Albert Bates was working as an attorney on a water pollution case in Tennessee – agriculture chemicals polluting an aquifer. What he saw left him deeply shaken and changed the direction of his life. He tells this story and more to Designers of Paradise host Erik van Lennep as he unpacks the fifty year trajectory that has taken him from environmental law to community design and re-engineering our economic relationship with carbon, presenting the opportunities to restore the life-giving qualities of our planet when we begin to move from problem to possibilities.

Bates left law to become a farmer, science writer, leader in the eco-village movement, and proponent of biochar. He talks about his work with a young Al Gore, how eco-villages are an effort to demonstrate a “better future”, and the threat life on the globe faces if we tip out of “the goldilocks zone” we enjoy thanks to the make up of our atmosphere on Earth.

He describes how a trip to the Amazon and witnessing terra preta helped him see an opportunity for using biochar to improve soil but also, in many different forms, to “mine coal from the atmosphere”.

As Bates explains, we don’t have a problem, we have an opportunity.

To learn more buy a copy of Bates’ book with Kathleen Draper, Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth.

Erik’s other interviews with a biochar flavor:

Other references and links to check out:

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