here's life

Come with me to my childhood home!  The house holds little interest for us, and while we glance at the barn as we pass, our real destination is beyond it and it's double-trunked Red Maple which reaches above it.  No, we are heading down the sandy isthmus, a two-track lane between two sets of fields.  This year, there are soybeans on the right, and corn on the left. Every year, the same two crops are alternated on this fertile soil, which produced well each fall, with the proper application of seed, fertilizer, lime and pesticides. Every summer, the crops would pull down carbon dioxide, water and sunshine from the sky and turn it into plants.  A small portion of each plant was harvested, hauled off to be made into chicken feed, most of which turned into chicken manure, mixed with sawdust, and was stored above our wellhead and then spread on the fields.  Every winter, the rest of each plant---much more massive than the seeds which were harvested---the rest of each plant fell into the ground, and rotted.  When we figure in the chicken cycle, I think we can ignore the amount of carbon hauled in and out in trucks each year, and call that part of the cycle steady-state, or constant.  Because our winters were not very harsh, microbial action over the months would break down the dead plants, and turn them back into carbon dioxide, which was released into the air---or, dissolved in the water, washed away, and then released into the air---unlike places more north, where the cold winters stop the breakdown of carbon, resulting in deep, humus-laden soil, or even peat bogs. But, carbon isn't the only cycle going on.  There is nitrogen as well, pulled from the air by the soybean plants, and the distant fertilizer plants, the excess nitrates being washed into the groundwater, endangering wells, and flowing into the ocean and bay, disrupting aquatic life.  But, since today's environmental outlook is more focused on Greenhouse Gasses and Global Warming, we will ignore the death of coral in the gulf at the mouth of the Mississippi.  After all, it won't matter what killed the coral-reef diving industry, when our Earth looks like Venus---as my little brothers explain, "you don't want to live there because it rains sulfuric acid, and is hot enough to melt solder!"
So, for the carbon cycle we have a fairly constant amount of carbon in the soil, and not a large amount of carbon being hauled off.  Even though the plants remove CO2 from the atmosphere, pretty much all of it goes back again. This helps our plight very little. We need some way to hang onto the Carbon, keep it out of the sky. Maybe we should keep walking.

After passing a quarter mile of fields, we come to hundreds of acres of trees.  On the left is a stand that is several decades old, the trees are tall, and block out most of the light, so there is little underbrush.  The right side is a little younger, a little more brush, and so more interesting for us to play in.  Oh, there is a tree which has fallen, landing on a smaller tree so that the top is several feet off the ground.  I lost a Reindeer-horn knife playing on that tree soon after moving to that house.  Ten years later that tree was much more rotten---in fact, it would have rotted more quickly had it actually hit the ground like some of the other trees around.
 As we continue back toward the pond, we on our left is a stand of short pine trees, 15 feet tall or so.  So thick with briers and underbrush that we didn't venture into it.  It stands on my map as "Unexplored".  There are more woods beyond the pond, but they are hardwood until you get really far back, so let's stand on top of the sand mound by the pond, and just watch the trees we've passed change over the years.  The trees reach for the sun, drawing in water that falls from the sky, and gleaning tons of carbon out of the air to build their strong, uniform trunks, one ring each summer and a more dense one each winter.  But tree's don't grow forever.  Winds blow down branches and even trees, and these slowly sink into the forest floor, building up a thick layer. This mass of needles and wood slowly rots, turning back into carbon dioxide, which is cooking us all.  Neither the woods nor the fields are helping to stave off the warming that is causing climate change, melting the icecaps, and triggering more and more massive hurricanes, which level our levies and leave our lower lands in Louisiana lying in liquid....oh, sorry.  But since these plant cycles end up about the same way they started, we haven't helped anything.  I must leave now, and move to the other side of the Mississippi, but you can continue to watch---what's that?  You see that loggers have arrived.  They are clearing the land of the mature trees, ripping them out using huge purpose-built machinery, loading them on trucks and hauling them away.  The young, brier filled stand of trees is spared, but the woods are not the same.  I wouldn't want to move back, not after that destruction!  But, being curious, you snag a ride astraddle a log on top of one of the trucks, to find out where all this carbon is going, now that we have gotten it out of the air. Meanwhile, bulldozers are piling up the tree stumps, and some industrial crew of wood elves is planting more white pines, in long straight rows.  You have arrived at the pulp mill, where you disembark, and watch the trees be debarked, and ground up, soaked in chemicals, ground to a slurry, and eventually turned into paper. 

By that time, I am in college, standing in the computer labs, waiting for my two page English paper to print.  Unfortunately, someone just sent a 500 page presentation on FAA rules to the printer, (one slide per page) and then forgot about it and went to dinner.  When it is done, it sits on the table for several days, but no one claims it, so it is thrown in the Recycle bin.  I grab a hundred pages, punch holes in them, and use the blank backs for my Robotics notes.  The rest stay in the "Recycle" bin until the Phys Plant workers come and dump it, and all the other trash, into the dumpster, where it goes to a landfill.  After Robotics, I go to Senate, where we discuss this paper problem, and tell Administration about our concerns.  One day, Senate announces a victory!  After harping on recycling for a long time, we find out that Ram Paper Products is going to do a pilot recycling program in the new Engineering building, and see if it is break-even or better.  Ahh, so it is economics, not ecology that drives paper recycling!  Which makes sense.  Every tree we kill to print a Flight Science 1 presentation is replaced by a baby tree, which quickly begins to pull carbon out of our air.  When we recycle a bin of paper, one less tree gets removed and replaced by a little tree, so more carbon stays in the air.  When we throw a bin of paper in the garbage, that paper goes to a landfill, where it waits anaerobically for the next flood/volcano/iceage to turn it into coal.  Meanwhile, my local model airplane field is built on top of years of trash from Boeing and it's employees that populate this town.  Boeing, and now my company, uses a lot of paper.  We print everything out a couple times each time we touch it. Whenever I make some tiny change I use a big stack of paper, which grows as it goes down the line.  This is because our process is set up to fit the requirements of the FAA---me and some others joke that stands for Forest Annihilation Association, due to the huge amounts of paperwork we do in response to their rules.  Actually, it is more our system which is at fault, but paper is so much easier than a screen to look at, thumb through, and mark up.  I am not sure where the paper goes that I toss in our "Recycle" bins...