Courtney White
A former archaeologist and Sierra Club activist, Courtney dropped out of the 'conflict industry' in 1997 to co-found The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to building bridges between ranchers, conservationists, public land managers, scientists and others around the idea of land health. Today, his work concentrates on building economic and ecological resilience on working landscapes, with a special emphasis on carbon ranching and the new agrarian movement. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Farming, Acres Magazine, Rangelands, and the Natural Resources Journal. His essay The Working Wilderness: a Call for a Land Health Movement" was published by Wendell Berry in 2005 in his collection of essays titled The Way of Ignorance. In 2008, Island Press published Courtney's book Revolution on the Range: the Rise of a New Ranch in the American West. He co-edited, with Dr. Rick Knight, Conservation for a New Generation, also published by Island Press in 2008. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his family and a backyard full of chickens.
Food & Water |
May 15, 2013
Organic No-Till
Many farmers consider organic no-till the ‘holy grail’ of regenerative agriculture because it combines the best of both worlds: reduced soil disturbance and no chemicals. Its development, however, came about as innovations so often do: by accident.
Environment |
Apr 30, 2013
2% solutions
Mitigation or adaptation? It’s usually an either/or choice: either we work on ways to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere or we find ways to adapt to new conditions created by climate change, including reducing society’s vulnerabilities and raising its resilience. Fighting to close a coal plant or developing green energy alternatives, for example, is a different …
Environment |
Apr 16, 2013
Tweak or Transformation?
“There are no experts.” This was my biggest take-away message from the inaugural National Adaptation Forum, held in Denver recently. Although it was my second major climate change adaptation conference in three weeks, I wasn’t sure what to expect. In Europe, there’s no need to whisper the words “climate change” in large gatherings for fear of offending …
Environment |
Mar 29, 2013
The other job
This is a blog about carbon, and by extension climate change mitigation, but there’s another big job that’s rising fast on a lot of people’s To Do lists. It’s called adaptation, and suddenly everyone’s talking about it – for good reason as I learned last week. And the reason is this: the future is now. Climate-related changes are bearing down on us faster …
Environment |
Mar 18, 2013
A carbon sweet spot
For a minute, I thought I had stepped into that scene from Lawrence of Arabia where T.E. Lawrence, approaching the Suez Canal, sees a ship sailing across the sand. Only I saw it in a farm field with cattle. I had parked on a levee at the north end of Twitchell Island, in the middle of the great Sacramento-San Joaquin river Delta, east of San Francisco. In front of me was prime farmland – …
Environment |
Feb 25, 2013
Hot carbon
Carbon is hot. This was the main message of a conference on climate change and agriculture that I attended last week in Davis, California. Everyone was talking about carbon, either as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or soil carbon below our feet. Farmers, scientists, policy-wonks, regulators, graduate students, activists and many others all had something to say about carbon.
Food & Water |
Feb 21, 2013
Pasture cropping: A regenerative solution from down under
Since the late 1990s, Australian farmer Colin Seis has been successfully planting a cereal crop into perennial pasture on his sheep farm during the dormant period using no-till drilling, a method that uses a drill to sow seeds instead of the traditional plow. He calls it pasture cropping and he gains two crops this way from one parcel of land—a cereal crop for food or forage and wool or …
Environment |
Feb 7, 2013
Tomorrowland
Winter is the rainy season in California, but I knew the previous four months had been very dry all across the Golden State, making people nervous. Water is life in the arid West. A diminished snowpack in the High Sierras has a cascading effect for anything depending on a watercourse all the way down to the sea. A lack of rain meant the land in between was parched too. Friends warned me that …MORE ARTICLES +
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