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Lucas Romero and his team had become adept at making sense of anomalies that the SoilCoin algorithm sometimes spit out. This time, however, the incongruities were different from what they were used to and none of them could come up with an explanation that they believed might actually be right. What was clear was that the remote sensing data for this secluded, hundred-square-kilometer piece of land looked too good to be true. And if it looked too good to be true, it probably was. And that meant that once again someone was trying to game the SoilCoin system. For Lucas, there was no mystery in the motivations behind what was happening: people did what served their interest. The puzzle rather was how to point their greed in the right direction. With the Pre-CoP Science Meeting and the Panel of Arbitration only four weeks away, Lucas made a choice: he booked a flight to Canada, and made his way to northern Alberta and the territory of this remote First Nation, as some Canadian Indigenous groups called themselves. Now the First Nation’s young manager, Daniel Erasmus, was taking Lucas to see with his own two eyes what was causing the anomalies. As they drew closer to one of the hotspots Lucas had identified, he let the view from the passenger seat of the pickup truck—forest on the right side of the gravel road, pastureland on the left—calm his thoughts.
His phone vibrated, pulling him out of his reverie: a message from Mahalia de Guzman, the director of the UNCCD’s SoilCoin program. He swore in Spanish under his breath, then opened the message. “WTF are you doing in Canada!!!” she wrote. “Denier extremists killed two scientists from their envt ministry’s soil finance program last year. Imagine what they’ll do if they learn the UN is there.”
He typed a brief reply: “I’m trying to save SoilCoin.”
Lucas set his phone on the stack of thin cardboard sheets that occupied the middle of the truck’s bench seat and looked out again at the beauty of the landscape. He yearned to forget about the currency trading, global finance, and natural capital futures for a month and just go canoeing or hiking. Both his native Spain and his adopted home of Kenya had saved some beautiful slices of nature, but neither country had anything that could qualify as wilderness by these North American standards. Even here, though, the so-called “wilderness” had people, some working in it, some living in it, some exploiting it, some trying to take care of it. He also knew that the landscape here was changing. The prairie was moving northward: with the warming of the climate, boreal forest was giving way to mixed wood forest, mixed wood forest to parkland, and parkland to grassland. In most places, though, the old ecosystems were dying faster than the new ones could establish themselves, and where new grassland was spreading into the southern limit of the forest, and new forest was spreading into the southern limit of the tundra, they were impoverished versions of their parent ecosystems. Agriculture too, having drawn down its soils to the point of bankruptcy, was also sliding northward.
His phone vibrated again—his boss had more to say. “The Canadian AMBASSADOR and a lawyer from RFD and are demanding answers from the Executive Director. They think you’re overstepping our mandate. You’re in over your head!!!”
RFD Eco-Investments, a Montreal-based natural capital speculator, had leased a large tract of land in this area from Daniel’s community and the Alberta provincial government in an arrangement that Lucas did not really understand. What he did understand was that large expanses of land in rural and remote parts of Canada were now being converted from farming or forestry to “natural capital speculation”—investors leasing or buying land to earn money from carbon credits, watershed or habitat concessions payments and, increasingly, SoilCoin credits. As far as he was concerned, if arrangements like this led to soils actually being nursed back to health, they should be encouraged. But only if the renewal of soils was real. That was what he needed to confirm. For three weeks, however, ever since the anomaly detection routines had flagged this remote section of Alberta, people at RFD had been ignoring his emails and dodging his phone calls.
Daniel took one hand off the steering wheel and pointed ahead. “You’re gonna lose reception when we get over the next hill. Want me to stop for a bit so you can finish your messages?”
Lucas took another look at the director’s message. “No, let’s keep going. I’ll deal with this later.” He slipped the phone back into his pocket.
As they crested the hill, Daniel gestured at the trees on his right. “This bit of forest here helped keep my family alive during the famine. I shot my first elk in there. I was twelve years old. Between the hunting, and the traditional harvesting, and our Nation’s bison herd—together, those things helped us get through it. We still had six people die, but it would’ve been more people if not for us turning to our traditional foods.”
That was a time Lucas avoided thinking about. He had been in his early twenties when the soil blight, and then food shortages, and then riots hit Spain. Since then, year after year, the soil blight continued to erupt around the world, and several countries seemed to be permanently on the cusp of famine.
“Dr. Romero, would you say that you guys—the UN, I mean—would you say that you’ve started to turn things around for erosion and for the soil blight?”
Lucas sighed. “Not yet.” It seemed Daniel had been hoping for a different answer because for the next few minutes he was quiet.
Eventually, Lucas’s eyes were drawn to the stack of letter-sized cardstock on the seat between them. He picked up one of the sheets and looked it. It was stamped with perforations that created six circular slugs that looked ready to be stamped out of the card. “What is this? There were stacks and stacks of these in the garage where the truck was parked.”
“Blanks for drink cup lids.”
“Drink cup . . . Like coffee cup lids?”
“Exactly. We inherited them from the Canwest paper mill about forty klicks from here. We won a court case against them for contaminating the watershed. But as we were winning the court case, this big chain of coffee shops went bankrupt, and they owed Canwest millions. Canwest decided that their best option was to declare bankruptcy too.”
“So instead of getting money from your court settlement, you got thousands of half-finished drink lids?”
“Not thousands. Hundreds of thousands. But not only drink lids—there were eight giant rolls of stock ready to be chopped into biodegradable, cellulose-based glitter.”
“Glitter like for children’s art projects?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Lucas stared at him, not sure if the young man was pulling his leg. “It wasn’t all bad,” Daniel continued, as he steered to avoid a pothole. “We inherited the mill’s machinery too. We blocked the road to the mill and prevented them from shipping it out until a court confirmed that now it belonged to us. Anyway, take these drink lids for instance.” He tapped the stack of cards. “Because of these, I studied materials science at university. The writing was on the wall for plastic drink lids and plastic everything else, and there’s so much you can do with cellulose fiber. Like these: before a press stamps these blanks into the shape of a lid, they can be overlain with a nanocrystal cellulose film, and instead of using pigments and dyes for color you can manipulate the nanostructure of the fibers.”
“To create structural coloration.”
“Exactly! You know about this stuff?”
“Not about manufacturing it. But some satellite remote sensing methods look for structural coloration. I know someone who used it to detect the New Zealand shield bug infestation last year.”
“They could see insects from a satellite?”
“He wasn’t seeing individual insects. But the infestation was so bad that the cumulative iridescence of the insects’ wings showed up in the data.”
“Very slick!”
For a few minutes more, Daniel peppered Lucas with questions—several of them quite insightful—about the SoilCoin system and the kinds of remote sensing data it relied on. Then he eased off the accelerator and turned onto what was little more than a trail. He drove more slowly now, another two hundred meters, then came to a stop. Lucas checked his GPS unit. Daniel had brought him to the middle of one of the areas with unbelievable readings.
Stepping down from the truck, Lucas immediately saw something out of place. At the beginning of the drive, in the spots where the land wasn’t dominated by trees, there had been a diverse mix of grasses, forbs, and bushes, but here the ground was blanketed with a single type of plant. They were mostly between thirty and forty centimeters tall, a few of them just starting to flower.
“What’s this?”
“That’s the cover crop RFD planted. It’s based on prairie coneflower.”
“GMO?”
“Yeah.”
Lucas crouched down and took out his phone to capture an image with his flora identification app, but then remembered that his phone had no network service. He captured the image anyway to upload it for analysis later. Then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a device that looked vaguely like a camera. He held it close to one of the leaves then tapped a button.
“The cover crop is supposed to improve soil moisture,” Daniel explained, as Lucas read the display on the back of the sensor.
Lucas took a deep breath and slowly let it out, his suspicions confirmed. “What it actually improves is the appearance of improved soil moisture. It changes the reflectance of short wavelength infrared in a way that appears to our algorithms as improvements in soil moisture. And you see the way the leaves spread out? This isn’t like clover or grass. With this, each individual plant hides a lot of bare soil without actually reducing bare soil, and it does it in a way that looks to the satellites as if soil moisture has gone up. We’ve been hearing about the idea, but this is the first time I’ve actually known it to be used.”
“You’re saying RFD engineered this plant specifically to hack the SoilCoin algorithm?”
“We’ll have to run some tests,” Lucas replied, his eyes still on the display of the infrared sensor. “But yes, that’s my guess.”
“Very slick! Very slick!”
Lucas looked up to see Daniel nodding and smiling. He admires how RFD is gaming the system! But then he admitted to himself that he admired it too—just a little. It was pure entrepreneurial ingenuity. The problem, however, was that planting this engineered crop across the landscape was not doing anything to actually address the soil crisis; it was just sucking credits out of the SoilCoin system and devaluing it a little more. Interventions like this would make the system just a little less trustworthy, would add a few more straws to the camel’s back.
Then, in an instant, Daniel’s expression flipped and he looked worried. “If your hunch is right, will RFD need to repay the SoilCoin credits it earned? They’ve been doing this for five years. Will they get fined or something?”
“That depends on the Canadian rules. SoilCoin doesn’t pay RFD directly; it issues credits to national governments. But Canada might need to repay some credits, and certainly they’d want to pass that loss on to RFD. That’s not really my area; my job is only about making sure the algorithms behind the SoilCoin system are scientifically solid.”
“If you decide this is a loophole and you close it, RFD will probably lose interest in leasing land from us.”
Lucas had not thought about this—he was fixated on the satellite data and the algorithm. “SoilCoin needs to incentivize actual improvements in soil health, not this.”
“Sounds like the latest in a long line of what gets done to us. Canada comes along and says, ‘You can’t live there on the prairie anymore; you have to go live up north in the forest instead.’ Then we get here and they say, ‘Actually, we’re giving most of the forest land to logging and paper companies.’ Then the paper company pollutes the water and when they get caught, instead of compensating us, its owners say, ‘Sorry. Bankrupt. Canwest doesn’t exist anymore.’”
“That’s really too—”
“Meanwhile, the climate crisis and the soil crisis are putting the ecosystems here through a meat grinder. And you guys say, ‘We’re gonna fix it by changing how money works.’ So we try to play along, and we start earning money with carbon credits and SoilCoin, but now you’re about to say, ‘No. We’re cutting off your SoilCoin.’”
Lucas heard the frustration in the Daniel’s voice and began to imagine how he must be seeing it: Here I am, a stranger from the UN parachuting into their community to gather evidence that will likely be used to close off a major flow of funds for them. A small, poor, and remote community. To them, RFD’s lease is valuable, and I’m about to take it away.
Seeing the anger in Daniel’s eyes, Lucas also remembered his phone and the fact that he had no reception here. He had traveled with this stranger from the edge of nowhere off into the depths of nowhere, and now was telling him that he might be about to further impoverish him and his people. He considered lying, considered telling Daniel that he had nothing to worry about, but the truth was that this was a loophole in the SoilCoin system that he needed to close. But before Lucas had a chance to say anything, Daniel whirled around. Lucas followed his gaze and saw that someone was approaching on an ATV. With its electric engine, Lucas had not heard it at all; it had just appeared out of the forest like wolf.
Then, as it got closer, Daniel smiled. Its driver, a man who looked to be in his early fifties, stopped beside the truck and stepped off.
“Dr. Romero, this is Reggie Merrier, our chief.”
Lucas offered a hand.
“Sorry I missed you this morning,” the man said. “But I see Danny’s taking care of you. As long as he doesn’t get the two of you lost in the woods.” He laughed, which started to put Lucas at ease. Then Daniel summarized for the chief what Lucas had told him about the RFD’s cover crop and how it fooled the SoilCoin algorithm. The chief crouched down to take a closer look at one of the coneflower plants. “You know, Dr. Romero, your presence here has caused quite a stir. Since last night, RFD and the provincial Ministry of Energy, Natural Resources and Ecosystem Services have both contacted me at least three times. And this morning, even someone from the federal government. Normally, I can’t get them to make time for even a thirty-minute Zoom, but now they’re calling me. And Amelia Gagnon, RFD’s ecosystem investments director—she’s flying here from Montreal this evening.”
“What do they all want?”
“Everyone’s beating around the bush, but I think they’re all trying to suggest that I should tell you you’re not welcome.”
“Oh.” Lucas looked at the chief, then at Daniel, then down at his feet. Mahalia was right—he was in over his head. For a few seconds the only sound was the trill call of a red-winged blackbird.
Eventually, Daniel broke the silence. “We tried to be so careful in leasing part of our land to this company. We had an ecologist study what they were going to do. Our elders discussed it. The whole community debated it. The money is helping us, just like a temporary side-hustle, you know. It’s just a lease—the land is still ours. In the short-term we’re just trying to get by, but in the long-term, this land is our wealth. Dr. Romero, can you tell us, is RFD harming our land?”
“I can’t tell you anything definitive on that—I’m just trying to ground-truth the satellite data. And even for that, it will take us a while to analyze it properly.”
“But if you had to make an educated guess . . .”
Lucas now felt guilty for imagining, even for a moment, that Daniel might have been capable of doing something violent. He’s actually more concerned about protecting his community’s land than he is about the money they’re getting. He told him the truth. “My guess is that it’s not doing any harm. It’s not particularly helping the soil or the ecosystem, but it’s probably not doing any harm either.”
Daniel visibly relaxed at hearing that, and Reggie nodded.
“I suppose you’ll want to take some samples of the plant,” Reggie said, “and some soil samples, too.”
“That would be ideal. I want to measure how much moisture is actually in the leaves and in the soil. A couple of live specimens of the plant would be best.”
“Sorry. I can’t let you do that.” Then before Lucas had a chance to say anything, Reggie added, “Our lease contract with RFD has all kinds of clauses about not harvesting or letting others harvest, about intellectual property and all that. So, I can’t let you . . . take any samples.” Reggie paused as if waiting to be sure that Lucas was properly listening. Then he shrugged dramatically. “But if Danny and I go over there to have a smoke and our backs are turned for a few minutes, we wouldn’t necessarily know if somebody collected what they needed and put it in the back of the truck.”
Suddenly Daniel had a huge grin. “Not to change the subject,” he said, “but I got a shovel and some empty ice cream pails in the back of the truck in case anyone needed them. Just sayin’.”
Lucas chuckled, having received the message. But his amusement did not last. He hated that yet another corporation was trying to game the SoilCoin algorithm. The soil crisis was real, and the SoilCoin system that was meant to create economic incentives to reverse the situation was itself being eroded little by little. Once Daniel and Reggie were was a suitable distance away, he collected a few small bottles of soil, and dug up two of the plants and put them into the ice cream pails, trying to think how he could get the analysis done in time for the Pre-CoP Science Meeting. The Soil Convention was in an arms race against companies like RFD Eco-Investments around the world. He was glad to have them as allies if they would actually work to restore soils—that was the entire aim of the convention and of SoilCoin credits—but for that to happen, the incentives had to be correct. Companies like RFD would not do it simply to save the planet. And for the business incentives to align with actual improvements in soil health, the algorithm had to be correct. If there was one thing that Lucas still had faith in, it was human greed; his job was to make sure that greed aligned with saving the planet instead of destroying it.
* * *
WHEN HE RETURNED TO Nairobi, it was clear from the understated, almost sad way in which Mahalia reprimanded him, that he had done serious damage to his long-term career prospects in the UN. “There are procedures for how we carry out activities within the member states,” she chided him, “and you didn’t follow them. You didn’t even tell the Canadian government you were going there. So Lucas, here’s the way this doesn’t become a diplomatic incident: our position is that RFD and Canada were simply playing by the rules as they were at the time, and in turn, they’ll choose to overlook your actions.”
Sometimes the politics and the inertia and the bureaucracy were too much to bear, and Lucas wondered, as he had multiple times before, if he would be better off in academia. He did not care about the drop in salary that leaving the UN would probably entail—what he wanted was to know that he was making a difference. But then, three weeks later, the conclusion of the Pre-CoP Science Meeting and the Panel of Arbitration gave him cause for hope. The panel accepted his team’s evidence and ruled against all seventeen appeals that different national governments had filed arguing that the algorithm had shortchanged them. Then came the CoP itself, which passed a resolution requiring the algorithm to be updated annually instead of every five years, allowing loopholes that Lucas and his team uncovered to be closed more quickly. Within eighteen months of his trip to Canada, the official SoilCoin algorithm was differentiating genuine soil moisture improvements from the false signal created by plants engineered for unnatural spectral profiles.
Still, the fact that neither RFD Eco-Investments nor the Canadian government would be penalized irked him. He had read the latest global review and he knew the incentives needed to be stronger. The actions being motivated by SoilCoin and other policies and programs were restoring soils in many places, but not nearly as quickly as soils were dying elsewhere. To make matters worse, the more the international financial institutions pumped up the value of SoilCoin, the more incentive corporations and governments had to take shortcuts. Meanwhile, in the declining breadbaskets of Punjab, Saskatchewan, Western Australia, and Ukraine, erosion continued, and in the wetter climates like the Mississippi Valley and the paddies of Kerala, the soil blight fungus continued to spread.
His response was to work harder.
The next CoP was to be held in the United States, with the Pre-CoP Science Meeting hosted by the university in Madison, Wisconsin. Lucas planned to participate virtually, but Mahalia, recently promoted to executive director of the convention secretariat, organized an event to celebrate the successes of the Soil Convention. “You need to crawl out from under your bridge and go there in person,” she said. “It all revolves around you and your team.”
“It’s too soon to celebrate,” he told her. “We haven’t solved anything yet.”
She insisted, saying that although the event would be described as a celebration of the science, in reality it was a political event meant to deepen support for the convention and for SoilCoin specifically. “If we want more countries to really get behind this, we need to look like the winning team. And you need to be there smiling graciously and speaking diplomatically.”
As much as he dreaded it, he knew that politics and ribbon-cutting and spin were all part of what was needed to make the SoilCoin system work. And so at the event, as he sat through the speeches from high level panelists, he tried not to squirm. The CEO of the World Wide Fund for Nature praised SoilCoin for helping to put an economic value on natural capital, and a Hollywood VR star—the goodwill ambassador—cooed that the global financial system was finally starting to account for environmental externalities and move in the direction of full-cost accounting.
“One tenth of one percent of full cost,” Lucas muttered.
Then came the presentation that was hardest of all to listen to. He had not realized that Amelia Gagnon, the Ecosystem Investments Director of RFD was here—he had not reviewed the agenda for the event and had not seen her sitting up near the front of the room. Two years ago when he met her in northern Alberta, she had been calm and unapologetic about their use of plants specifically engineered to fool satellite observations. And clearly the tightening of the SoilCoin algorithm had not ended RFD’s interest in ecosystem services markets.
Taking the podium, she praised the SoilCoin system, and then she complimented Lucas personally. “Two years ago when I first met Dr. Romero at one of our restoration sites in Canada, I was impressed by how important it was to him to ensure the SoilCoin system is objective, accurate, and rigorous. It seems appropriate that after this meeting I’m going to visit that same site again, where we’re still investing in soil health—the same place where I first met him. But what’s important here is that it’s the rigor of the SoilCoin system that gives us confidence to keep investing in soil restoration. The SoilCoin Secretariat and the UNCCD as a whole, every year, you improve your remote sensing methods and improve the algorithm, and that keeps us on our toes. And that’s the way it should be. But what’s really important is that your work makes soil restoration a good investment for us.”
As she returned to her seat to the sound of applause, she glanced at Lucas sitting at the back of the room.
Is she smirking? We caught them red-handed. Exposed them. If one of us should be smirking arrogantly, it should be me.
He did not enjoy it, but he did his duty and sat through all the formal presentations, and when called upon made some optimistic pronouncements. In the evening at a wine and cheese reception, he shook hands and mingled. The next morning, he was glad the fanfare had finished and that he could attend the actual scientific sessions. The first one started with an economist specializing in global datasets who outlined how every country that created its own environmental credits system based on SoilCoin assessments had seen an uptick in farmers losing land to international investors. Then an anthropologist described a community in Ethiopia whose traditional communal methods of ecosystem management began to earn SoilCoin credits for the government, some of which were passed down to the community institution. Lucas felt as if she was speaking directly and particularly to him as she described how the new influx of money led to growing mistrust by community members towards its leaders. She finished her presentation by explaining how, last month when she had returned to the community, she learned that it had split into three hostile factions and the traditional system had completely broken down.
Lucas recognized several people in the room, and he knew that many knew who he was: not quite the architect of the SoilCoin system, but certainly one of its chief engineers. In the Q&A that followed the presentations, discussion revolved around intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, whether the financial incentives were crowding out spiritual, cultural and moral impulses, and what it would take to put sustainable use of land and ecosystems on a firm footing permanently. And then the chair of the session introduced Lucas and asked him for an insider’s perspective.
“I’ve got faith in greed,” Lucas said. “Love of nature, concern for generations not yet born—it’s all wonderful, but it’s money that will decide things in the end. We need SoilCoin to work.”
“It better work,” said the session chair. “The consequences of it not working are too frightening to think about.”
That evening in his hotel room, Lucas reviewed the latest anomaly analysis: a spatial, spectral and temporal deep dive into the remote sensing data in a search for results that made no sense. One of the flagged sectors caught his eye: northwestern Alberta in Canada, north of the town of the Grand Prairie. He double-checked the location: it was the same place, the same Indigenous territory where RFD was leasing land! He cursed out loud in Spanish and then English and then Spanish again, but then he channeled his anger into determination. He had stopped them before; he would stop them again.
* * *
LUCAS BOOKED FLIGHTS from Madison, connecting through Minneapolis and Calgary, for the morning after next. In the meantime, he studied the anomaly analysis. Whatever this was, it was different than before—clearly, they were not stupid enough to keep using the same GMO cover crop. And unlike two years ago, this time the effect was small and would yield only a tiny increase in SoilCoin credits. But something definitely was strange with the sudden appearance of point-source increases in microwave reflectivity and strange spectral lines in the visible spectrum scattered across the landscape.
They’re probably still experimenting with some new trick. That means I can stop them before they even get out of the gate.
This time, he made no attempt to contact RFD or to arrange an appointment—he would just show up. He did send an email to Daniel Erasmus, though, thinking that once again he might need the First Nation’s assistance. Two days later, with coordinates of the anomalies loaded into his GPS unit, he arrived at the area in a rental car. As he entered the First Nation’s territory, he pulled over at one spot where the strange satellite readings were within a few meters of the road. Looking around, he saw nothing strange. This was a location where the forest had almost completely given way grassland. There were scattered aspen and poplar trees, various grasses and wildflowers, a few patties of bison dung, and sadly some roadside litter.
He double-checked the GPS location: he was in the right spot. He took readings with his infrared sensor, took photos of several plant species, and then picked up handfuls and soil and looked, felt, and sniffed. There was nothing that struck him as strange. He had hoped that the source of the anomalies would have made itself obvious, the way it had two years ago. Not finding any clues, he returned to his car and drove another half kilometer down the road to a spot where the anomalous readings were stronger and stretched for almost a kilometer beside the road. Again, there was nothing that looked out of place—just the same poplar trees, the same wildflowers, more bison patties, and more litter.
What a shame. So far from the cities and towns and from so-called “civilization”, but the few people who are here can’t be bothered to keep their rubbish in their car until they reach a bin.
He returned to the car again and continued driving. All along the road here, his data showed that he was driving beside an area where the anomalies were strongest, but still he saw nothing unusual. He checked that his phone had network, then called Daniel, but the call rang five times then went to voicemail. Having failed to find any smoking gun, Lucas decided he would nevertheless go and confront whomever he happened to find at the RFD office. When he arrived, he was thrilled to see that Amelia Gagnon was there—at the event, she had said she was coming here but had not said precisely when. But this was perfect—if he was going to confront one of them, he wanted it to be her. With her was RFD’s site manager, whom he had also met two years earlier. The manager led him into the trailer home that was their field office and directed Lucas to a table, all the while peering at him.
“Why didn’t you tell me in Madison you were coming here?” Amelia asked.
Lucas avoided answering immediately. He wanted to reel them in slowly, to watch their reactions as he gradually revealed that he knew they had started to cheat the system again. “I suppose you know,” he explained as he sat, “that we’re always updating our anomaly detection systems, looking for new ways people might try to fool the algorithm. Improvements in soil condition that are too good to be true. Unusually rapid transitions . . . Fraud.”
The site manager looked to Amelia for guidance but she seemed unconcerned. “Mmm-hmm.”
Lucas looked at the site manager, but he was now taking his cue from Amelia, sitting quietly, his expression blank. Lucas tried again to bait them: “Although the main algorithm is open source, our anomaly detection systems are not. Machine learning, input from experts around the world—I’m amazed at how sensitive they’ve become.”
Amelia remained quiet, waiting for Lucas to say more.
He lost patience. “Are you using any new GMOs?”
The site manager’s poker face dissolved. “You know, you’re really overstepping your mandate and—”
“It’s all right,” Amelia said. Then she looked Lucas in the eye. “Yes, we are. It’s a variety of milk vetch—Astragalus flexuosus. It’s leguminous but we’ve tweaked it to also put a bit more carbon into the soil, as well as nitrogen. We had the Ecosystem Services Branch of Environment and Climate Change Canada review it for us. They couldn’t see any way that the SoilCoin protocols could deem it illegitimate. Anyway, it isn’t much like the coneflower—that did have a unique spectral profile—but the modifications on this plant are all about increasing soil carbon. And most of the benefit will actually come after we’re gone—the First Nation isn’t renewing our lease. We’ve got less than two years left.”
That surprised Lucas, but he decided it was irrelevant. Whatever tricks they were experimenting with here they would eventually take elsewhere.
“Even with the coneflower,” the site manager added, “your own panel said we did nothing wrong.”
Amelia nodded in agreement, then changed her tone. “Dr. Romero, why are you here?”
This was not going the way Lucas imagined it would. But he decided that even though he still did not know how they were doing it, it was time to reveal that he did know they were doing something. So without yet divulging the precise details of the anomaly detection, he told them this area had been flagged again. “The anomalies are all geolocated. Let’s pick one of the coordinates I’ve found and go see what there is to see.”
“Your mandate doesn’t—”
Again Amelia interrupted the site manager, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Fine. We’re doing nothing wrong. Can you bring up a map and show us where the flagged sites are?”
Lucas unrolled his tablet, opened the map and showed them the clusters of bright purple dots. As Amelia and the site manager studied it, Lucas studied the two of them. Then the site manager stood up and walked to the wall behind him, where a large paper map was pinned. He looked at the map on the wall, then back to Lucas’s tablet, then back to the map.
“It’s not our easement,” he said.
“What?”
Amelia leaned back in her chair.
There’s that maldita smirk again! Lucas thought.
The site manager waved his hand over the map. “This whole area belongs to the First Nation, but our lease-easement is only here.” He ran his index finger across part of the top of the map and then down the left side halfway to the bottom. Then he pointed to one cluster of dots on Lucas’s map, then returned to the wall and pointed to a different part of the paper map. “That cluster of yours is here. And that other cluster in your data is off my map somewhere over here.” He pointed at a bit of blank wall a few centimeters to the right the map. “None of your ‘anomalies’”—he put an exaggerated emphasis on the word—“None of your anomalies are on land where we operate.”
Lucas’s contempt was swept away by panic as he tried to make sense of what he had just been told. The land RFD leased was only part of the First Nation’s territory. And it was not the part where the new anomalies were located. His mind cast about for something to say, for an excuse he could give, an explanation he could provide for having showed up here unannounced making accusations—something he could say that would let him save face. Then the panic melted into embarrassment. He apologized. Thankfully, neither Amelia nor the site manager insisted on an explanation or otherwise expressed the offense they certainly had a right to feel. At least not that Lucas could later remember. They both said a few things, but later as Lucas replayed the fiasco in his thoughts, he could not remember what else they had said.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered one last time as he got in his car.
So what now? Go confront Danny Erasmus and his people? Go try to summon up some more indignation as I accuse them now? I don’t even know how serious the problem is or have even a clue what the source of the strange readings might be. Mierda! I messed this up.
He tried to calm himself as he drove, and to decide on his next move. Trying again to act like a police detective interrogating a suspect was out of the question. What he was sure of was that he would need to calmly and carefully write an email to Amelia Gagnon to apologize properly. As for the unusual readings in the microwave and visible bands, he was a scientist, not a detective: he would go back to Nairobi, analyze them properly, and if necessary ask the Canadian officials to come here and do some field studies. He doubted if he should even go to the band office to meet Daniel as he had told him he would. He could just message him saying he had been called back to Nairobi. But that too did not feel right. Then he reached a T-junction and had to make a choice: left to the First Nation reserve or right and back to Grand Prairie and from there, home. He was not sure what he would do when he reached the community, but he turned left.
As he neared the main village, he remembered Reggie Merrier, the chief. Two years ago, they had stopped at his house. In Madrid or Nairobi, Lucas would never just show up at someone’s home unannounced, but he had the impression that here, dropping in on someone was very normal. He found the chief sitting in front of his house at a picnic table.
“Dr. Romero! Danny told me you were coming. Have you seen him?”
“Not yet. My—umm—my meeting at RFD went faster than I thought it would so I’m early. Danny won’t be expecting me yet.”
The chief directed Lucas to sit, then closed his laptop and went inside and came back out with two coffee cups and a plate of muffins. Thankfully, he did not start questioning Lucas about his mission here, instead wanting to know about life in Kenya and the culture of rural communities there. They chatted about that for a while and then about Canadian politics and about melting glaciers. Eventually Lucas regained enough confidence to ask about the community’s relationship with RFD. “I’m curious why you’re not letting them renew their lease. Even though they’re not doing their GMO coneflower anymore, I’m sure they’re still making a profit.”
“We need the land back. Our nation is growing, and our buffalo herd—bison, technically I guess—our bison herd is growing.”
“Does your bison herd earn you as much as leasing the land to RFD?”
“No, no—on pure economics we should probably keep leasing that section to RFD.”
“I guess there are tradeoffs, whatever you do.”
“No, ‘tradeoffs’ is the wrong way to think about it. Tradeoffs disappear when you live right. We take care of our families, we take care of our community, and we take care of the land—all three, no tradeoffs. If some option is good for two of those but bad for the third, then it’s just bad, plain and simple. No, for that land, for a while it made sense for our families, and for our community and for the land itself to lease it to RFD. But it’s as if we sent it away to the city. Like a son who went away make some money in Toronto. But now it’s time for that piece of land to come back to the family.”
Lucas had to think for a while about that. The chief sipped his coffee.
“RFD needed it all fenced, right? To keep out your bison and even . . . elk . . . is that what they’re called? They needed to keep all the big grazing species out.”
“Yeah, they did. Getting bison onto that land now will be good for it.”
“Yes, if you do it right,” Lucas replied. “Using grazing animals to restore soils can work, but it’s a long-term thing. And the types of improvements it brings aren’t easily detected by SoilCoin. So even if you’re you do it well, it probably won’t earn you much SoilCoin credits.”
“No offense, but for us SoilCoin isn’t about taking care of the land. It’s a . . .”
“A side-hustle?”
“Yeah! That’s what Danny calls it.”
“Aren’t you going to miss the money you were getting from RFD?”
“We’ll keep taking care of our land. If SoilCoin or the Canadian natural capital credits give us some money in the process, we’ll gladly accept it, but that’s not why we do it.”
They talked for a while longer, and then Lucas said he should be leaving. “Please tell Danny I said hello, but I got what I needed at RFD this morning.”
They said goodbye, and then Lucas got in his car and drove away. Twenty minutes later he came again to the kilometer-long stretch of road he had passed in the morning where the anomalies showed as particularly strong. And there on the other side of a barbed wire fence, for the first time in his life in person he saw bison, at least thirty of them. They had not been here earlier on his way into the area. He had to stop. When he stepped out of his car, for a long while he just stood there watching them in awe.
I thought they were just furry cows with humps, but the biggest ones look twice as big and three times as strong as any cow.
Then, on the ground, between him and the bison, just beyond the fence, he saw a glint of reflected sunlight, but then it was gone. He moved his head to the left and to the right and then saw it again. He could not tell what it was, but if he kept himself at the same relative angle between it and the sun he could see it. He crossed the road and the ditch and approached the barbed wire fence. As he did, he saw other glints of reflected light from various places. But it was hard to focus his attention on them with the bison now so close. Two of the animals were less than ten meters away and they began fidgeting.
I bet if they really wanted to, they could break through this fence like it was cobwebs.
He stood still. And then, while keeping the bison in his peripheral vision, he looked at what was causing the reflections. They were scattered around on the ground, circular disks slightly larger than his palm. A bit further down the line one was almost within arm’s reach of the fence. He walked along the fence until he was as close as he could get and saw that it was still out of reach, but not by much. He looked at the bison and saw that they were bunching up—an instinctive reaction of mutual protection in response to his presence. The closest ones all seemed to be keeping an eye on him as they grazed. Very slowly, he bent down, pulled the middle strand of barbed wire up and pushed the bottom one down with one knee, then he poked his head through and then his shoulders. Then he crawled two more steps, reached out and grabbed the disk and then darted back through the fence. The nearest bison had turned to face him, but the rest just kept grazing peacefully.
Only when he had backed away from the fence, across the ditch to the road and his heartbeat slowed again, did Lucas look at what he had picked up. He remembered the places he had stopped on the way into the area in the morning, a few hundred meters further down the road. And he remembered the litter he had seen there—it was not aluminum cans or glass bottles or candy bar wrappers. It was these same disks, weathered, discolored and partly decomposed at the other location, but that’s what they were. Here in his hand he had a new one. It was light and seemed to be made of a thin, hard cardboard. And it was green, but not consistently. Instead it was iridescent, reflecting various shades of green, or from some angles bright white.
And he recollected as well his trip here two years earlier, and the rows and rows of boxes in the garage at the First Nation’s office, and the stack of cardboard sheets in Daniel’s truck. These disks were Daniel’s blanks for drink cup lids. But unlike the blanks he had seen that day with Daniel, these ones now had nanocrystal films applied. Lucas did not need to do a spectrographic analysis—he already knew what he would see. Daniel would have selected the right structural coloration to apply based on what the SoilCoin algorithm wanted to see. The benefit in terms of credits would be small, and would probably not translate into more than a few thousand SoilCoin credits per year even if they scattered them over their whole territory.
But they already have the cardboard blanks and the machinery for the cellulose nanofilm, so this probably doesn’t cost them anything. How many of these did he say they inherited from the bankrupt paper mill? Hundreds of thousands? Enough to last them a couple of years, I imagine.
Lucas recalled one of the presentations at the Pre-CoP Science Meeting in Madison. One of the complex sugar chains produced by the soil blight fungus polarized light in an unusual way. This gave him an idea for a remote sensing method for detecting it.
He examined the disk. “Slick!” he said. “Very slick!”
He threw it back toward the fence like a Frisbee, knowing it would biodegrade soon enough.