Mark Easter - Food, Soil, and Our Planet's Future

Mountain & Prairie with Ed Roberson

Mark Easter is a Colorado-based ecologist and author whose new book is titled "The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos." If you care about food and you care about Planet Earth, "The Blue Plate" is a must-read. It explores the production, consumption, and disposal of many of our favorite foods– seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, ice cream, and more– and offers a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of these foods' impacts on the environment. This is not a gloom-and-doom climate change book, nor does it have the condescending tone that sometimes accompanies many climate-related readings. While Mark is crystal clear about the massive threats facing our planet, this is a book built on the ideals of optimism, ingenuity, and taking action. I loved it.

Mark lives and works in Fort Collins and has conducted research in academia and private industry since 1988. He has enjoyed a very successful and impactful career at Colorado State University, and he has authored and co-authored more than 50 scientific papers and reports related to carbon cycling and the carbon footprint of agriculture, forestry, and other land uses. But Mark also has a real gift for storytelling and for breaking down enormously complex topics into understandable and enjoyable writing. His writing is personal, educational, and fun to read, and I credit Mark and "The Blue Plate" with helping me to finally fully understand issues around greenhouse gas emissions and carbon sequestration.

Mark and I met up a few weeks ago at CSU and had a fun and nuanced conversation about food, agriculture, and the climate. We started by discussing why he refers to himself as a “greenhouse gas accountant,” and he offers an excellent explanation of soil's all-important role in balancing the release and capture of carbon on Planet Earth. We talk about how grasslands, jungles, and mangroves sequester carbon, and how and why the destruction of any of these ecosystems negatively affects the planet. We discuss Mark’s ten-year process of writing this book and how Patagonia Books helped him bring his vision to life. We discuss how methane is produced by everything from reservoirs to ruminants, and why that particular greenhouse gas is more harmful than the others. We discuss regenerative agriculture, meat production, composting, and personal diet choices, and Mark offers a long list of excellent book recommendations.

We barely scratched the surface of all of the fascinating topics in "The Blue Plate," so if you enjoy this conversation, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy of the book and dig in. I know you’ll enjoy it and learn a lot.

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• Mark Easter
• The Blue Plate: A Food Lover's Guide to Climate Chaos
• Patagonia Books
• Full episode notes and links: https://mountainandprairie.com/mark-easter/

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TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• 3:00 - Intro and how Mark describes his work
• 7:15 - Parallels between carbon accounting and business accounting
• 13:45 - An overview of soil and carbon
• 21:30 - Carbon in grasslands vs jungles vs mangroves
• 25:00 - How and why Mark decided to write this book
• 33:00 - The ten-year process of writing the book
• 37:00 - Greenhouse gases explained
• 40:00 - Methane feedback loop explained
• 43:30 - A fascinating story about methane in Lake Powell
• 46:15 - Reservoirs and evaporation
• 47:00 - The most difficult chapter to write: Ruminants and meat
• 55:30 - The increasing global demand for meat
• 58:00 - Taking action and personal responsibility
• 1:01:30 - Personal responsibility versus regulation
• 1:04:00 - A helpful way to understand carbon quantities
• 1:06:00 - Carbon consequences of transforming forests to grasslands
• 1:09:00 - All about composting
• 1:13:00 - Business opportunities in regenerative agriculture
• 1:16:30 - Favorite books
• 1:22:15 - Parting words

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