honest and grounded ecological thinking requires a radical proposition—there is no where else. there is no other place, everything goes somewhere, it's already here and it’s here to stay. our earth is essentially a closed system. a marginally tiny percentage of gas evaporates from the atmosphere into “space” every year, a marginally tiny amount of material (asteroids etc) falls into the planet every year. everything else stays put. the quantity of oxygen or carbon or nitrogen has stayed the same, even though they have taken different complex configurations thru the vast spans of geological time.
we aren't very good at thinking this. it is very unintuitive to imagine air as a physical thing, or even a container that holds physical things. it seems obvious to us that when something burns—when a glass breaks when a body rots—it is gone. but nothing is ever gone.
there is no where else taken at face value and with absolute sincerity is a very powerful framework. all that we have—us, the big “we,” all that lives and breathes—is the immense, elastic, fragile here and now, and we’ll never have anything else. even the most distant parts of Here are as immediate and important as the closest ones. there are no degrees of separation. this idea forms a lot of my beliefs, even far outside of the strictly ecological. i’d like to explore many of them eventually.
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lately i am haunted by the carboniferous era, a span of geologic time between 300–360,000,000 years ago. this era is called the carboniferous (coal-bearing) because the large majority of all coal that humans have ever burned was formed from plants that died during this time. there weren’t trees as we know them, but there were huge forests of tree-sized club mosses (lycopodiales) and “scale trees” (lepidodendrales). these are both relatives of modern club mosses, which are today quite small. but these ancient forests were absolutely enormous. the amount of carbon dioxide they removed from the atmosphere caused global temperatures to drop meaningfully. there is always a connectivity between photosynthesizing life and climate. as oxygen and carbon dioxide and water fluctuate in the atmosphere so too does the temperature. it has always been this way, ever since the first oxygen-producing photosynthesis—which was a cataclysm for life on earth, i’ll write about this sometime.
photosynthesis is essentially a process that uses light energy to take carbon dioxide, removes the carbon and releases the oxygen back into the air. the plant uses that carbon molecule to make molecular energy for itself and to make more complex molecules like cellulose and lignin. when a plant dies under very specific conditions, that cellulose and lignin is compressed over millions of years and becomes coal. when coal is burned, those complex molecules break back down into carbon dioxide. on a physical level these plants took carbon dioxide out of the air over 300,000,000 years ago—before pangea was formed—and that carbon dioxide was undisturbed in the form of more complex substances, until we started burning the remnants of those plants a few hundred years ago.
there is no where else. there is only the big Here. carbon dioxide has, for good reason, taken on an immense social and political meaning. it lives a life far greater than the physical thing itself. but carbon emissions come from somewhere. they come from here. carbon dioxide fluctuates naturally in sublimely complex relationships between plants, the ocean, rocks, living animals. but in a few hundred years we’ve “undone”—so to speak—hundreds of millions of years of geological time.
that's what haunts me. we have been fucking with processes so vast and slow that we can’t perceive any fraction of a part of them happening in front of us. thinking the big Here helps put into perspective that “carbon dioxide emissions” are literal tangible things that have been in the ground for millions of years. (oil is product of similar processes). nothing ever goes anywhere. it’s all been here.
if we are to counteract the changes we’ve made—(which is realistically never going to happen)—we must find away to re-store the million years old carbon we have let into the air. this isn’t three hundred years of emissions to tackle, it’s something far far worse. a start would be to plant a trillion trees and burn a billion cars. get digging.
at this point in an essay, there is an expectation of some turn, a volta, a gesture towards elsewhere. but there is no where else. i can’t impart any optimism because i don’t have any. all i can say is that ecologically, politically, spiritually, the big Here is all we have, we are all we have, and Here is enormous, sublimely beautiful and complex, and somehow very fragile. each of us bears a responsibility to care for the other, each of us has dirty, bloody hands, the air we breathe is a gift and a condemnation both. we absolutely must be unrelentingly good to each other, there is no other option. good thinking of the Here illuminates the nightmare we've created, but is also the most honest and needful place to begin our relationships with each other, the world, the divine. this isn’t a gesture towards hope it’s an imperative to action. we have what we need right here, we have to use it.