Carbon is the basis for life. Organic chemistry is simply innumerable combinations of carbon chains. Carbon is life. We are made of it. We eat it (plants and animals), breathe it out (Carbon Dioxide), burn it for power (oil and coal), wear it as jewellery (diamonds). We need it in the soils that grow the plants we eat and feed the animals we eat or we suffer from poor nutrition. All around the world the soils have been depleted of carbon, through centuries of "take take take", through misguided, one-dimensional scientific farming methods that create more problems than they solve. At the same time we have been pumping carbon into the atmosphere as CO2 which is apparently heating up the globe and causing tsuamis and cyclones and rising sea levels and all sorts of other bad things. This 'free radical carbon' can be locked away where it does more good than harm, in plant life which absorbs it and locks it up in the soil in the form of nutrients. Locking away carbon in this way is called 'sequestration'. Already the Europeans are trading "carbon credits" - planting huge forests to soak up free radical carbon - in a market worth billions of dollars. But forests aren't as efficient as grasslands in soaking up carbon. The critical fulcrum role that carbon management can play in transforming the productive power of our soils - the source of all life on the planet - make it the most important issue of the early 21st century.
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