Dear Reader:
One morning in early April, Karen woke up with the words “inconvenient truth” in her mind. An Inconvenient Truth is, of course, the 2006 documentary film about former United States Vice President Al Gore’s campaign to educate people about global warming. The film is credited for raising international public awareness of global warming and reenergizing the environmental movement.
Believing that there is no such thing as coincidence and that there was a reason that Karen had awakened with those words in her mind; we spent the rest of the morning doing Internet research to find out what old Al Gore is up to these days. You won’t believe it.
Al Gore bought a 400-acre farm outside Nashville, Tennessee, and he is collaborating with a preeminent soil scientist from the Ohio State University, named Rattan Lal, to conduct research on the use of regenerative agricultural practices to sequester carbon and to reverse climate change.
Research conducted on Gore’s farm found that carbon is sequestered in soil at 2.6 gigatons annually. Planting trees and vegetation, along with topsoil “has the technical potential” to absorb 157 parts per million of CO2.
At the annual Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research conference, Gore was quoted as saying that agriculture can be “one of the most promising and biggest solutions to the climate crisis” if carbon sequestration and regenerative practices are implemented.
We at the Climate Change Permaculture Project find Al Gore’s new direction to be validating. The strategy, that we intuitively adopted, to help to reverse climate change (and to address food insecurity), is essentially the same as that of Al Gore—someone who has access to much more information and research. And, we didn’t even know about it until Karen woke up with the words inconvenient truth in her head.