Alternative Futures and the Long Carbon Cycle

At this point, there is little debate about whether humans have impacted the short carbon cycle, in which carbon moves between the atmosphere and biosphere in a span of a few years. But what about the long carbon cycle, measured in millions of years? Can humans impact that?

Let’s look at the evidence.

The earth’s crust is the outermost level of the geosphere, made up of several components which have already been impacted by human behavior. For example, humans have altered the…

➤ Pedosphere through agriculture and human settlements
➤ Lithosphere through mining and atomic bomb tests
➤ Hydrosphere by re-routing rivers and creating lakes
➤ Biosphere by wiping out populations of creatures, including other human species besides Homo Sapiens, and by destroying forests

Can humans impact the geosphere? Clearly, the answer is yes. Does that mean that the end of the long carbon cycle, which won’t complete for at least another million years, will be affected? That’s impossible to say. The measurement problem is clearly intractable. There are a few scenarios that could play out.

1️⃣ Perhaps the system is self-correcting. Maybe humans, whose time on earth to this point is only a blip in the geologic timeline, will disappear due to our own self-destructive behavior or by falling prey to a microscopic predator or giant meteor. The environments we have impacted recover, and the cycle continues. Problem solved as far as the long carbon cycle is concerned.

2️⃣ Humanity survives and fails to change its ways, adapting to life on a planet whose environment would be considered unlivable by today’s population. The long carbon cycle is forever disrupted, but humans live on as the earth’s most resilient parasite.

3️⃣ The impact that humans have had on the environment doesn’t actually matter in the grand scheme of things. The long carbon cycle is so long and so massively complex that the ways in which human behavior has impacted the Pedosphere, Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, and Biosphere are insignificant, a “rounding error” in the cycle.

4️⃣ Humanity changes its ways, lessening and even repairing the damage it has done to the environment, and lives on in harmony with a healthy long carbon cycle.

Options 1 and 2 seem unpalatable from where I sit. Option 3 is either a roll of the dice with the highest stakes imaginable for our species or a supremely selfish shirking of responsibility to future generations. The idealistic option 4 is fraught with challenges in execution because as we all know, changing human behavior – even our own – can be incredibly difficult.

At Tilt Global, Alternative Futures is one of the tools we teach leadership teams to use when defining strategies in the face of uncertainty. The results of this sort of speculation do not necessarily paint an easy way forward, but teams can define a path toward which they want to strive while identifying the obstacles that must be addressed and being aware of less appealing possibilities.