Freshman biology is where I first got hooked on science.  I grew up in Deerfield, Illinois.  What hooked me was the story of the deer.  Basically, humans moved in, killed off all of the deer’s natural predators because they would attack their small children and their cattle, and the deer population exploded.  That explosion also decimated local vegetation because it could no longer support the deer numbers.  As a remedy, there are deer culls, controlled hunts to keep the deer numbers under control.  I found this story to be fascinating – how a small group of humans could have such an impact on an entire ecosystem.  Then I heard the story of Yellowstone.

In 1995, Yellowstone National Park reintroduced 14 wolves to the park, which had long been hunted to zero.  The result? Not only did the predators get the huge deer population under control, but the park also experienced revegetation of previously eroding riverbanks, and the return of rabbits, beavers, birds and more.  In fact, it was so impactful that the course of the river changed. 

The restoration of balance changed the course of a river.  14 wolves. This stuff blows my mind.  Check out this amazing video about it.

The Story of Carbon is very similar to that of Yellowstone – a system thrown out of balance having wide-ranging impact on life and land. That’s largely where the similarity ends, unless the Yellowstone story started with humans first ADDING deer to the park IN ADDITION to killing off it’s predators. Because we’ve taken long-buried carbon and ADDED into the system, in addition to destroying the natural mechanism that maintains the balance.

But we humans have gotten smarter, no? And we are creating solutions left and right to clean up this mess we’ve made. You may have recently heard terms like “Carbon Markets”, “Carbon Credits” or “Carbon Offsets.” You may have heard about cities, countries and corporations with a goal of “Net Zero” by 2030, 2035, 2050, etc. To those of us not working in that world, it may seem rather mysterious. Simply put, we humans, in the last 200 hundred years, have gotten carbon all wrong, just like we did the wolves at Yellowstone or cougars in Deerfield. So now we need to incentivize those that create SOURCES of Carbon to reduce their output of carbon into the atmosphere and simultaneously incentivize those that create SINKS of Carbon to increase their input of carbon into the ground. The way the Carbon Market works is the SOURCES are essentially buying “credits” from the SINKS.

But like I mentioned earlier, first we built entire systems around the carbon long buried that was not part of the balanced cycle of carbon – utilities, transportation, agriculture, industry rely largely on fossil fuels.  So to solve it:

• First, we have to stop pulling the ancient carbon from the ground that we pour into fuel, plastics and chemicals.  Because that created an excess of carbon in the system. 
• Second, we need to remove some of that carbon from the system altogether, the excess.  An example of this action is the invention of technologies like encapsulating carbon in cement.
• Finally, we need to restore the living carbon sinks that once inhabited the earth as trees, forests, wetlands, coastal ecosystems, and the micro-universe within the soil. Those carbon sinks kept the carbon cycling and balanced, and we’ve almost completely destroyed the sinks.  

“Carbon, that is currently one of the biggest problems in the atmosphere, can be
the biggest solution in the soil.”

Ryland Engelhart, Co-Founder Kiss the Ground

So, righting these wrongs and working towards restoring a balance is where we are at in the Carbon Story.  And the solutions require a change in sourcing, manufacturing, packaging, and distrbution in so many industries that it seems insurmountable.  The “wolves” have not yet been returned, but we seem to know how to get them there.

This table shows just some of the Sources and Sinks in the system.  And changing entire systems is no easy task.  Building a market around moving carbon is a start because it incentivizes people within the system to change. 

So the way the carbon story is now told, there are those that create carbon sources and those that create carbon sinks. There is enormous potential in our energy, industry and transportation sectors to eliminate carbon sources. There is an enormous potential to improve carbon sinks in how we manage our forests, grasslands and bodies of water. And most relevant to this blog, there is an enormous and quite beautiful opportunity to eliminate a source AND create a sink of carbon through how we produce our food, which currently accounts for almost a third of the atmospheric carbon we are trying to mitigate.

The truth is that the Carbon Story is not just the carbon story.  The Deer Story, our Food System Story, the Water Story and the Carbon Story are one and the same story. It’s about restoring balance. And now you know the story. Or at least part of the story.  Stay tuned for a post – Carbon by the Numbers.