Joe Campbell - When Life Gives You Soil, Make Carbon Credits

[00:00:00] Adam: Hello. Welcome to another episode of Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

[00:00:21] Adam: And I am so glad to be here alongside Dominique, the sustainability expert.We bring you guests who saw the potential for impact of their job or community and did something about it.

[00:00:30] Dominique: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant some new ideas.

[00:00:39] Adam: Today Dominique and I are joined by Joe Campbell, a senior lecturer at Ohio State School of Environmental and Natural Resources, and also the director for the Environmental Professionals Network.

Last episode we really dove into his journey into sustainability, becoming a professor and understanding some of these great things that he's learned from academia and how Joe is providing opportunity for students to grow in their own capabilities when addressing these. So very excited to dive more into this. Joe. Welcome back on the podcast.

[00:01:07] Joe: Thank you so much. It's great to be with you both.

[00:01:09] Dominique: I'm really excited to talk today about community development and the work that you've been doing, but I think we're gonna get into a little bit of the connections you have internationally. 

Can you just share how your network grew to be so broad?

[00:01:22] Joe: Yeah, I can tell you exactly when it started. In the year 2010, I was pursuing my PhD at Ohio State in Rural Sociology. My professor, my advisor was Dr. Linda Labeo, and I was in Nolton Hall, which is where the city and regional planning section of the College of Engineering is based. And I saw an advertisement for an event well it was about a study abroad program to Ghana in West Africa and they were calling on people from different backgrounds, different areas of study. It really stuck out to me and I sat down with the section head of the City and Regional Planning Department at that time and they said, "Have you thought about this Ghana program?" And I thought, " Well, that could be really cool. It sounds great. I just don't know if that's for me." and I talked to my advisor and they said, "Well, your travel scholarship will apply to either one and would cover you for each one." I thought, "Well, let's go with Ghana," and that was 2010 or maybe 2011, and that just ignited an entire spiral of great opportunities and new relationships. 

And during that program, I became friends with a lot of new people, including some Ghanaian American graduate students. And one of my colleagues in particular, had an entire expanded network of other grad students that were trying to do kinda like professional technical consulting while getting our graduate degrees.

And that led to us, after that year, kind of creating our own company and LLC to do. We were called Development Consulting International. We really set our sights pretty high with a big name like that and that kind of started a journey that was over 12, 13 years ago. And we worked with people from many different parts of the world and we were doing some mapping and use of GIS technology, geographic information systems to try to coordinate different community activities.

And that was just a great experience and it really just opened my mind to different opportunities and pathways that could be out there. I mean, in so many ways, like I think other listeners might resonate with this, that so many of the chances we get internationally are tied back to some affiliation or network that we're in here in the us. Being a grad student at Ohio State, I can't think of a single entity on the planet that has as many international interrelationships than Ohio State does. So one benefit was just drawing upon the resource base that OSU can kind of bring to someone, and then just trying to make the most of it.

And we formed our own consulting company and then a few years later I was asked to actually teach that course, which was a great privilege, that was probably 2014 or so, and just more opportunities kind of brought themselves along and I made a lot of friends there and kind of continued to go back and forth between Ghana and the US working on different community projects and supporting different environmental professionals.

[00:03:56] Adam: So tell us a little bit about what does community development actually look like in practice? 

[00:04:00] Joe: So community development is often about process. What that means is you can be developing a community, meaning like the three of us right now are developing a community through our conversations, through us as people are creating some common understanding and through our dialogue and from listening to one another and being in a shared space like we are creating community.

We're developing community in a way but in practice, I think what I like to do is kind of draw a boundary, even though it might be artificial around, well, what is the community we're talking about? What's the place? we've given it a zip code or city limits.

Okay, now what type of participation is happening among residents or people who might work here and maybe even live somewhere else, but what is the interaction, the social interaction in this place? And then what we'll probably do is start to identify material things like, "Okay, there's a building, there's buildings here, there's office spaces, there's residential, apartment, housing, et cetera. There's post offices, there's lots of different features around where we're recording this conversation." 

And those start also to become part of our community. And then we can say, well, as residents, people interacting here, what do we want our material surroundings to look like? Also really, really, really importantly, what do we want our social interactions to be like culturally, how do we want our conversations to occur? What do we want the air in which we breathe, both literally and figuratively? How do we want that air to be breathed? So it's both a material thing and a sort of a social cultural thing.

[00:05:30] Dominique: When a community brings you in for a project, trying to use a small example, what is the goal usually? Are they trying to solve a problem? Are they trying to grow? Can you share like what the usual connection point between project starting and that community usually is?

[00:05:49] Joe: Yeah. There's a term that is sometimes used called 'community readiness'. There are situations where you might have residents of a place who we could even maybe call them leaders like they are out in front on particular issues, or they're chairing or leading certain organizations. And because of that duty and that obligation, they're recognizing patterns in front of them or members of their community are recognizing patterns and those communities are, if they have some shared sense of where they want to get to, I've worked on projects related to water, to agriculture, to wind energy, and many of these are kind of difficult to work on because you might have a couple organizations or individuals that are out front saying, this is what we want, but if it's a 20,000 resident community, you're not necessarily hearing from all 20,000. You're probably never gonna actually hear from all 20,000. 

I want to say it's an art, not a science, but I also know that there's a science to this and there are different ways you can get at teasing out first off, those people who are out in front, how much are they in agreement?

 If there's 10 people who we know are invested into some community development project because they want an outcome, they want a material change in the community. Maybe it's related to an environmental issue, let's call it water access. We might have those 10 individuals with an outside facilitator to try to maybe limit a more neutral party to come in and work with those 10 individuals and just kind of put down on paper or onto a visioning board, like, well, "What do we really want this to look like and what will impact if this comes to fruition, if this actually happens?" 

I worked on a project once where we took a rock and we threw it into a bucket, and the rock was the implementation of the community project. It was an engineering thing, but we knew that there would be a ripple impact. So we used a metaphor of a rock dropping into water to symbolize if the rock is us having this physical change to the community, infrastructural change, and maybe some financial change and some political change in order for that infrastructure to come, how does that reverberate throughout the community, who's gonna have access to it, who will no longer have access to something? What are the inherent inequalities which exist in pretty much every community, there's gonna be, it ranges tremendously across the planet, but there will be inherently some difference in terms of certain families or certain neighborhoods, or certain members of families who are gonna have disproportionate benefits to that metaphorical rock dropping in pro the infrastructure development, the material thing, some will benefit more than others. 

There will be, I don't like the term winners and losers, I don't like how that classifies things, but there will be some who are more likely to gain more than others. And in projects that are constructed in a way that I usually try to call out or disassociate myself with over time, if it becomes evident, are actually intentionally designed for some to have less access and others to have more privileged access. 

When you start to see that in a non-public interest manner be kind of written, probably not literally written, but informally written into the, decisions that are being made, then I think one has an obligation as a professional to call that to attention to a body that can broker or mediate conflict.

And if that isn't being heard or if that's not seen to be evident and the behavior continues, then unless there's a media interest in documenting or some other entity that can intervene, you do your best to inform the others and then exit. Because I just have seen this happen so many times that there are over some years or even some months, it's like the iceberg analogy is used in a lot of situations for a lot of things. And sometimes community development can be like the iceberg in the ocean where there's a tip and then there's a base and 95% of that iceberg is underwater and you can't see it. And there are things that are realities social or political or cultural realities in that community. They're just not obvious. And so as a social scientist and as a community development worker, you wanna try to tease out as much as you can uncover the iceberg. Because if there's deep, fundamental, entrenched conflict like inherent disagreement, well, that's gonna manifest itself eventually. 

[00:09:51] Dominique: very great to have just a picture of what that looks like and the understanding that yeah, it is messy and that people do have agendas, and bringing that to light is part of that challenge.

[00:10:00] Joe: Absolutely. And you really can't teach that, you can talk about it and you can have students or other people read case studies or watch videos or immerse themselves in other people's experiences. But you just kind of have to live it and, and do it. I think the educational component is helpful for people kind of after the fact often.

I was gonna say, let's get tangible for a second and can you share an outcome you're most proud of?

One thing, and maybe you all can relate to this, like you have this format of conversation and this podcast that there are so many things that are happening that the audience doesn't know. Like you have multiple microphones and you have recording equipment, and there's a whole technical side that maybe the listener is they're hearing words right now, but they don't know the infrastructure behind it. 

And it took me, it's still taking me 8 years now, I'm almost into 8 years of supporting the Environmental Professionals Network at Ohio State. And I'm still trying to tease out like all of the different moving parts. So we had a system that had worked from about 2012 until february of 2020 where this is how stuff got done. And one of our main points of difference, like one of the reasons we even existed was to have in-person conversation over a shared meal with people across the age continuum, different health dispositions in different ways.

I mean, We were trying to bring different stakeholders from different parts of Ohio around a shared table and meal, and then COVID. And so I remember I was getting emails and messages saying like, "Well, are you gonna shut the EPN down?" 'cause like, what's the point? And I think if I go back to March of 2020, there was just so much uncertainty in people's lives that you really wanted people to just, in many ways, like follow the, the health precautions that we knew were critical and do what they needed to do to maintain their families or maintain their relationships or their health. We already had like an entire like five programs lined up, so that was March of 2020. We were pretty much booked with venues and topics and speakers and contracts at places all the way I think through July, something like that, of that year. And our team,we had to make the decision like, "okay, do we just cancel all of that and just focus on our lives? Or do we maintain the infrastructure but do it very differently?" 

And we made the decision then to just try to actually do everything and do it virtually. For me, it mattered a lot actually. I don't think for other folks it really made much of a difference. But for us, it actually made a big difference. And then to continue that for another year and a half knowing that like one month we might be actually ready to do in person. 

[00:12:31] Adam: Before we get too much into the detail, how would you describe the work that the Environmental Professional Network does and what's the mission?

[00:12:37] Joe: The mission is to connect, inspire, and grow the thousands of environmental professionals, and I call natural resource enthusiasts across Ohio and beyond, to be more successful, more inspired in their careers, and also as a forum to identify like-minded people and maybe non like-minded people in organizations who they could approach or tackle some of our major environmental challenges or opportunities. So we exist as an online and in-person forum.

[00:13:10] Adam: Got it. And what are some of the achievements that you've had from this group towards sustainability?

[00:13:14] Joe: We have hosted over 8,000 different people like identifiably, different people, and probably more than that 'cause we've had some larger events where we just didn't totally capture everyone. But yeah, it's about 8,000 different individuals about 12 years or so. And I think really critically with that is we've maintained consistency and I think that's one of the hardest things in this domain of social capital. It's consistency and there are months where it's easier to make things happen and months, other months that are more challenging. Maintaining the consistency without ever dropping a single event. Since 2012, given what happened in 2020. 

[00:13:52] Dominique: It says a lot that a, a community group that brings people together didn't have a hiccup through a period of time when we could not get together.

[00:14:01] Adam: How many members do you have?

[00:14:02] Joe: We generally operate around 2000 and something because there's always some turnover and that's what's really kind of fun to see as one of the people behind the scenes with our membership directory is like we never really go go below 2000 and we've never really jumped above 3000.

It's kind of been at this interesting level of about 2000 or so as people join other people move into different careers or just are no longer interested or whatever. So we kind of maintain this. For at least to the last maybe eight or nine years, somewhere around that.

[00:14:29] Adam: So if somebody's listening and they're not part of this network, this is a place that they can go and really connect with other people who are interested in this topic, but hear different points of view and be part of that discussion.

[00:14:39] Joe: Absolutely. And we just hired a very special position in person. Harrison Freed just defended his PhD at Ohio State, and he looked at the value of networks in solving environmental challenges in Ohio. 

and also he created this tool as a graduate student with others. Kimberly Ordonez, Rohit Basu, Matt Hamilton, Ramiro Barardo. They were a team of scientists and scholars. Rohit was in high school at the time, by the way. I wanna make a plug for He's now at Yale, but he was at Grove City High School when he developed this with Harrison and Kimberly and othersBasically, it's a visualization of how different organizations work together on topics like water quality, air quality, forestry, how different stakeholders around Central Ohio and broadly in Ohio are tackling different solutions or creating collaborations and it's visual.

So you can log into the system and see like, how does the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife partner with Ohio State School of Environment Natural Resources to help improve biodiversity in Northwest Ohio. You know, you can see all that. It becomes real visual for the visual learners of us. I think it can help people better understand who's working on what and where they might even be able to play a role, both their organization or themselves as individuals so we're really blessed, 

[00:15:53] Adam: That's cool. Well, and I think that's also very relevant to people who are listening of like, a question that comes up often is like, "How do I plug into finding the right place for myself?" or like, "How does this world work?" So I can know here's what I would like to join in. So that sounds like a way that they could navigate that and actually find out where they belong.

[00:16:10] Joe: Absolutely.

[00:16:11] Dominique: When you think about the change that you want to create and looking ahead, what is that for you?

[00:16:17] Joe: One of the best opportunities I have for the last 10 years has to be in a building, a shared space with some of the top scientists focused on the environment or groups that are trying to improve the environment. Like in Ohio and even in the world, like Ohio State is a top tier research institution, and so when I'm like walking down the hallway, I walk past all these research posters and there's statistical data, there's interpretation, there's charts, and I read that and some of it will make sense depending on the field and how it's communicated.

But if I like take a step back, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, these scientists spent hours and hours and hours doing really hard field work." In some cases were collecting data in other places and they synthesized it. They took years to go through the review process, and then they shared this with the public like.

We all have access to this and I think a big moment hit me, Dominique, to your question. What I find, what's so funny with my family and friends, I love them all. They'll see like, there's like geese, like all around their apartment or something. Like, "Joe, why are the geese like lining up around my apartment?" Or one of my favorites is like, I have,

[00:17:19] Dominique: Any natural thing? I think you have the answers.

[00:17:21] Joe: Any natural thing. It's like, "Oh, Joe, why? Why is this this, you know, like this, my tree died. Why did that happen?" I don't know. There's lots of things that happen, right? And so I start getting these, the equivalent of that is like, "Hey, have you seen this movie? Kiss the Ground?" It was a Netflix documentary that was released probably late 2019, early 2020. It was kind of diffusing out on Netflix in 2020. And so I watched, so people are telling me like, "Joe, is this what you do? Or you might be interested in this". So I watched the documentary and it's really good if you haven't seen it, Kiss the Ground, I think it was released, say 2020. It has some famous people are affiliated with it. I think it did very well on Netflix.

What I noticed in that is the storytellers, the makers of the documentary, did a really good job of, I would say, making charismatic the role that agriculture has in addressing climate change. And what they did is they brought real like life and story to a lot of these research posters that I would see up and down the hallways of where I work most days. And it inspired me to action and I would say. It wasn't like I had to change what it was I was doing in my 9-5 job, so to speak, or to give up on teaching or something like that. 

It actually reinforced what I was doing because I could see how, again, these friends and family who aren't thinking necessarily about how raising crops or cattle or something can help actually improve our ecosystems. It was more like, oh, they, they saw something in this or else they wouldn't have taken the time to like reach out. So if they can see something in this, and I have access to all this science and all these people who take the time and the really important precision to make accurate observation, how can I maybe align these things together 

[00:19:03] Dominique: It sounds like access is that key word. Making accessible the knowledge that's out there and what people are really are studying and working on and making it accessible to everybody.

[00:19:12] Joe: Exactly right and that caused me to get involved with some self-reflection 

What are you passionate about and what can you affect? And I was like, "Okay, I live in Columbus and I can get to pretty much any farm in Ohio in about two hours drive. All like the top, many of the smartest minds working on soil related issues, including soil carbon, are the floor right above me. I see them every day at and I used to work for a renewable energy credit company when I was an undergraduate student intern in Vermont. 

I could kind of try to line up some of these pieces. 

But what I was observing was how model driven, without diving too much into like carbon credits and soil organic carbon measurement and crediting, it was coming from an academic background. It was very model driven, meaning I take some variables that are important, I input them into a, a system. If a farm is growing corn for the last two seasons and they had soybeans three years ago, and they use these fertilizer applications and they're in this climate. Outputs basically and some other really important variables too. How much carbon is there? And I was like, well, where's the soil sample in that?

And I started to dive more deeply into this business. What I found out, like naively, no one in the industry was really doing this until about 2020. my understanding is that in the United States, in North America, the first carbon credits for soil carbon were issued in 2021.

[00:20:31] Adam: So that's about the same time that I was starting to do the research and. I was like, "Wow, this is really important. This is one.two. five?

[00:20:39] Joe: Yeah. 

one.two.five Benefit Corporation.

[00:20:41] Adam: Give an overview of one.two.five like what the business is and what you're accomplishing? 

[00:20:45] Joe: We're registered as a benefit corporation, which is a organizational structure that in Ohio was only started about three or four years ago. So it's, it's kind of that three-part approach. So we want to improve the environment. We wanna address climate change through nature-based solutions. And three, we want to help land managers and landowners essentially realize more financial value for what they're doing for the environment.

 I wanna say that in January of 2021, people would use the term Wild West around carbon credits related to soil in, in agricultural spaces. So if you wanted to basically sell a carbon credit and you were a farmer, you had to fit a certain set of criteria. And there were a lot of farms that didn't fit that criteria, so they weren't eligible essentially, to sell their carbon onto the market. 

There were also buyers who were been buying carbon credits, like large corporations, for example, that might be sourcing their carbon credits from forestry projects in the tropics, renewable energy. They had not yet explored soil organic carbon credits from say row crop agriculture in Ohio or livestock grazing in Colorado. That was all just emerging at that time. 

 So Leo Dice is now a professor at Colorado State, he's been a visiting assistant professor at Ohio State. And he's originally from Brazil. His bachelor's, master's, and PhD are all out of the University of Parana, in Brazil. He's like, "I wanna talk to you more about this. I think I have a way to add a little more value to what you think might be a problem." So what Leo came up with was a way of measuring soil, not only for how much carbon is there, which is what others were doing, but what the potential to store carbon is.

Now, folks in academic circles have been doing that for a long time, and including at Ohio State and beyond. But we were trying to kind of merge the two and to specialize in certain geographic areas. We call 'em like biophysical regions. So different parts of Ohio are gonna store carbon differently in the ground, in the soil.

basically regional expectations for soil carbon storage.So in 2022, we applied for a regional conservation partnership program project. It's not a grant, it's a series of, of funds that are available if we follow certain procedures. And we drew a boundary of about 6 counties alongside 10 or 12 different organizations in southwest Ohio.

From urban farms to larger scale and more rural, less populated areas. Lots of livestock, lots of non livestock row crops. So there's a tremendous diversity of farms and also some really committed organizations to regenerative agriculture. So we partner together, there's now 13 partners on this project. We are doing something that the federal government has never paid for before, which is the way in which we are measuring soil, carbon and paying. We can't technically use the word paying. We are reimbursing farmers for how well they are storing carbon on their ground. And it allows for any licensed farm operation to participate up to 20 farms. And we just started this 

[00:23:40] Adam: year.

Neat. So you are encouraging farmers to use practices that capture carbon better?

[00:23:46] Joe: Yes. The farmer can actually pursue their management plan as they want, but we're gonna be tracking the presence and storage of soil carbon. So if they tick upwards, then they'll actually get reimbursed more money. If they tick downwards, then they'll get reimbursed less money. 

[00:24:03] Adam: So you're actually measuring the carbon in the soil and you're saying, " Yes, it's going up or going down. And that's how you're getting credit. 

[00:24:08] Joe: Correct. 

[00:24:08] Dominique: You're monetizing healthy soil, which is very interesting. 

[00:24:11] Adam: That's really cool.

[00:24:12] Dominique: how can our listeners support that work that you're 

[00:24:14] Joe: doing?

They can visit 125benefit.com. That's the number one, the number two, and the number five benefit.com, to learn more, you can email me at joe@125benefit.com and I'd be happy to set up time to talk and share more resources.

[00:24:31] Dominique: This is awesome. We spanned everything from Community Development to the EPN and the way you've brought together a community of 2000 people and 8,000 unique people. How you braved Covid as a community group and how you've also taken this community you're a part of, and the scientists that share space with you to solve a problem that's affecting our community. So I just love that community development work that really comes definitely through everything that you do. 

[00:24:57] Adam: Cool. 

[00:24:57] Dominique: Thanks, Joe.

[00:24:58] Adam: As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change.

[00:25:09] Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you got questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website, the green champions.com. Our music is by Zane Dweik. Thanks for listening to another episode of Green Champions. We'll meet another green champion in our next episode. 

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