The following years were not El Niño years but each winter’s rainy season called me up into the fields to find more plays and observe what would happen. This nourished deeper thoughts.
A raindrop possesses a high amount of potential energy, thanks to the sun’s energy evaporating the water and lifting it higher within the earth’s gravitational field. Up there, its distilled pureness is so highly reactive that it starts dissolving carbon dioxide as its falls through the air. As the drop falls, some of its potential energy becomes kinetic energy that comes to a splatting stop when it hits the ground.
If the rain falls faster than the soil can absorb (inflow greater than outflow), then some of the rain starts to puddle and then run off. Its potential energy starts transforming into kinetic energy again. As it converges with other runoff and flows faster, ever more of its potential energy becomes kinetic energy to erode soils, to tumble rocks down streambeds, to cut gullies. It can start the whole downward spiral I knew from Kiet Siel.
But if the water soaks in, its energy creates a much more energetic soil chemistry. Within this “broth”, roots absorb soil moisture, some of which is pulled up through the plants’ veins and into the leaves. In the leaves, this moisture can follow one of two creative pathways.
The first path is to be transpired as water vapor back into the atmosphere. Leaves spread water molecules through a thin but broad, energy-absorbing surface. Some of these molecules evaporate, carrying heat away from the leaves which protects the leaves from overheating. This allows photosynthesis to proceed at maximum rates while also increasing the rate at which the fallen rain is recycled back to the sky. Transpiration was never mentioned when I learned a simplified water cycle in fourth grade. But when I, as an adult, looked at the measured numbers of the actual water cycle, several amazing truths emerge.
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The blue-grey numbers reveal that more than 90% of the water that evaporates from the ocean falls back into the ocean before it ever reaches land. (413,000 cubic kilometers per year evaporates from the ocean / 373,000 cubic kilometers of it falls back on the ocean per year.) Water is heavy and it is hard to move it over great distances.
A second truth (red numbers) is that approximately the same amount of moisture that falls on the land (40,000 cubic kilometers per year) also flows back to the sea per year. Inflow and outflow are in balance for the ocean/land interaction.
The magic lies in the evaporation/transpiration numbers (green numbers). Only 40,000 cubic kilometers of water per year come from the ocean and yet 113,000 cubic kilometers falls upon the land. That additional 73,000 cubic kilometers per year (65% of the total precipitation) is the water being recycled again and again back up into the clouds.
The thin, broad surface areas of leaves has tremendously increased the rate at which fresh water transpires back into the sky. This brings me back to my Glacier Bay question: “How did the emergence of Life onto land change the land?” In this case, the emergence of life onto land has evolved canopies of leaf surfaces that almost triple the amount of rainfall the land receives. The amount of precipitation coming directly from the ocean is only about 11 inches of rain per year on average, barely enough to sustain desert grasslands. A wise biosphere hangs on to that precious gift. Life recycles it through the leaves and now the land receives around 27 inches per year on average, enough to support forests. Life recycles the rain, creating more rain that nourishes more plant growth which transpires more rain. It’s a reinforcing feedback spiral until it reaches a dynamic equilibrium. Our environment is not a given, fixed and unchanging. It’s in dynamic equilibrium with the Earth and Sun and with all the life that both depends on it and helps sustain and increase its vitality.
The second path that water flowing into the leaves can follow is into photosynthesis. The energy of sunlight powers photosynthesis, the rearranging of six water molecules and six atmospheric carbon dioxide molecules into a high-energy sugar molecule and a by-product of six molecules of that way-out-of-thermodynamic-equilibrium atmospheric oxygen (O2) (what most life needs to breathe).
6 CO2 + 6 H2O + solar energy → C6H12O6 + 6O2
Each sugar molecule contains chemical energy. Some of the sugar molecules will have their energy tapped, step by incremental step, within the cells to fuel the growth and maintenance of the plant. Some of this energy will be stored for later use, either by the plant or within its germinating seeds. Some of this stored energy will be eaten by animals and will power the food pyramid.
But the pathway for sugar that constantly delights me is that in which hundreds or thousands of sugar molecules are brought together to form cellulose, the building blocks of cell walls that will create surface areas. Through photosynthesis, formless liquid water and formless carbon dioxide gas combine into sugar molecules that can then create solid surfaces from cellulose. Many rates of flow are proportional to surface area. By creating solid surfaces, plants have the power to change the world in so many ways.
One delightful example Alysia named “Gaia dams.” They can be seen easiest after a rain. Dead leaves and stems float in the runoff, getting wet. Wet surfaces stick together. As they raft along, they drift against something (a rock, a plant stem, anything holding its place in the flow) and become lodged. Other floating things drift by and adhesion pulls their surfaces against these lodged surfaces and the area of lodged leaves grows larger. A small dam forms. Each new leaf sticking to the dam forces the water to flow a bit more off to the side to go around it. The dam lengthens across the slope until finally the runoff starts to ooze over the dam.
But now that brings the wet drifting leaves in contact with the top of the dam and they start sticking to the top, raising the level of the dam. The moment a leaf sticks to the top, that becomes a high point and the water cannot flow that way. The current shifts to the next lowest point on the dam, which carries soggy leaves to that point, building it up. Through this slow process of clogging leaves shifting the current from low spot to low spot, the height of the dam rises in a remarkably level way. And once the entire dam has achieved this height, the runoff then flows around one of the edges of the dam again, which carries soggy leaves there, and it clogs up again, extending the width of the dam still farther across the slope. Since the water cannot go around now, it starts to go over the top, starting another round of raising.
Like the shuttle of a loom working its way back and forth, weaving loose fibers into homespun cloth, the current shifts from low spot to low spot all along the length of the dam, building it up and to the side, one wet piece at a time. The size of the dam tends to be proportional to the surface area of the floating debris. Grass clippings and pine needles have relatively small surfaces so their dams are only a centimeter or so high. Deciduous tree leaves, with their large surface areas, can form dams five or six centimeters high.
These Gaia dams are resilient. If I make a break in one of the dams, the backed-up water starts to rush through the gap. This carries floating leaves to the breach. As these leaves drift through, the wet surfaces on the edge of the breach pull some of the leaves against them. The breach clots up just like blood in a cut on your skin. These little self-forming dams form everywhere, on forest slopes and in street gutters (though street sweepers sweep them away). Gaia dams slow down the rate at which life-enhancing materials flow out of the system. Later, these dams become mulched seedbeds for the trapped seeds germinating within them.
These Gaia dams accumulate power. The first generation creates tiny dams across the thin channels flowing across the area. The ponds behind these dams trap silt and other debris flowing through. This deposition raises and levels the area behind the dam, forcing the next runoff to flow a bit broader and therefore thinner. This thinness will allow more dams to form. More of the surface becomes covered with these dams and the silt that settles behind them. More seeds can sprout over the area, creating more plant surface area that will eventually become more floating things for future dams. Through this small but cumulative process, life can cover bare surfaces with an initial layer of thin soil. The work grows on itself.
Many rates of flow are proportional to surface area. Change the amount of surface area and the rate of flow changes (which is why I cover up with insulation as much of my surface area as possible when I watch the sky turn into cold night). More leaf surface area proportionally increases rates of transpiration and photosynthesis and the flow of energy into the food pyramid. More grass stem surface area slows the flow of runoff through the grass. More root surface area increases the rate at which soil nutrients flow into the plants and decreases the rate at which soil erodes. The weathering of rocks into smaller rocks increases the surface area that moisture and plant roots can embrace. The inner surfaces of our lungs and intestines are rich with surface area so that we can have high rates of oxygen and food energy flowing to our cells. More hair surface area decreases rate of heat loss from the body. Surface areas can dramatically alter rates, thereby shifting the relative balances of flow that determine the Upper Level expression of flows.
One of the profound yet easily-overlooked answers to my Glacier Bay question is the creation of surface areas. When we look at the world, we see its surfaces and give different surfaces different names (tree, mountain, soil) that simplifies the surfaces to a name. But look at the shape of those surface areas. A tree with its massive trunk, wrinkled with furrowed bark, rich with surface areas for insects to hide within. The single trunk splits into smaller trunks, branches, twigs which produce tens of thousands of leaves that shade the ground, that baffle the wind, that absorb the pounding of rain and gentles it into drips, and transforms the sunlight into the food pyramid. Below ground is an even richer surface area of hundreds of miles of fine root hairs that join symbiotically with an even finer network of fungal mycorrhizae. The surface area of the tree increases photosynthesis and reduces erosion, both of which change the relative balance between the rates of inflow and outflow of soil, leading to soil accumulating. Does the tree create the soil or does the soil create the tree? Increasing surface areas power many reinforcing feedback spirals.
Succession is the extended process by which bare ground turns into a forest, alpine tundra, or whatever the climax vegetation is for that area. “Pioneer plants” first appear and change their environment so that other plants can now colonize the area and eventually outcompete (often by overtopping and shading out) the pioneer plants. Plant species replace plant species until a climax vegetation is reached. As a young naturalist, I thought of this process as a ruthless competition of species for the limited resource of sunlight. But as I observe Gaia dams and all the other mechanisms of succession, I also see it as a cooperative creation of surface area, the most limited resource of them all. Use the resource of sunlight to create the more limited resource of surface areas by which rates can be altered so that more sunlight can be absorbed.
The potential energy within the rain can drive a reinforcing downward feedback spiral that washes away soil and diminishes the possibilities for life. The potential energy within the rain can also drive a reinforcing upward feedback spiral that can create soil and surface areas that can increase possibilities for life. Either is possible. Like in the canyons of the Anasazi, it can go either way. It depends on the relative balance between how much of the rain soaks in and how much of it runs off.
I can help shift that relative balance towards more life. As I do this work, the work grows on itself. I thought I worked alone but I am surrounded by billions of grass plants and millions of worms and hundreds of gophers and an uncountable host of bacteria and other creatures doing this work. I start to understand that our environment is not a given. It has been created over hundreds of millions of years and is being actively maintained through the efforts of billions of other living things.
Some call this work “ecological service” (also “ecosystem service”.) Plants do it, absorbing sunlight into the food web, transpiring rainfall back into the sky, protecting the soil while alive and adding to it in death. Salmon concentrate some of the sea’s fertility into their growing bodies. When they do the work of swimming back upstream to spawn in their birth headwaters, their spent carcasses nourish both their children and the surrounding forests that shade and cool the nursery streams. Beaver do the ecological service of constructing dams that hold and slow the surge of the mountains’ spring snowmelt, diverting more of it through willows back into the clouds to fall again. Bears rip apart logs, increasing their surface area which speeds their rate of decay back into richer soil. Earthworms do it, opening the soil to more rain and air with their burrowing as they eat decaying plant materials, speeding up the rate at which it becomes available for the next generation. We are surrounded by allies doing the work.
The results of all this work I shall call The Commons. By this I mean all of the structures and functions by which Life has and continues to lift the Earth system so that it can support more life. The Commons is the heart of the answer to my Glacier Bay question. How has Life’s emergence changed the Earth? Life has done the work of changing rates of flows so that an oxygenated atmosphere, fresh water, fertile soils, and forests accumulate. The “things” around us – sea level, atmospheric chemistry, topsoils, populations, aquifers, forests, beaches, permafrost – are all upper level dynamic equilibriums, expressions of the relative balances of a myriad of underlying inflows and outflows which life has been changing over hundreds of millions of years. The Commons is all the life-created things that now stand higher than thermodynamic equilibrium – in contrast to the Martian atmosphere at thermodynamic equilibrium by which Lovelock realized that Mars is lifeless.
The Commons include gopher tunnels that allow runoff to drop deeper into the soil. The Commons include bird migrations that allow a large food pyramid to quickly form and take advantage of the short but powerful twenty-four-hour-per-day arctic growing season and bring some of that energy back to the temperate regions. The Commons include the massive amount of energy that life has stored in coal beds and petroleum deposits over hundreds of millions of years. Soils accumulate rather than wash away, thanks to the anchoring root masses that grow in them. Bears defecate the nutrients within salmon carcasses throughout the forests. Kelp beds and coral reefs absorb some of the energy of waves, reducing the rate of coastline erosion. The common courtesies that societies have developed to reduce wasteful hostility, develop trust, and nourish constructive cooperation are part of The Commons.
We can be part of this work. We have minds that can understand the importance of this work, eyes to see places needing the work, voices to inspire, plan, and help one another organize the work, feet to carry us to the work and hands and mind-created tools to do the work. We can be part of a great Upward Spiral of life using the sun’s radiant energy to lift our entire planet up into greater possibilities. This is what I started feeling up in the spring fields when I heard a bird singing and realized that by helping more rain soak into the ground, I nourished more plants which fed more insects which might have given that bird the energy to sing its song of hope for the next generation.
As the land around me began healing, my spirit began healing. I was finding light at the core of my Denali koan. The biology textbooks that had asked: “How is life and evolution possible in a universe constrained by the Second Law of Thermodynamics?” had always given the textbook answer: “We exist by harvesting the energy of other living things.” Our energy comes from eating others in a never-ending survival of the fittest. My spirit had become confined within that answer. But that answer is incomplete. There is a second part: what does Life do with the energy it thus obtains? Some of it goes to basic metabolism and growth. But some of it can go to changing the world around us. What do we do with that energy? What flows can we change and what will happen when a relative balance shifts? What new possibilities can we create within The Commons?
Like the upward spiral in which the rain that is absorbed by hard-packed soil nourishes life that helps loosen the soil so that more of the future rains can be absorbed, so these questions soaked in and loosened my spirit. Hope grew within me, nourished by energy that had previously run off due to assumptions that had unconsciously hardened me against hope.
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heather rangel
An absolutely exquisite chapter. Thank you for this so perfectly articulated version of building The Commons.