, and red in colour, due to centuries of high heat and intense rains, terra preta is a dark soil, with a balanced pH and a high nutrient content. It is so fertile that it has been excavated, bagged and sold to gardeners in South America in recent times. The key ingredient (though it was only one among many): charcoal.

James Bruges, in his book The Biochar Debate, notes that archeologists have found many raised ridges, banks and mounds along the Amazon river, for "tens of thousands of kilometres", and that the charcoal buried within them dates back over 2000 years. The thought is that these ridges and mounds were built to keep their intensive gardens above water in the rainy season, and also that the scope of the "digging and earth-moving involved in creating these structures [...] was comparable to building the pyramids. They completely altered the landscape."

They also may have built huge fish-ponds inland, which would be filled as the waters swelled in the rainy season, flowing over weirs that would trap these inland lakes from draining down in the dry season, providing fish to eat throughout the year. Bruges mentions that idea intrigued him, as he had seen similar systems in old French monasteries. His descriptions of their "bridges, dams, dikes, causeways, canals, ponds, gardens, [and] orchards" reminds me of what I imagine Holland must be like, with its controlled inundation of its low-lying plains, and also maybe of the importance the ancient Egyptians placed on the annual overflow of the Nile.


Ute Scheub, in his fascinating book Terra Preta, speculates more closely on the role charcoal may have played in the daily life of the ancient cultures along the Amazon River. (His book credits Haiko Pieplow, Hans-Peter Schmidt, and Kathleen Draper as co-authors: I'm not sure what their contributions were to this book, but each has an interesting body of work to their name, relating to soil science and carbon sequestration. I'm currently very engaged by Kathleen Draper's book Burn, which she wrote with Albert Bates, which details a full spectrum of uses for carbon in the economy, along with applying biochar to the soil.)

Ute Scheub begins by pointing out that indigenous people of the Amazon river did not burn or clear-cut the forest to cultivate an agricultural landscape, instead they established their homes and gardens among the fruit bearing trees. We know that they produced a fair amount of charcoal, which Schaub assumes was probably made from "scrap wood and dead branches," as larger timber was hard work to come using with hand axes, and would probably be used mainly for building homes.

The main use of charcoal would probably be as a fuel source for cooking food. It burns at high temperatures and gives off relatively little smoke compared to burning wood directly. In the hot, humid climate of the tropics, turning wood into charcoal prevents it from rotting before it can be used as a fuel.

Burning charcoal to cook meals leaves one with ash, of course, and not the charcoal content that is found as a major ingredient of terra preta soils. The shards of clay pottery that are also commonly found in terra preta might indicate the other main use of charcoal in a forest civilization.

Based on the animal and fish bones and shells and the human feces found to be a component of these soils, Scheub speculates that both kitchen wastes and bathroom wastes were collected in clay vessels of about five gallons in volume (about the size of the plastic pails in common use today.) Powdered charcoal would have been layered into these vessels, to cover over the wastes, drying them out and preventing odours. The clay vessels would have tight fitting lids, and the contents of the clay containers would then begin to ferment, something similar to Japanese/Korean bokashi fermentation.

The addition of charcoal apparently sets up "better conditions for lactic acid fermentation. Lactobacilli, excreted by the human intestinal tracts, initiate the fermentation process. The numerous water-filled pores of the pieces of charcoal provide an excellent habitat for these probiotic intestinal bacteria. Harmful bacteria, however, have very little chance of survival, as fermentation has a bactericidal effect..." (Scheub, 41)

Scheub continues to conjecture that these clay refuse bins & dry toilets, layered with charcoal throughout, could have been a means of preventing disease within the tightly populated areas along the Amazon river. Containing waste materials, and then subjecting them to a period of fermentation, would have greatly restricted the ability of pathogens to pass from one person to another. The authors speculate that perhaps each person of a household had their own dry toilet, or maybe that a person who was ill was given a personal toilet, to sequester the pathogens that might spread with communal toilets in a densely populated civilization.

In addition to these household-sized pots, there were also larger vessels, 50 - 80 gallons in size (basically the volume of a regular-to-large hot water tank) that would be lined up in rows, maybe in areas that were intended to later be gardens. These larger receptacles were filled with layers of cooking wastes, feces, charcoal and soil, and were sealed at the top to undergo fermentation, and to avoid the contents being washed out or attracting  insects.

Some of these larger pots seem to have been made with holes in their bases, which Scheub theorizes may have allowed effluent to seep out the bottom of the vessel witin the ground, attracting soil microbes up into the vessels, helping transform the mix of fermented wastes, charcoal, and soil layers into terra preta.

Another possibility for some of these vessels is that, "as soon as the vessels began to emit an earthy smell, the indigenous people may have planted a seedling or a banana plant in the vessel to complete the humus-making process" through the symbiotic relationship between plant roots and soil microbes. "In time, plant roots would have burst through the confines of the vessels, providing an explanation for the numerous shards found in deeper soil profiles." (Scheub, 43)

People would slowly fill these with fermented kitchen and toilet wastes, and when this layer of containers was completely filled, perhaps a new set of clay vessels would be built up on top of these, creating the raised-ridge garden mounds, filled with charcoal and humus-rich soils, that seem to have been characteristic of this civilization.

A Potter in Nepal works with clay-biochar mix

(I'm wondering if maybe these mounds were built up first, and then holes dug into them to line with clay, to fire in the ground. How else can a 80 gallon clay pot be fired? Maybe the firing of these pits involved making a batch of charcoal, in open-pit kon-tiki style burn, I'm wondering if the temperatures would be high enough?)

The indigenous civilizations of the Amazon river apparently did not keep livestock (making them very susceptible to the types of viruses brought to their continent by Europeans.) This means that they did not have a steady supply of animal manure to use as fertilizer. The use of their own "humanure" filled the double purpose of making fertile soil as well providing sanitation and disease control. Nor did they use draft animals in their agriculture, they had no plows and no carts. They worked their raised mound gardens with their hands and digging sticks, and therefore spared themselves the degradation of their soils that is normally entailed by constant tilling.

Ebenezer Howard's Schematic for Garden Cities, 1902
James Bruges wonders if this horticultural, forest-dwelling way of life created an egalitarian type of society: there is no evidence here "of pyramids as in the Maya civilization, no ramparts, no hierarchy of grand buildings surrounded by hovels." They certainly engaged in massive building projects, in controlling flood waters with canals, ponds, etc., as well as bridges and roads, and their raised garden mounds, but their projects seemed to focus on function rather than social hierarchy, more civil engineering than the aggrandizing of wealth and power.

"At the heart of each town was a big circular plaza from which roads radiated," one archeologist said of the sites he studied in Brazil, describing them as essentially "garden cities."







* * * * *

"Charcoal is one of the oldest industrial technologies, perhaps the oldest."

                                           - James Bruges

A few years ago, a suggestion in a Transition group meeting of maybe producing an 'Encyclopedia of Post-Carbon Living' got me into the mode of researching one topic related to resilience at a time, instead of the very general reading I was doing before. Not that I would try to become an expert in any topic, but I aimed for learning enough that I could write an encyclopedia style article for that subject.

The first one I worked on was biochar and biochar stoves, then to composting toilets and the use of humanure, then concrete and alternative concretes, then compost heat recovery systems. I picked the topics pretty much at random, but I started to feel like that there was a connected group of materials and purposes that kept circling around in these topics, something like:

biochar  -  clay  -  limestone  -  waste management  -  nutrient cycling  

water filtration and storage  -  fermentation  -  carbon drawdown

Every topic seemed to reach into the other, mind-map style. The histories of charcoal and pottery seemed to be very intertwined, likewise with the ancient kiln-based practice of roasting limestone to make mortar. The oldest temple in the world has lime-clay floors. Biochar works well mixed in with lime mortar/concrete. Biochar is excellent and filtering water, and can help in various composting toilets.  Biochar can be mixed in clay pottery with good results, and clay vessels are ideal for fermenting and food storage. Both clay and certain kinds of cement make excellent cisterns. And of course, working with biochar allows to engage in one form of carbon drawdown.

One example: in Albert Bates and Kathleen Draper's new book Burn, they mention a practice of the traditional peoples of the Levant (around modern day Syria), of finding a good spot for a cistern, beside which they would build a house. The book is a little unclear on the details of the practice, but basically they would dig out the pit, and use some of the clay soils to line the walls of this cistern. The clay would be set with a charcoal-producing, gassifying fire. The biochar was used to help filter the water in the cistern.

On the left, a 2000 year old clay cistern in Syria.

They also used crushed char, ash, calcined clay and potassium lye to make plasters and concretes, one use of which was to make indoor columns that could condense large amounts of water out of the air. On top of that, amazingly, they somehow channeled this condensed water into underground set-ups that basically produced compressed air, and forced it into the bottom of their cistern to keep the deeper waters from becoming anaerobic. They also used the cool, compressed-air they generated for refrigeration, and channeling  through air wells into their orchards, for crops like apples and pistachios that do well by growing in colder air.

It sounds almost fantastical to me, but I bring it up to illustrate how these traditional appropriate technologies can cross-pollinate among themselves, and how traditional peoples often had very sophisticated means of working with nature's systems to provide the necessities of a good human life. It's surprising how often that researching appropriate technology and resilience leads one learning about really ancient ways of living. For instance, my main source for the history of concrete traces the origins of limestone kilns to the shamans of pre-agricultural tribes, and to the construction of temple at Gobekli Tepe around twelve thousand years ago (which interestingly also came up when reading about the memory systems of oral cultures.)

Of all places, biochar happened to get a mention recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, in an interview with the author Graham Hancock. It has to be the largest audience ever to be introduced to biochar, terra preta, and the civilization that once populated the Amazon river basin. The interview was related to Hancock's newest book, America Before, which I believe is centred around recent discoveries that suggest that the indigenous peoples of the Americas have been here far, far longer than was previously thought in the academic world.

Hancock and his collaborator Randall Carlson of Sacred Geometry International have been very active in recent years promoting the idea that human civilization is itself far older than previously thought, having alternated through cycles of flourishing and cataclysm, and that certain remnants these extremely ancient cultures were carried through these collapses and passed on to successor civilizations. I can't help but wonder if somehow this knowledge about these forgotten, obscure civilizations isn't arising now, at this particular moment in time, because there is something there that we need to hear and learn about to deal with the crises we are faced with today.

Anyways, I'd like to follow this introduction to biochar with a few more posts on biochar, including an exploration as to what benefits it might have as a soil amendment, about various biochar producing devices, and on the many uses biochar could have in the economy outside of it's agricultural applications. Please stay tuned.






2 comments:

  1. Fascinating article --and you are really adept at linking ideas together. I'm excited about the rest of the series.

    I recently cataloged Graham's new book at work. I've always been interested in his ideas, but haven't read anything by him. I also cataloged back in April a book I thought looked interesting at the time: Gardening with biochar :supercharge your soil with bioactivated charcoal by Jeff Cox. I earmarked that one in a notebook to read later. I liked how it talked about making compost teas & such with it... a ripe area for experimenting.

    ...hmmm. When I started reading this article, I never thought it would begin with carbon sequestration, jump into ancient history and humanure, and end with speculation about vaster ages of time / Graham Hancock.

    Well done! Good that you can eat some stir fry too while making biochar!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks kindly Justin! I'm fairly new to writing articles, but I've found that, maybe like Lynch and his 70 notecards to a feature film, once I have maybe 4-5 general ideas to tie together, there is enough material to string together for a post!

      I haven't read the book you mentioned, but I think I've seen his youtube videos, I think he's got the right idea by emphasizing how one fills all the empty pores of the char with the right types of nutrients and microorganisms for what you are trying to grow.

      I think Albert Bates has said that biochar for the soil might become more popular once local regions work out what works for them in terms of compost teas, etc. (Or maybe take the waste fermentation route as opposed to aerobic composting mentioned in Ute Schaub's book, based on Korean/Japanese bokashi).

      Thanks again - yes the stir-fry's are nice, they at least give a little bit of purpose to making the biochar, since I don't have a garden to try the char out in. But to me, green wizardry is about immersing oneself as much a possible in the principles involved in energy, generating heat, dealing with wastes, and I think these projects help with that, if nothing else.

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Biochar Woks, Cooking, Collapse

I came back to my home city about ten years ago, after having lived for a few years up north in the Yukon. I took a culinary arts course ...