Biochar: Coral Reef of the Soil
Justin Roberts, MLA '22, describes his journey abroad exploring the powerful potential of using biochar in landscape design.
For students at the University of Washington, discovering their academic and career passions is a journey of exploration, opportunity and learning. Justin Roberts knows this well. Justin is a third-year master of Landscape Architecture student. He spent a quarter abroad in Sweden as part of the Valle Scholarship & Scandinavian Exchange Program , which funds student exchanges between the UW and Nordic countries. He is also the author of his new book, “Metabolic Matters: An Urban Designer's Guide to Biochar,” where he explores how biochar, an incredibly sustainable material that can be made from any organic substance, can be used to tackle some of the most difficult challenges facing humans and ecosystems across the globe. This book was inspired by the many journeys Justin has taken in his life as a student, emerging landscape architect and passionate proponent of adopting more holistically sustainable practices into landscape design.
Discovering a Passion for Biochar
Justin’s discovery of his passion for biochar is an amalgamation of the many different opportunities he encountered throughout his personal and educational journey. He describes his background as being interdisciplinary. As an undergraduate student, he received a degree in Science, Technology & Society at the University of Puget Sound, where he studied history and philosophy of science under the lens of environmental policy.
One of the catalysts into his exploration of biochar was learning about how Indigenous peoples in the Amazon region and cultures across the globe used biochar to create rich, fertile soil that people still use for agriculture today.
Biochar is a gift from Indigenous civilizations that figured out how to make really fertile soil and fuel their communities with it
There is a growing body of research documenting how Indigenous communities in the Amazon region made extensive use of biochar for thousands of years. Justin explains that the layer of fertile soil in the Amazon is extremely thin because most nutrients are immediately incorporated back into living biomass or washed away by the rain. Therefore, people had to come up with a solution to create better soil to produce food for their communities. Biochar became one of the most effective solutions to this problem. Justin explains, “The amazing thing about char is that it has so much surface area, it acts like a sponge for nutrients and microbes, and it becomes a ‘coral reef’ in the soil.” Biochar also doesn’t degrade for thousands of years, meaning communities have been able to utilize its benefits for many millennia.
“Biochar is a gift from Indigenous civilizations that figured out how to make really fertile soil and fuel their communities with it,” says Justin. While European-borne diseases and other impacts from settler colonialism decimated the populations of these cultures after Spanish explorations in the 16th century, their soil and agricultural legacy remains. Furthermore, biochar is making a comeback among Indigenous communities in the Amazon today as a means of practicing more permanent tropical agriculture—something that also has enormous potential to mitigate the negative impacts of tropical slash-and-burn agriculture around the world.
After completing his undergraduate degree, Justin worked as a political organizer and canvass director for just over a year, and then moved on to become a naturalist guide for a local tour company called Evergreen Escapes. There, he facilitated small group tours to places such as Mt Rainier, Olympic National Park and Mt St Helens. During his time as a guide, Justin developed his skills as a storyteller for the interconnected narratives that link the region’s fascinating natural history with the diverse ways that people have inhabited the region for millenia. After gaining valuable experience as a year-round guide in the region's parks, Justin felt the pull to shift his career path towards addressing the rift between people and nature that made visiting National Parks feel like such a necessity. Having been exposed to landscape architecture through friends and family, he decided to explore the option at UW. While biochar was in the back of his mind from his interest in undergraduate school, Justin didn’t anticipate how central biochar would become to his master’s research.
Valle Exchange
While in school, Justin discovered the Valle Exchange Program. “I heard about the Valle Exchange after the Italy abroad program got canceled due to the pandemic,” says Justin, “I liked how the Valle program lets students do their work independently. I learned that the program allows you to come up with your own research agenda and connect with people abroad who will help you carry it out and get support from UW.”
While searching for a mentor and topic to pursue on exchange, he browsed through research being done at landscape architecture departments at various Scandinavian universities. Justin encountered work on biochar at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Lund, Sweden and decided to reach out. Soon after, he was contacted by Ann-Mari Frannson, a professor at SLU and one of the leaders of a project in Sweden called “ Rest till Bäst ,” which essentially means turning leftover material from ‘waste to gold’ in Swedish. This project brings together landscape architects, biologists, researchers, city operators and administrators to investigate how biochar can revamp urban landscapes, documenting both its uses and benefits. Ann-Mari graciously accepted Justin’s proposal to mentor him and connect his research to her work.
A few months after his application to the Valle program was accepted, Justin found himself over 4,000 miles away from the Pacific Northwest in Scandinavia. During his time there, Justin traveled throughout Sweden and Finland interviewing practitioners, visiting key sites of biochar research, and learning more about how landscape architects incorporate biochar into their designs to improve communities and plant health.
Varvsparken, Malmö
Stockholm
Vellinge
Hyväntoivonpuisto Park, Helinski
Justin visited many other sites across the region. He says that the Valle Program offered him an incredibly valuable experience as a researcher and graduate student, “It was such a tremendous opportunity to talk and meet with all these people and see all these sites for myself.”
Back to the US: Reflections
Justin says his journey to Scandinavia had a huge influence on him. He emphasizes how much he enjoyed the independence of the program because he was allowed to “step off the regular treadmill” of the traditional course structure of graduate school and think deeper about the projects he researched. Not only was he thrilled to be able to focus on what he was passionate about because of the flexible structure of the learning environment, he also got to improve many skills essential to landscape architecture. Justin earned credit for an independent sketch class, enabling him to devote significant time towards this key reflective and communicative practice in the profession. His ability to invest more time into thinking about his research also allowed him to expand his thinking about biochar as a generative material that connects to broader strategies for circular and regenerative economies.
To synthesize his work abroad, Justin is participating in a two-quarter long capstone studio course based in South Park in South Seattle along the Duwamish waterway. The South Park community is a diverse neighborhood that has demonstrated incredible resilience and solidarity in the face of challenges resulting from toxins released from the industrial area nearby and pollution and disconnection from highways that bisect the community. Justin’s studio, run by the Landscape Architecture department’s Associate Teaching Professor Julie Parrett, focuses on catalytic landscapes, exploring how landscapes can generate benefits in a way that continually unfold and do so in close coordination with the communities they serve.
Because of biochar’s unique multifunctional properties and production process, Justin believes that the material holds potential for positive and circular economic and landscape processes to emerge in these communities. He hopes to see how biochar can help address some of the toughest issues in South Park, such as reducing exposure to toxins in the soil, enhancing food growing capacity, and cleaning up stormwater running into the Duwamish River.
As an emerging landscape architect, Justin hopes to continue to be able to investigate how biochar can transform degraded soil into a foundation for thriving communities of soil biota, plants and people. After graduation, he plans on journeying back out to the mountains to reconnect with the outdoors and traveling before he starts working. He hopes to give “attention and love to the soil and plant communities” by doing work that unites the needs of people and the functioning of ecosystems as a designer at a landscape design firm in Seattle.