Albert Bates, a recent Santa Barbara Permaculture Eco Hero, is the founder of the Global Eco Village Network, an ongoing delegate to the United Nations Climate Conferences, lawyer,  and author of more than 20 books. He left his law practice and started an Eco Village, The Farm, in Tennessee, in 1972, where he started a Mushroom Farm. He took up a law case and worked with his young congressman, Al Gore, and discovered the challenges of climate change. He taught permaculture in China and Brazil and learned from the indigenous rainforest tribes.

His travels to the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon introduced him to terra preta (dark earth) and biochar, with biochar’s potential for mitigating climate change and improving soil quality where implemented. Biochar is modeled after an ancient practice found in the Amazonian basin, where indigenous people used it with great success for centuries to create rich fertile soils, out of their typically thin tropical soils.