permaculture and CO2

An interesting take on permaculture. [via WorldChanging]

There are estimates that 70 percent of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere are actually caused through food production, because it's not just the farmer growing the food, it's all the inputs into that. It's all those big corporations. It's all the energy used for making these soluble fertilizers that are killing the soil microflora and breaking down the structure of carbon in the soil. Allen Young's book, "Priority One," says that if we increased the organic matter in soil by 1.6 percent in all our cropping lands, we would sequester all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.