Couple of thoughts.
Kelpie Wilson's "electric
carbon sponge" mental imagery for biochar so works for me. I wish the electrical chemistry and physics aspects of biochar received wider recognition. Kempf has a
course on soil redox and teaches in great detail how every living process has an electrical effect on its surrounding environment. Soil and plant health depends on the redox environment being where it
should be. We need to relax our minds so we can grasp the workings of it, the soil alive with living electricity is a deeply beautiful image. Kempf doesn't mention biochar, but we can make the connection. The electric carbon sponge, like Kehne's soil carbon sponge, nicely captures the imagination. New soil ideas need new soil language. Biochar challenges long-held ideas about soil.
"In fact, biochar, whether naturally created or man-made, maybe the base of many humic materials found in soils (Hayes, 2013)."
This fact is having a huge impact on soil science, especially humification theory, and the soil organic matter paradigm. The longest-lasting components of soil organic carbon may not be long-chain molecules like polysaccharides (expected from humification) or glomalin (thank you fungi), or carbon attached to clay by biological communities, but rather the little clay-particle-sized sheets of graphene* that seem to accumulate in any soil which hosted a prehistoric human-induced accelerated fire regime. It's a huge shift in understanding, not everybody is going to make the mental transition at the same time. (*aka fused-aromatics in the literature)
I believe that one-day (It's been 23 years so far, give it another 50 years) science will determine that there were long time periods where fire-knowing grazing-ecosystem-knowing nomadic cultures had a beneficial effect on the
land and left a lasting legacy of rich black soil and that their actions predate most of written history. We were fortunate to have witnessed the nomadic cultures occupying the grasslands wth their towering wildfires and blackened landscapes stretching to the horizon in the North American prairies for a few short decades. We see today the indigenous fire practices nurtured in isolated enclaves throughout the world, and it gives us some idea as to how it works, how a human can wield fire in a way that revitalizes the living systems of the earth. "God made the earth, we made it fertile."
In my view, whatever remnants of fire-knowing nomadic cultures that there were in Eurasia, and responsible for creating the deep black chernozems, Peter the Great erased them from history. He finished the job started by the Mongols, who made a practice of cleansing the land of the fire-setting cultures who occupied them. Russian soil scientists will be the last to accept that charcoal is what makes their black soils black.
I read a paper from the 1950s where the lab researcher determined that
wood charcoal can be a great source of artificial humic acids. The humic extracts made from charcoal closely mimicked the high stability of natural humic acids. My understanding gained from that paper lines up with where Kelpie's article states that biochar enrichment in soils on la landscape scale (think chernozems and mollisols in particular) may be the base of many humic materials occurring in soil.
2
