We can repair the Earth’s ruptured carbon cycle by recarbonizing it with the living carbon of biodiversity.
Credit: Pixabay

The Earth is living, and also creates life. Over 4 billion years the Earth has evolved a rich biodiversity — an abundance of different living organisms and ecosystems — that can meet all our needs and sustain life.

Through biodiversity and the living functions of the biosphere, the Earth regulates temperature and climate, and has created the conditions for our species to evolve. This is what NASA scientist James Lovelock found in working with Lynn Margulis, who was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases from the atmosphere. The Earth is a self-regulating living organism, and life on Earth creates conditions for life to be maintained and evolve.

The Gaia Hypothesis, born in the 1970s, was a scientific reawakening to the Living Earth. The Earth fossilized some living carbon, and transformed it into dead carbon, storing it underground. That is where we should have left it.

All the coal, petroleum and natural gas […]