Global Flattening

The great systems thinker, Donella Meadows, pointed out thirty years ago that the ecological problem underlying “global warming” was the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That is the cause. Warming is an effect, a trailing indicator, something that lags decades behind. She lamented how so much political energy and precious time for action was being wasted in debate over temperature while the measurements of carbon dioxide were solid and irrefutable. To wait until temperatures are dangerously high is to waste the opportunity to take action.

A major part of what I call the Upward Spiral is life’s creation of surface area which dramatically changes the rates at which things flow. I recently realized that another perspective on what we refer to as “global warming” is global desurfacing. Cutting down of forests, paving of land, loss of topsoil are all part of a reduction of surface area on a global scale. Over millions of years, life spun a great web of surfaces based on carbon extracted from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Over millions of years, photosynthesis has fueled a complex “mat” covering bedrock. This mat is inches high in the alpine tundra, hundreds of feet high in the forests, and contains so many surfaces that it has exponentially changed the rates at which many things are flowing upon this earth. (The flow of heat in and out of our atmosphere – the cause of global warming – is just one of these flows.) As we flatten the earth by knocking these surfaces down and either burning them or having them rot away, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. So thinking of the problem as “flattening” focuses on the initial cause and it also does not sound positive. (Some think “global warming” sounds warm and inviting.) Global flattening does not.