The promises of the Amazonian soil: shifts in discourses of Terra Preta and biochar

ABSTRACT

Biochar – a carbon-rich product used as a soil conditioner – is among the more recent technologies in environmental governance. In the spirit of ecological modernisation, biochar is claimed to deliver multiple benefits for soil fertility and climate change mitigation. However, biochar has a long history. It was inspired by Terra Preta, a highly fertile soil of anthropogenic and pre-Columbian origin found in the Amazon. This article uses discourse analysis to explore how the Terra Preta and biochar concepts have been articulated over time and what environmental discourses they resonate with. Our analysis shows that over time, the concept of biochar has slowly become disconnected from Terra Preta. While the concept of Terra Preta continued to be closely connected with Amazonian nature, archaeology and indigenous culture, biochar gained international traction and became embedded in ecological modernisation discourse. The different articulations of these concepts in fact represent different conceptualisations of human–nature relationships. We suggest the rich and intricate history of biochar and its connection with Terra Preta is key to understanding how the concept changed throughout the years, how it was influenced by international environmental discourses and how its underlying assumptions will determine who might benefit the most from biochar.

KEYWORDS:

• Genealogy
• articulation
• nature conservation
• climate change mitigation
• carbon

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions; they were most helpful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

Notes on contributors

Joana Bezerra is a postdoc researcher at the Environmental Science Department at Rhodes University, where she works with land claims in protected areas. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Science from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, where she looked at the political dimensions of Terra Preta. Her main research interests are environmental politics, international environmental agenda, land claims in protected areas and sense of place in the context of environmental management.

Esther Turnhout is Full Professor at the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Her research program The Politics of Environmental Knowledge includes research into the different roles experts play at the science policy interface, the political implications of policy relevant knowledge, and the participation of citizens in environmental knowledge making, also known as citizen science. She has published articles on these and other topics in journals such as Nature, Environmental Politics, Geoforum, Journal of Rural Studies, Science and Public Policy, Environment and Planning, and Conservation Letters. She is associate editor of Environmental Science & Policy and she has been selected as an expert for IPBES.

Isabel Melo Vasquez (1977), MSc, is a Ph.D. student at the Postgraduate Programme in Ecology and Conservation at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She holds an MSc in Forest and Nature Conservation from Wageningen University, the Netherlands (2009). Her main research interests are environmental discourses, nature conservation, and landscape ecology.

Tatiana Francischinelli Rittl is an environmental manager with master degree on soil science. Her Ph.D. thesis was part of the Terra Preta Programme, and it focused on the potential of biochar to mitigate climate change. Her main research interest are soil organic matter, carbon sequestration, and greenhouse gas emissions.

Prof. dr. Bas Arts (1961) is Chair of the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He holds an MSc in Biology (1987) and a Ph.D. in the Policy Sciences (1998). His main research interests are in the fields of international environmental governance, local natural resource management and their interconnections (‘global–local nexus’).

Prof. dr. Thomas W. Kuyper (1954) holds a personal chair in the Department of Soil Quality of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He holds an MSc in Biology (Nijmegen, 1980) and Ph.D. (Leiden, 1987). His main research interest is the management of soil quality, with a focus on biological soil quality. He is particularly interested in human modification and improvement of soil quality such as that found in Terra Preta de Índio.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Interdisciplinary Research and Education [The Terra Preta Program].