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…3/11: Rachel Donald asks James Dyke:
“Explain a little bit more to me how it is that within certain systems, like the Earth system before we started putting loads and loads of extra carbon dioxide and methane and everything else into the atmosphere – before we, the human system radically increased its amount of entropic waste – how was it that systems were managing to keep entropic waste within a certain gradient that was useful work and didn’t like over pollute?”
James’s answer follows…
…4/11: James Dyke:
“I guess the short answer is through energy, material, recycling.
So the biosphere has evolved. I don’t mean to evoke a sense of purpose or direction on the biosphere, although some people do, right?
But it has evolved over time, and we’re talking billions of years, to highly conserve things that life wants, limiting nutrients like phosphorus or nitrogen or other bits and pieces, which are essentially in rocks, which get liberated by life and…
5/11
“…life has evolved ways to get access to those limiting nutrients.
So lichens can secrete acids to dissolve rock, which grab hold of these nutrients and then things eat the lichen and the thing that eats the lichen gets eaten and eaten. And that goes round and round, which we learn at school. It’s never a food chain, it’s a food web, right?
Now, eventually, let’s say that lichen was liberating an atom of phosphorus that goes round and round tens, hundreds of times until eventually…
6/11
“…[that phosphorus atom] ends up in the sea, and it goes round and round tens of times in marine ecosystems, but then eventually drops out of the marine ecosystem and falls to the bottom of the sea floor.
Even then, there’s a little bit of recycling. Whenever you see those submarines that go right down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, these weird things, you know, nightmarish creatures, they’re eating the products of the kind of detritus that rains down from the photic zone of the sea…
7/11
“…But even then, eventually [that phosphoris atom] gets covered with silt and mud and it becomes rock and it goes back into the Earth’s interior and then maybe 10, 20 million years later, it comes back up again…
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