Any recommendations on books about biochar?
I recently read and enjoyed The Biochar Debate: Charcoal’s Potential to Reverse Climate Change and Build Soil Fertility by James Bruges. It’s a short read, slightly academic but not stuffy, and written with a sense of urgency. At the end he briefly talks about the CMF (Carbon Maintenance Fee) which I hadn’t heard of and is essentially a proposed strategy for financially incentivizing land-based carbon sequestration (reforestation, increasing soil carbon, etc). I would recommend this book to anyone interested in biochar or climate change.
What other biochar books do people like, and what do you like about them?
I haven’t got an answer for you but I hate seeing thoughtful posts go unanswered too.
I must admit, I’ve never read a Biochar book. What I have consumed a lot of is scientific studies so I can glean how I can use it in my everyday life. There are so many out there, one wouldn’t really run out of things to read.
Then, I might read a blog or two, and I’m sure there are videos and now podcasts with the same. When i was obsessing over biochar water treatment, this blog was good info: https://joshkearns.substack.com/
Biochar is such an expanding area of investigation, it would be difficult to write a comprehensive book at this point. Of course the root idea of partial-combustion to make soil amendment is well-enough known, but there is much being learned about how to alter the properties of the char by how the pyrolysis is performed. There is much to be learned about how much char to add and how to pretreat the char. Beside burning to make char, there are other ways it can be heated and those affect the type of pyrolysis products that form - molten salt, steam, and subcritical hot water are all gaining prominence. The management and use of the pyrolysis products aside from the char is also a complex topic.
