Havering Friends of the Earth

Everything Interconnected (2)

by Ian Pirie; first published 21-Jul-2023

An ouroboros symbol

Last month I wrote about how, in nature, everything is interconnected: how microbes in soil help plants to grow; how these plants are food for animals and ourselves; and how, when they die and rot back into the ground, they enrich the soil, becoming food for the microbes that live there. This is a circular process: from microbes to plants and back to microbes again.

Another feature of plants is that they absorb carbon dioxide. This gas is crucial to life on earth: plants absorb it to help them grow, and when they die carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere - to be re-absorbed by newly growing plants. Another circular process.

In this way, everything is kept in balance: life, death and re-birth. The ancient Egyptians and other cultures knew this about nature: the ouroboros symbol (first found in Tutankhamun's tomb) represents this circular process.

We humans, though, use technology to do something very different. We mine raw materials such as oil, and we burn it. When we do this, the heat and the gases produced do not go back to make more oil. The gases - mostly carbon dioxide again - build up in the atmosphere. Too much is produced for plants to absorb it all. This is not a circular process. We also use other materials such as metals to build factories and vehicles, and we make tons and tons of plastic! But these materials don't go back to where we found them! They stay on the surface of the earth.

Why is this important? Because our way of life is not sustainable. We are going, eventually, to run out of oil and of some metals. We are clogging up the oceans with our plastic waste. We have enormously increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And the consequences? Alongside pollution, causing illness and death, we have just experienced the hottest June since records began, there are vast forest fires in many places across the globe, and thousands of people are migrating away from areas that have become too hot to live in.

To survive, we need to think about how to live sustainably. We need to learn from the circular processes that keep nature going. A circular economy would be a start! (See for example Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth).

We must, as Friends of the Earth keeps saying: Reduce, Re-use and Recycle.