This is a story of two Als. One used to be the next president of the United States, and is now the global face of the climate change debate. He believes an excess of carbon in the atmosphere is cooking the planet.

The other, Alan Lauder, was a woolgrower at Cunnamulla, and has built a name as a passionate authority on rural land management. He has long warned that many of agriculture's problems stem from a loss of carbon in the soil.

Both problems are obviously related - the landscape needs more carbon and the air has too much - and Alan Lauder believes he has the solution to addressing the imbalance through grazing management.

Through the release of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has galvanised public interest in global warming and triggered a sudden but distinct shift in mainstream political and media acceptance of climate change. He has also brought an understanding of the role carbon plays in the environment into everyday thinking.

With carbon now firmly on the mainstream agenda, Mr Lauder will soon release a book detailing what he has long termed 'carbon grazing', explaining how all of agriculture's problems and solutions lie in how it manages carbon.

Mr Lauder is in a position to bridge the communications gap between scientists and farmers. The former woolgrower's lifelong dedication to studying the relationship between grazing animals and the natural landscape has won him trust and respect in scientific circles. He also understands the commercial realities of rural life and knows what can and can not be achieved in everyday management.

He is confident that he and his scientific collaborators know how to manage agriculture and the environment in a more sustainable and profitable way. However, despite years of trying, he has been unable to break through to the bureaucracy and get the government-level attention required to get their ideas widely circulated.

That may be changing. With the seismic shift that has occurred in public interest surrounding climate change, bureaucratic doors that were long closed have also suddenly started opening.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting has recently opened discussions with Mr Lauder, and public support for his position (which maintains that saltbush, when used to rest pastures, indirectly results in an increase in landscape carbon) has appeared in the Grains Research and Development Council's Ground Cover publication. The Queensland Murray Darling Commission has also offered to collaborate to ensure the issues surrounding the use of saltbush in a grazing management sense can be made more transparent.

"This is a significant turnaround from the previous experiences of bureaucratic indifference together with negotiations that meander along without ever resulting in action," Mr Lauder says.

Mr Lauder's name has become synonomous with saltbush, which in itself provides a case-study in how he believes carbon should be managed. He believes the role carbon plays is poorly understood in many quarters, with the exception of a handful of scientists.

Among them is CSIRO scientist David Freudenberger, who talks of the ecosystem services provided by saltbush. He observes that the presence of saltbush can alter soils, allowing grasses to re-enter degraded areas. Saltbush plantations can also be used to rest pastures, which lets allows them to regenerate and consequently introduce carbon directly into the landscape. In these ways, saltbush actively promotes the carbon cycle.

Mr Lauder has long made the case that there is a direct link between the resting of pastures (by running stock on saltbush plots for several weeks after rain) and environmental outcomes including water quality, salinity, lessening the impact of drought, acid soils and greenhouse outcomes including methane production by ruminant animals.

He recalls that after he spoke at the 1999 International Rangeland Congress, a soil scientist approached him and stated that the manner in which soil had changed around the base of some old man saltbush plants growing on a claypan, from red to cracking clay, was the most extreme case of soil change he had even seen.

However, some bureaucratic organisations have been unable to make these links. For example, EnviroFund recently knocked back an application by an Inglewood producer to establish a saltbush plantation to facilitate regular resting of pastures.

EnviroFund explained the rejection on the grounds the landholder may achieve a private benefit from the income he would earn from livestock grazing the saltbush while pastures were regenerating. It did not believe there was sufficient public benefit, despite the well-documented role of saltbush in promoting the carbon cycle. At the same time, it approved funds for desilting of farm dams, the potential private benefit of which was not an issue.