Black is the New Green

Black in the New Green
Emma Marris, NATURE, Vol 442, 10 August 2006

"In 1879, the explorer Herbert Smith regaled the readers of Scribner’s Monthly with tales of the Amazon, covering everything from the tastiness of tapirs to the extraordinary fecundity of the sugar plantations. “The cane-field itself,” he wrote of one rum-making operation, “is a splendid sight; the stalks ten feet high in many places, and as big as one’s wrist.” The secret, he went on, was “the rich terra preta, ‘black land’, the best on the Amazons. It is a fine, dark loam, a foot, and often two feet thick.”

Last month, the heirs to Smith’s enthusiasm met in a hotel room in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, during the World Congress of Soil Science. Their agenda was to take terra preta from the annals of history and the backwaters of the Amazon into the twenty-first century world of carbon sequestration and biofuels."