Biosphere Earth — 7: Biospheric Reality

This is a picture from somewhere up in North Austin, not too far from where i live. And you know, inside of this small, domesticated ecosystem are (obviously) plants, insects and a maybe even a few wild animals.

Whether you see it or not — these plants, insects, and animals are interacting with the weather conditions they’re given, whatever happens with that building in the background, and so on and so forth. All is “connected & affected.”

Even at this super-local level all of those relationships (restating some of what’s in blog #5) inside of this ecosystem are creating and providing essential life-support services. Filtering air and water, protecting people and property from storms, maintaining microclimate, absorbing carbon, holding carbon and putting it to use, making oxygen, providing pollinator habitat…

And what this looks like in a very simple model (diagram below)… People, individuals, are in the middle of Earth’s biospheric system.

We live inside our beliefs, sub-cultures, and societies. Our societies share an economy across social and political divides. But our economy is fed by ecosystems. And it’s the totality of those ecosystems that creates Biosphere Earth, our life-support system.

It’s just this simple.

This is what created us and this is what continues our ability to live. We can’t go to another planet and find this. Over 4,300 planets surveyed so far and yet we still don’t see indication of even a simple life biosphere out there in the universe, much less a complex-life biosphere like our life support system, Biosphere Earth.

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More tomorrow! Thanks

Citations

• All citations for the research referenced in this blog can be found in the most recent draft of my forthcoming paper, “Biosphere Earth = all GDPs + all lives.”

This blog is part of a series on Biosphere Earth.
Read the previous blog: The Forgotten Memory.
To review other posts, please visit the TOC.