Our world ecology is at a pivotal turning point in 2014. Let’s shift gears away from too much talk about CO2 emissions and energy over-use. Undeniably, humans are the keystone species with the power to dictate where the world’s ecosystems will turn. At times in history, forests and fertile grasslands existed throughout the lands of the globe. Let’s call this ‘land life’ “terrestrial biology” and let’s include freshwater marine life there-in. The other type of biology would be oceanic and represent the salt water ecology of the planet. Our choices at this point will either continue to push nutrition and biology to the oceans or to draw nutrition and biology back to the earth’s soils. Compare the earth 100 years ago to ours today resulting from the “green revolution” and the playing out of industrialization the world over. More deserts, less forests and much less organic matter and total biology in any average soil is what you would see. In another viewpoint we find more mineral nutrition in the oceans with less fish and large species (slow adapters). When biology is removed from the terrestrial ecosystems it ends up, inevitably, in the oceanic ones; the result: more salt in the salt water. Eventually, the life that remains in the oceans and seas salvage and transfer the mineral nutrition back to the lands. In a matter of thousands of years nature is designed with the miraculous ability to redistribute our… “excess”. Just as we can level mountains in search of fuel in a relatively short time, we can also create large changes to any of the other natural, geological, and atmospheric systems more rapidly than much of the biology can adapt and evolve. Therefore, if we do continue to rapidly push life and mineral nutrition ‘out to sea’, we could fail our future world even there by the extreme increases in heat and salinity killing off so much biology that the world never recovers. Too quick of change loses too many species during the transition. Less species involvement means less possibilities and less efficiency in biological remediation of extremes. In 2014, the effect is increasingly rapid extinction of various forms of life within the biology on land and in the sea. Though this is arguably a natural process, the pace of change is currently putting the world ecosystem’s future adaptability at risk. The risk is being created by the world’s keystone species—human society.
In many nations, we have been convinced that buying insurance from corporations is wise mitigation of important risks for us and our families. Billions of dollars of hard earned income goes with a statistical return lower than that of casino gambling. That money, and much of our labor earning it, is funneled into the meeting of the growth requirement in modern economy. The utopian promise is alleviation of poverty and better distribution of the world’s resources. At the same time, we increasingly degrade and destroy elements of our sustaining planet and we endanger our child and the unborn child that would call us “grand”. We don’t have to do that, but we do.
Enter 2015: what we did yesterday doesn’t have to be what we do today. We turned the forests into biologically depleted water hungry plantations. We turned fertile lands into mineral hungry chemical depositories in the “green revolution,” satisfied by leveling mountains in search of more nutrients, while those applied washed down through the biologically depleted soil ending up in the seas. Fueling the surge, we dug the fossil Carbon from the earth and sent it to the atmosphere along with those forests, the soil organic matter, and the biology, while the energy that created the fossil Carbon, forests and soils never stopped bathing the earth day in and day out. In 2015 we can change course to regenerate the terrestrial lands and speed up mineral transfer back from the oceans. If we build up the health and soil biology of the worlds agricultural lands; if we build up the Carbon content, mineral balance, and water holding capacity of marginal desert lands; if we methodically replenish the mineral nutrition previously harvested from our forests, we can re-green the earth and purchase an insurance policy with thousands of percent return by our children and the generations to come. Hands we have, and energy in plenty. Energy comes in the form of heat and light. It then goes to fuel the currents of the ocean, the winds of the earth, the evaporative cycles of rain and snow, the storms, and the growth of green that feeds the animal and fungal life of the world. In 2015 we shall fuel the hands and the tools of our hands in real time with this sustaining energy force through an infinite diversity of ideas and technologies coming out of collaboration for good. The lessons of the past are just that. Remember and create a world inhabitable by healthy people and creatures in balance. Remember, and create collaboration for true quality of life.
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