On a broiling February afternoon in Mazamari, Peru, Brenton Ladd waited inside the one-story airport for a Bombardier Dash 8 from Lima. Aboard the plane, Lukas Van Zwieten and Ruy Anaya de la Rosa dozed between fits of turbulence that rocked the tiny plane as it flew over the Andes. The men were Mazamari-bound to collaborate with Ladd—an Australian plant ecologist and professor at Lima's Universidad Científica del Sur—on a project that involved giving cookstoves to indigenous women from the neighboring town of Satipo.

The cookstoves weren't so different from the traditional stone ones women had been using all their lives, except that they were designed to burn wood and other biomaterials at low-enough oxygen levels and at high-enough temperatures to create something called biochar. In theory, the resulting mixture could be added to surrounding soils to increase nutrient levels, and, eventually, crop yields. Van Zwieten, an environmental chemist, would provide scientific counsel, and Anaya de la Rosa, a project director at an Australia-based sustainability non-profit, would provide logistical support. The project should already have been well underway, but it had never begun.

Read the full article on the great biochar experiment in the Amazon by Kate Wheeling at Pacific Standard.