The Earth Beneath Our Feet

The Earth Beneath Our Feet by David Heithaus was originally published in the BFEC Newsletter, Vol. 20/No. 1, Winter 2016. 

Allow me to paint a New Year’s fantasy: This year on December 31 at precisely 12 a.m. (GMT, to be fair) world leaders will announce a technological breakthrough that will allow humanity to source abundant energy from the power of goodwill alone; effectively ending the era of sourcing abundant energy from the corpses of dead things in a race to make corpses of all living things. In order to prove the point governments and industries will give every human being on earth the required brain jack and universal power cord and all that individuals will have to invest in is being nice. That’s it! No more greenhouse gas emissions, no more pesky social justice issues, bright future, star-liners and alien babes/hunks/what-have-you here we come...

... in a hundred years or so. In the meantime, we can all use our new personalized power cords to sip into our good-will bunkers while the effects of climate change continue to batter us about like the proverbial monkey-in-a-piñata. So where’s the holiday-season fantasy? Is this rambling nonsense yet another reading ride on the tree-hugger’s holiday guilt train? Patience...

The point that must first be made is that there is no quick and simple technological solution to climate change. We can’t just slap solar panels on everything and call it a day. We have collectively broken wind in the car and it’s going to take some time for things to air out. Even if my (patent pending) devices existed and we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, there would still be enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to keep us on the extreme-weather rollercoaster for many, many... many years. That’s the stage we’ve set, that’s the mise en scéne.

So here’s the good news: there’s already a mechanism out there that’s ready to help get carbon back where carbon belongs; an open window in the car; an air freshener of sorts. It’s actually chugging along right now, waiting for us to slow down on one hand and give it a nudge with the other. What is it you ask? Well... it’s kind of... everything — even you.

What I’m talking about is the biosphere: every living thing, alive or dead, past or present and the interactions of these things with the planet’s air, rock, and water. Yeah. Mind blown.

The biosphere produces massive amounts of energy, accomplishing more in a year than all of humanity’s combined industrial processes. Quietly spread out and invisible to the naked eye chemical bonds are being torn apart and reformed. Matter is changing states. Of these processes, the carbon cycle is one of the most colossal and the one that can help heal the effects of climate change if we start tinkering with it in a more thoughtful manner.

These days, carbon and carbon dioxide are largely associated with negatives: pollution, greenhouse gasses, climate change. In reality, carbon is the basis for all life as we know it. It is one of the most abundant elements on earth and believe it or not, there is no more today than there was at the dawn of time. Carbon atoms in your body might have once passed through a pterodactyl, a mighty blue whale, a clever mongoose... or a tape worm or Hitler... so don’t go too far down that road. In any case, we can no more create additional carbon than we can create bacon that isn’t delicious. That’s simple physics. What we can do is affect how it cycles through our planet’s component parts.

The important thing is to see the carbon cycle, all of nature really, as a set of processes rather than as things or sets of things. The carbon cycle is a factory whose circular conveyor belt packages energy from the sun for use by one type of living thing which in turn packages it for use by another which finally returns the raw materials for the first. It is a never-ending, solar-powered cycle with a finite amount of matter involved — while production fluctuates, it can never truly grow. What humans, as a part of the biosphere, are doing is pushing the cycle in a certain direction at an accelerated pace — we’re making an ellipse of the circle.

We are essentially built by plants from sunlight. From the bottom to the top, the food web chows down on these delicious little packets of solar goodness in the form of complex carbon compounds. We are eating the solar power in the form of the sugars and initiating the process opposite to photosynthesis: respiration. Here, oxygen and sugars interact with metabolic enzymes and are converted back into water and carbon dioxide as the energy is released. The release of stored solar energy in respiration fuels every action, emotion and perception we have, allows us to grow and returns some of the raw materials needed for photosynthesis back into the environment.

Some of a plant’s carbon finds its way into the soil through the roots or in the form of litter. As plants and animals die, yet more carbon enters the soil where millions of microorganisms incorporate it into soil organic matter — a key component of soil that stabilizes it from weathering while nourishing the plants that grow in it. Carbon comprises over half of all soil organic matter and can last for hundreds of years. Earth’s soils were built by life and both the living and the bodies of the dead serve to maintain them and buffer them from the damaging effects of weathering.

This is the carbon cycle: the biosphere continuously cycling matter through birth, growth, death and decay; the world’s carbon flowing from the atmosphere to living material to the soil itself.

It is the soil that holds the key to reversing climate change as soils hold more carbon than living things and the atmosphere combined. Unfortunately, as we move carbon quickly into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels we are also attacking soil’s ability to store it.

Through the spread of human populations, prairies and forests have been steadily converted to plowed cropland and the rich soils that supported them have been increasingly exposed to air and erosion. Carbon held by soil organic matter has been steadily released through oxidation (respiration outside of a living thing; think fire) or was carried away by erosion. In effect, we have been killing our soil and in doing so, shifting the distribution on the world’s carbon from the soil and living things into the atmosphere.

This is the standard sad tale but not the one that I would choose to end on. Instead, we should take heart in the biosphere’s ability to reverse soil degradation and our ability to help it along; to breathe life back into dead earth and restore its ability to restrain carbon from leaping quickly back into the sky.

Just as burning former organic matter in the form of fossil fuels increases the rate of carbon moving into the atmosphere; wise land management decisions can promote the photosynthesis that takes it back out and the soil building that keeps it out. As the carbon-rich organic matter is built, drought and erosion-prone dirt will become rich, spongey soil that will further act to slow evaporation and reduce the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.

Re-thinking the way we manage land has enormous ramifications beyond carbon sequestration. The kinds of techniques that help to promote soil building will also serve to improve human access to clean water and to promote sustainable food systems in doing so enhancing the strength of rural economies. It will improve our health as well as that of our environment.

Through no-till farming practices that consider the soil as a living ingredient to land preservation and habitat restoration projects, we are unique in the biosphere in our ability to accelerate and direct the carbon cycle. We have done so in one direction and face the abyss. Why not see what our big solar-powered brains can do to heal the earth that’s closest to us. The earth beneath our feet.