I highly recommend checking out https://twitter.com/BuildSoil if you're interested in learning more about this approach.

Thank you for this. What's amusing to me here is that each year I collect a load of chestnuts and try and plant them about. I do it for a variety of inane personal reasons - I hadn't appreciated that there are a load of useful reasons to do so too! ( https://wiki.buildsoil.net/index.php/Why_Chestnuts%3F )

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Just don't leave bags of chestnuts outside - apparently foxes love them and will utterly lay waste to them. Who knew?

- ed: Oh, actually, it turns out I don't - Horse-chestnuts aren't the same species as sweet or Spanish chestnuts.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum

Great account, and if there were one takeaway, chestnut trees are more interesting than I imagined

Sounds great, anything I can do to help you get to work on soil? Consider checking out AirMiners, may have some resources to help you in your quests.

When I posted the above last night, I sat there wondering whether I could Just Transition and somehow get a job in this field (scuse the pun) and had an idle fantasisation about the possibilities, but sadly my skillsets are uselessly-irrelevant in this domain, and I'm a bit too old and poor to make the swing.

Reality's a bitch, sometimes. Often.

Always good to have awareness. To me there's likely a lot you could contribute anyway. Maybe even just emailing companies and telling them you like what they're doing. There are fewer than 2,000 people working on carbon removal worldwide. "Inspire" is still needed.

Since you're talking about planting chestnuts above, I thought this video of carbon removal entrepreneurs talking about biochar solutions might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu3g0z7dl38

Have you done the math on that? It seems like it would take an awful lot of poop to counteract a coal fired power plant.

A city such as London (where I'm at) generates about 3600 tonnes of wet mass poop a day. Thanks for making me work that out... .

Given poop isn't even a main constituent ingredient in new soil, but rather forms the 'flavouring' for the development of the biological and mineral matter otherwise, I'd suggest a well-developed bio-recycling infrastructure could be quite productive.

This isn't even factoring in food or farm waste, etc.

But how do you move the wet waste from London to Mediterranean and Sahara. Also soil is one part of equation. Water is another. Poor soil results in poor vegetation that leads to poor rainfall and water sources. So soil also needs to be coupled with water increase. I think preservation is probably more feasible than rejuvenation. India for example is losing top soil at unprecedented rates that can have devastating consequences.

Start making it in Egypt or Tripoli?

People in deserts shit too, I think.

Well people have been shitting in the desert for centuries, but there’s no jungle yet, so something appears to be missing.

And people have spent millennia over-extracting plants, leading to erosion and desertification and subsequent changes of local weather patterns (precipitation, humidity, etc).

If they'd known to replenish and make broader use of their defecations and organic waste, they might well have kept their 'jungle'.

Certainly, it appears to have worked for ancient Amazonian tribes who are thought to be responsible for much of the quality land in the Amazon basin, much of which would otherwise be quite shallow and sandy with low nutrients.

Soil could be something that is too easily overlooked.

If you had prodigious quantities of good soil, you could grow trees and food at sea, where we have lots of space to grow, especially at the equator.

The problem then becomes a floating platform, and controlling it all, but those seem less difficult.