[gost]

I've run across info about this upcoming July soil conference before and read most of the abstracts. I think it underscores the "bleeding edge" value that many soil scientists are placing on the discovery of Terra Preta. Most of the research is still very preliminary and I have yet to find much to help me out as an organic gardener in North America, or for anyone else living outside the tropics. One of the presentations does have to do with home gardens, but it focuses on gardeners in Brazil burning their leaf litter and dumping the residue back on their fruit trees.

I think that for the time being, most of the research is being focused on the idea of readapting ADE into modern Amazonian agriculture as an alternative to the "slash and burn" methods practiced today. While I think that there is a great potential in this idea in regards to the tropics, I also believe there is an equal potential for many other parts of the world.

I recall reading a paper published in the eighties that suggested that native peoples here in the Pacific NW of N. America (where I live) had terraformed large tracts of land in the area around modern day Fort Lewis, about 75 miles or so south of Seattle. These large cleared areas were called "prairies" by the European settlers and had been thought to be natural formations. Scientists studying the area, however, were surprised to discover that these clearings were in fact man-made, created by "burning off" the temperate rain forest cover and encouraging the growth of certain plant species that the native peoples then harvested. These included various types of berries, root crops, grasses, etc. The highly productive land also provided habitat for various species of game animals. Had these people created their own version of Terra Preta? I wish I had that paper to reread today, but alas my memory of where I read it and who did the study has vanished from my gray matter. The fact is, those "praries" are still there today and the US military uses these sites for artillery practice. What I do know is that if you clear any land around here, it's only a matter of time before the forest grows back. Somehow the natives were able to create sustainable, productive ecosystems that endure for decades or even centuries.

What is difficult for us modern geniuses to comprehend is that people in the distant past were every bit as intelligent as we are. They had the same number of brain cells that we do. We like to call them "primitive" while we call ourselves "advanced." At least we've quit calling them "savages," for the most part. Some of the researchers in the Amazon suggest that the development of Terra Preta was probably an accident. Some uneducated native discovered that his beans grew better in the garbage heap. With our technocentric viewpoint, we fail to credit the idea that somebody besides ourselves could possibly have come up with an original idea. Terra Preta and it's manufacture is apparently so complex that the soil scientists are still struggling to understand it after numerous years of study. For me, the very idea of covering a single field of up to three or four hundred acres with as much as six feet of perfectly balanced compost that doesn't degrade over time is almost incomprehensible. I look at my measly little compost piles and think about how much effort I put into maintaining them, then shake my head in wonder.

While we may have focused our science in the direction of physics and engineering, other cultures may well have directed their science in quite different directions. My gut feeling is that many ancient peoples might have developed horticultural technologies that may still be a little bit beyond our current understanding. We have spent the last hundred years developing an agriculture based on petrochemicals and are quickly coming to the realization that this is not a sustainable practice. The ancient Amazonians developed a method of organic agriculture that sustained them for at least two thousand years, possibly much longer, and is so stable that their fields, covering an area at least the size of France, are still viable today. We have so much yet to learn.