Policy & Community Engagement
Cool Villages
Location
CC 165
Start Date
16-10-2013 10:00 AM
End Date
16-10-2013 11:20 AM
Session Description
Rebalancing ecosystems: carbon farming, agroforestry, biochar energy & cool living: Albert Bates - Author, Permaculturist
Cooling the Earth from the dinner table: COOL VEGETM and the Carbon Minus Project in Japan: Akira Shibata
Carbon negativity – responding to the ‘green grab’ framing biochar battle-lines and mobilizing stakeholder support: Steven McGreevy, Research Institute for Humanity & Nature
Cool Villages
CC 165
Rebalancing ecosystems: carbon farming, agroforestry, biochar energy & cool living: Albert Bates - Author, Permaculturist
Cooling the Earth from the dinner table: COOL VEGETM and the Carbon Minus Project in Japan: Akira Shibata
Carbon negativity – responding to the ‘green grab’ framing biochar battle-lines and mobilizing stakeholder support: Steven McGreevy, Research Institute for Humanity & Nature
Bio and Photo
Albert has been director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee since 1994. His remarkable achievements include decades of support for indigenous people and the teaching of sustainable design, permaculture and technologies of the future to students from more than 50 nations, co-founding the Global Ecovillage Network and The Farm Ambulance Service, and inventing the concentrating photovoltaic arrays and solar-powered automobile displayed at the 1982 World's Fair. Bates is a former attorney who has argued environmental and civil rights cases before the US Supreme Court and has drafted a number of legislative acts. Bates is the author of Climate in Crisis (1990) and The Biochar Solution (2010) and the recipient of the first Right Livelihood Award (1980) and the Gaia Award (2012). Since the mid-1980s, Bates has been planting a private forest to sequester carbon dioxide and related greenhouse gas emissions from travel, business and personal activities. At 40 acres under mixed-age, mixed-species, climate-resilient management, primarily being managed for ecosystem services, that forest now annually plants itself as it expands.
Akira has a background in policy science from Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, and has also worked extensively in the private sector. He is currently the Vice President of the Wood Carbonization Science Society of Japan and the Secretary General of the Japanese Biochar Association. He has worked across academic traditions and with various stakeholders throughout Japan to create Carbon Minus Projects—efforts in rural revitalization that bridge local biomass management, small-scale biochar production and improving farmer livelihoods with urban food consumers. He has developed the COOL VEGE™ eco-label as a marketing tool to promote carbon sequestration via biochar and low-carbon lifestyles.
Steven is an Assistant Professor at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto, Japan and has a background in agriculture and rural sustainable development from Kyoto University. His research focuses on novel approaches to rural revitalization, sustainable agrifood and eco-energy transition, and the relinking of patterns of food consumption and production in local communities. He is a member of the Japan Biochar Association and has been involved with supporting small-scale biochar producers/users and Carbon Minus Projects.