Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Have you ever looked at any climate data?

Most of us, probably have not. Many industries take advantage of this knowledge gap to sow disinformation, whether it be fossil carbon industries, forestry industries or agricultural industries.

The new report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ^[1] has compiled data (a lot of it), and reveals precisely why industries like these ones work so hard to shift the narrative and our focus away from the problem at hand, into a zone of frivolous debate.

Summarized in this chart for policymakers, ^[2] the #1 actionable thing we can do right now is to reduce conversion of natural ecosystems. As stated in the previous post, many of these industries that rely on destroying the environment for profit have successfully convinced many policymakers that their industries are “sustainable.” Combined with improving sustainable forest management, there is no better thing we could possibly do than to simply let nature be and help nature be. But how does this help our atmosphere cancer problem?

Often it feels like the media and popular culture believe there are (or will be) magic technological solutions to this issue of radical increases to atmospheric Carbon…perhaps there is some “Carbon capture” technology that could help us deal with the issue.

There is nothing better that humans could possibly invent that is more efficient at capturing Carbon than….nature.

In fact, nature is designed to do this very thing.

The brilliant and incomparable design of nature, where every living creature plays an ecological function, is centred around Carbon: A tree splits Carbon away from a pair of Oxygen molecules, uses the Carbon to build its structure, and gives the rest of it to the underground microbial world. A grass does the same photosynthetic trick, and when an animal (perhaps a Bison) comes to graze the grass, the plant is damaged, and in being damaged, it increases its photosynthesis to build new tissue, and in doing so, discharges more Carbon into the ground to inspire microbial and fungal support.

We humans are excellent at interrupting this “Carbon capture technology”: we cut the trees down, we spray chemicals to make sure only what we decide is best for industry grows there, and we have removed nearly every grass-grazing animal from every grassland available, replacing sprawling grasslands with near-infinite sections of monoculture commodity crops, often managed with an ever-evolving arsenal of chemical concoctions designed to kill things.

Capturing and drawing down Carbon is what ecosystems are designed to do. They’ve been doing it for hundreds of millions of years, co-evolving with fungi and the microbial world in order to move Carbon from the air, to somewhere that is not the air. It does this every day, as long as the sun is shining.

There is no more elegant solution to the beautiful movement of Carbon than what has been designed by nature and evolution.

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” Francis Bacon (Novum Organum, 1620). There are many a great philosopher with astute and profound observations of the natural world. It seems that in our times, the philosophy of observing nature or holding her in reverence and wonder has been rejected, in favour of the idea that we as humans can control our environment by eliminating nature without consequence.

Graham

thanks to everyone reading

plant a tree, or pass some complimentary blueberry juice to a friend