Centre Climate: What is a restorative community and how can the Centre Region become one?

Here’s a new idea for a new year. What if we made the Centre Region a restorative community, one that actually removes more carbon from the atmosphere than we burn? This challenge came from Denice Wardrop five years ago, when she was director of Penn State’s Sustainability Institute.

The idea is pretty simple. A restorative community uses the power of natural systems to repair themselves. Add to that emerging technology from Penn State scientists and engineers, and we can actually reverse the effects of our fossil fuel binge.

A restorative community is a better, cleaner place to live. It is a community that supports both human and ecological flourishing. It is high tech, high efficiency, and it leaves the world a better place for future generations.

For example, some farmers in the Centre Region are engaged in low-till agriculture that builds up soil. Penn State Agricultural Extension service has been advocating this for decades. There’s even a thing called “carbon farming” that uses a variety of techniques to bury (or sequester) carbon in the soil.

When you think about it, plants do this naturally. Think a tree creates its bulk by turning soil and rocks into wood? Think again: most of the tree is actually produced out of thin air!

Using the sun’s energy, the tree (and other green plants) take carbon dioxide out of the air and convert it to sugar and oxygen. Here’s the simplified chemical formula that you may remember from junior high: 6CO2 + 6H2O + light energy ------> C6H12O6 + 6O2.

Moreover, trees push that mass deep underground with their root systems, effectively sequestering it, preventing much of it from going back into the atmosphere after it dies. According to Timothy J. Fahey, professor of ecology in the department of natural resources at Cornell University, “An approximate value for a 50-year-old oak forest would be 30,000 pounds of carbon dioxide sequestered per acre.”

So, one solution is to stop cutting down forests (such as the Pine Hall forest) to make room for development. Another is to re-establish forests on unproductive land and let them perform their magic.

We can also do more with all the construction in our area. Cement production is responsible for 8% of carbon emissions worldwide. But new building techniques, including “mass timber” can eliminate some or all of that burden. Like all construction, there are significant energy costs, and much is still to be worked out, but the possibilities are exciting.

Some Penn State faculty members are pressing Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts to commit to the Living Building Challenge in constructing its proposed Liberal Arts Research and Teaching building.

The Living Building Challenge pushes architects, contractors and communities past the idea of using as little energy as possible; it emphasizes producing more energy than the building needs. Buildings should not just be utilitarian, but beautiful; they should reflect the materials and community values where they exist. They should have “a positive impact on the human and natural systems that interact with them.”

So often, addressing climate change seems to be about what we can’t do. Stop driving your truck, don’t eat meat, don’t fly to Cancun for vacation (really, just don’t). But it’s far more effective, and encouraging, to think about what we can do.

So, this is my New Year’s resolution. I resolve to do more than simply reduce my carbon footprint; I will be part of a restorative community that sequesters more carbon than it produces, a community that generates a healthy environment for all of earth’s inhabitants: human, animal and plant.