James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3d ago
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
They created fertile ground to grow crops and support large populations, and there's another bonus too.
Because Dark Earth holds huge amounts of carbon, these practices incidentally locked carbon into the ground for centuries or even millennia.
That makes terra preta not just fertile soil, but a potentially powerful example of long-term carbon sequestration.
And that soil does way more than just help provide food.
Woven into all of this is the fact that in almost every example we've talked about in this video, the forest itself is part of the construction.
In an article published in Science in 2017, Levis and colleagues compared distributions of domesticated woody species with archaeological sites and environmental data, and the link they established between them was mind-blowing.
They reported that domesticated tree species are far more likely to be hyperdominant, where a small subset of species makes up a disproportionately large percentage of the total individuals or biomass in an ecosystem, and that the richness and abundance of domesticated species increases near archaeological sites.
Now, this doesn't mean every single hectare of the Amazon forest was designed, but it does mean the old binary of pristine versus human is too simple.
The Amazon can be wild and historical at the same time.
And in a cruel twist of irony, all of that carbon that the soil locks in is the very thing that's most under threat.
The Amazon holds roughly 150 to 200 billion metric tons of carbon in its forests and in its soils, an amount comparable to the last four to five years worth of global CO2 emissions.
Intact Amazon forests work as carbon sinks, helping reduce the impact of emissions on our atmosphere.
But that sink has weakened.
And in 2019, parts of the Amazon actually released more carbon than they absorbed.
This means that if the Amazon continues to shrink or indeed was lost entirely, the impact would be catastrophic, essentially releasing in the order of hundreds of billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and dramatically altering regional and international climates.
Recent data shows Amazon deforestation soared to more than 10,000 km2 per year between 2019 and 2021, before enforced efforts to drive it down again in 2023 to 2025.
Severe wildfires in drought years have also released large amounts of carbon.
For example, satellite-based measurements found Amazonia emitted between 28 and 62 billion kilograms of carbon monoxide in 2024 from wildfires alone, approximately four times the average.
These trends underline that the Amazon's carbon bank account is being depleted, increasing risks of future climate impacts if not urgently addressed.
Which raises one big question, doesn't it?
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