Reversing the Great Sequestration: The Role of GEOMIMCRY

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This video series has looked at Geomimicry — the human imitation of physical geological processes in the design and manufacture products and services — and this video will look another sustainability challenge that arises from our dependence on geomimicry: Global climate change.

From space, what you notice about the Earth are the blue-green colors — green being plant life and blue, liquid water. This is not an accident, as biology has played a powerful co-evolutionary role in creating life-sustaining conditions on the planet. By looking at the chemistry of the atmosphere, we can see the power of the biosphere to alter the air around us.

When you combine geology with biology, you have an even greater long-term impact on the atmosphere. The first 600 million years of the earth are appropriately called the Hadean period and point to a very hot environment. Volcanoes released huge amounts of carbon dioxide in the early days of the earth. But as geologic activity started to slow, rainwater formed and rock weathering began to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, fostering conditions that were tolerable for life. I call this process "The Great Sequestration."

Now, however, with the rise of our geomimetic industrial economy, we are in the process of reversing the Great Sequestration. Through coal mining, we are exhuming the ancient Carboniferous forests and burning them for energy. By doing so, we put their long-sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere. We're reversing the dynamic interplay between biology and geology that took hundreds of millions of years to play out, and doing so in the blink of a geologic eye.

Will our reliance on geomimicry return us to an environment that is less conducive to life? We don't know the full consequences of reversing the Great Sequestration, but it is certainly making a world less conducive to the lifestyles we’ve grown accustomed to. We are already beginning to see impacts of climate change with the increasing variability in hurricanes, flooding and droughts, all of which are in agreement with predicted impacts of increasing atmospheric CO2. Geologic history tells us that reversing the Great Sequestration is risky and something that should be a preeminent concern to humankind.