Planetary consciousness
To solve a planet-wide problem, we need planetary consciousness
Some of the most important places on Earth for climate have no direct relationship to buyers and sellers of climate credits. Our species must think of Earth as a complete organism, to have a chance of becoming a starfaring (or even long-lived) resident of this planet.
NASA model of atmospheric carbon dioxide, tagged by source for the year 2021. Green is absorption, brown is emissions.
“A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. ”
A story.
We were co-founded by indigenous leaders to work with smallfarmers. Birthed in former FARC territory in the Colombian Amazon — we were designed to be an economic tool to do one thing: protect pristine jungle. All the other local economies (petroleum, mining, logging, and narcotrafficking) were extractive. Brazil and Ecuador had devolved to local violence between indigenous groups protecting forests, and multinationals pushing smallfarmers to extract. So four taitas asked us to make a local economy that protected the jungle AND created peace between these two groups. So we did.
We stop deforestation with a monthly micropayment for grassroots conservation activities. Then sell six fair-trade climate products internationally for shared profits: carbon, biodiversity, and water credits, agrobiodiversity crops, and sustainable ecotourism. Landowners (smallfarmer and/or indigenous) get to be co-owners if they complete a successful year. Everyone wins.
But shortly after we started we had a problem with our target clients… carbon credits. The problem was, they simply didn’t make sense to an indigenous smallfarmer. Carbon credits are intangible, require advanced science, and rely on international death-by-committee standards. (Yes, you could argue they don’t make a lot of sense to anyone else either, but that’s another debate.)
We did the best we could, but in the first year, on our pilot site, we faced a pernicious local rumor. In a series of community meetings, and over many innocuous neighborly visits, we had to explain, and then explain again, that selling carbon credits did NOT mean we were going to send a giant automated aerial vacuum cleaner to suck up the air over our farmer’s land.
(My friends keep asking but I really have no idea if this idea came from a credulous viewing of Space Balls).
After trying unsuccessfully to translate the concepts of tons of carbon, international markets, allometric equations, emissions regulations, and deforestation rates. We struck upon a solution. We invited 100 farmers and their families to lunch, set up a large TV with a generator, supplied several rows of seating, and played the video you see above. “The people at the top have to pay the people at the bottom to keep cleaning the air,” we said. And that was that. Everyone finally understood.
Why did this solution work? Because it was a simple depiction of a planet-wide problem. Sure, it might seem like a funny story about a naive population, but it’s not. Because I talk to investors, activists, scientists, and citizens every day who are still applying local experience — and their peer group’s consensus — to a planet-wide problem.
This article is to get you to think past your vacuum cleaner. Look at the data as it really is. Widen your lens and see the answers for yourself.
Planetary consciousness = Paradigm shift
Would you cut off your own foot? Probably not. But what if you couldn’t feel it? What if you didn’t know it was a part of you?
Planetary consciousness is the idea that we are bigger than our families, our race, or our gender. We’re beyond our own species and an integral part of natural cycles. We span nation-states. Subject to natural laws - still somehow unique and fundamentally unknowable.
We are more than the sum of our parts.
There is a reason some people act forcefully outside their own apparent self-interest on behalf of Nature. Because they didn’t. Their self expanded. When they became aware of how they were connected to other living systems — the Next Right Action was self-evident.
(Indigenous peoples call this awareness “adulthood”. But we don’t listen to them as much as we should — despite their long history as civilizations that live without ecological destruction. Perhaps if we did, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.)
When do we cease living as if we are perpetually alone, and constrained when everything we know about the universe suggests that we don’t stop, or begin?
If you are reading this, then you are part of a food chain, you are composed of ancient elements that cycle through even your bones, and some part of your DNA will live on after you die. Pick the discipline whose results you respect… spirituality, intellect, quantum physics. Our brightest minds agree on this topic. We are our planet.
We must evolve our sense of self-preservation.
Planetary consciousness = Biogeochemistry
“We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”
You don’t have to be a spiritual person to have planetary consciousness. In science, we call planetary consciousness biogeochemistry, the study of the earth and its natural cycles as an organism.
This field evolved from the synthesis of organic chemistry, earth & environmental science, and biology. The best textbook on the topic I’ve read was authored by William H. Schlesinger and extends far beyond carbon cycles into nitrogen, phosphorus, photosynthesis, and tectonic plates. Basically, everything on earth has a cycle - even things we perceive as static.
We could look at this planetary meta-organism as a fractal of the human body. Ocean currents are its arteries, and international shipping routes are its nervous system. People its cells… Or perhaps on a bad day — its bacterial colonies.
So this makes Earth a complex system. To simplify, a system with multiple component parts that interact with each other to produce unexpected results. Sound familiar?
Well, now that we’ve crossed six out of nine planetary tipping points, Earth is probably a chaotic system as well. In other words, a dynamic system that is sensitive to initial conditions yet unpredictable and uncertain.
So what do we learn from those two observations? We learn to stop using linear science. Chaotic and complex systems DO have a pattern, but it’s not a linear pattern, and it’s not predictable. In fact, it’s much more likely to be a fractal pattern.
Sure these systems are advanced, but they can still be manipulated, modeled, and even modified — IF you use the right tools. Complex and chaotic systems can absorb large inputs with no change whatsoever, but be disrupted by small things — the much-vaunted butterfly effect.
Small things like 100 smallfarmers and a video.
Planetary consciousness = Different actions
“As above, so below; as below, so above.”
What happens when you apply the lens of planetary consciousness to carbon cycles? Well first, you start directing your actions and money to different geocodes. Geocodes that aren’t within your neighborhood.
Let’s look at California’s much-vaunted progressive cap-and-trade program for carbon credits. Although emissions are emitted to the atmosphere, carbon credit buyers are required to store their carbon in California. This makes no sense.
25% of the world's land carbon is stored in the Amazon, which is also one of the planet's most critical ecological tipping points.
California has a higher-than-average risk of wildfires, while Amazon forests are very humid and rarely burn.
At our site, forests recover to full standing height in 6 years and live for 300 years. The average tree in the US lives for 40 years and has to face worsening drought conditions.
The Amazon itself is at a tipping point. Very little money is required to stop deforestation at the forests' edges and the cost of operations is fractional compared to California's reforestation programs.
Despite these facts, California legislators are still thinking with a vacuum cleaner mentality. Yes, emissions from California logically should be controlled in California, but, do carbon sequestration funds need to stay there? Why not store carbon more efficiently? Why not store it in a geocode where it’s more effective, that has no funding of its own? (Remember, California will also go down with the planetary ship if the Amazon collapses.)
Most Amazonian funding – and funding for other equatorial tropical forests like the Congo, are being processed through nonprofits (a 33% operating margin) or large public payments to nation-state governments that have minimal access to, or oversight of, these forests. (Even in cases where funds are not stolen outright.) Neither of these mechanisms incentivize the 1B smallfarmers and indigenous groups who live in tropical forests and are a devilish force for good or ill depending on the incentives.
Savimbo was designed to solve a problem that the industrialized world doesn’t care about. A bottom-up problem within the hotly contested borders of the Amazon rainforest. It’s a company for the indigenous peoples and local communities who were losing the battle for the protection of the jungle to their immediate neighbors. It's their action, and their dream, we’re optimizing.
But to solve this problem, we need funders, and clients, and friends with planetary consciousness. People who see the image above and want the green part to keep doing its job. People who think our farmers are worthy business partners.
People like our farmers — who stopped believing in vacuum cleaners, and got to work.
In conclusion
Earth is an organism — and currently a particularly fractious one. No worries - there’s an app for that! But you need to widen your lens a bit to care about it. Stop worrying about vacuum cleaners and look for a global solution.
By Drea Burbank, MD. Drea is an MD-technologist and co-founder of Savimbo.