Planetary boundary 4: biogeochemical flows
Nitrogen, phosphorous, heavy metals, and carbon. How do we stop poisoning the biosphere?
Energy generation, modern agriculture, industrial processes, and materials mining sustain our civilization. Our current practices in these four areas destabilize Earth’s ecology.
This article is the most difficult of the series to write so far. Biogeochemical flows impact other planetary boundaries: biosphere integrity, freshwater use, land-system change, ocean acidification, and climate change. Let’s start with the nasty byproducts of agriculture, mining, and industry.
We overuse nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers to produce our food. Industrial processes, detergents, fossil fuels exhaust, and mining activities add to the flows. Excessive nitrogen and phosphorous ends up in our water. What we get is eutrophication, an over-enrichment of nutrients that leads to excessive growth of algae and other aquatic plants. Eutrophication harms the environment by reducing biodiversity, disrupting food chains, and giving invasive species an advantage over native species. Altered nutrient cycles can lead to degraded water quality, species extinction, and unstable ecosystems.
When the planetary boundaries were first assessed in 2009, nitrogen had already exceeded the boundary for biogeochemical flows. In 2015, phosphorous crossed the boundary. In 2023, we were deep in the red zone for both.
What can we do about it? Agriculture practices, wastewater treatment, and industrial discharges must change. Ecosystem restoration projects that implement living systems to filter out excess nutrients can help. So can monitoring and management of water quality and ecosystem health to detect and address eutrophication early. Ultimately, we have to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous our civilization discharges.
Who’s doing that today? Governments taking steps to enforce reductions include China, Denmark, the European Union, Japan, and the USA Environmental Protection Agency. Mondelēz International and Nestlé represent corporate leaders moving toward sustainable sourcing and water quality improvement. Now, I understand all you conspiracy theorists out there might not be too impressed by this list. And I’m sure, if I dug further, I’d find lots of smaller entities taking action. Advocacy and grassroots action are vitally important, but we need the big players like the ones I’ve listed here to take action. Imperfect action beats inaction.
Now comes heavy metal contamination. While it’s not visualized in the planetary boundaries framework, I can tell you first-hand, it’s a dangerous problem and it’s getting worse. Our technology-driven society requires massive amounts of metals and energy. Demand continues to grow with the construction of AI data centers and associated electrical demand. The popular rhetoric bypasses the fact that materials used in wind and solar power generation, small module nuclear reactors, EVs and the supporting grid infrastructure require staggering amounts of mining, fossil fuel, and freshwater inputs. All those processes contribute to detrimental biogeochemical flows. Copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, lead, cadmium, and arsenic all play a part in alternative energy technologies, despite the environmental effects associated with their extraction and use.
The mining companies I work with have adopted sustainable mining practices, even though it has affected our profits and faced opposition from investors. As an industry, we have a long way to go. Respect to BHP Billiton, Vale, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Teck Resources, Anglo American, Newmont Corporation, Barrick Gold, and the other miners enacting environmental stewardship programs.
Next up, carbon. The climate change narrative has focused on global warming and catastrophic weather caused by carbon. I’ll go deeper into carbon markets, alternative energy, and energy politics in the next article. Let’s talk about fracking, the controversial process of releasing hydrocarbons locked underground using high-pressure fluid injections. If not properly managed, fracking fluids add hazardous chemicals to biogeochemical flows. These practices have received scrutiny and publicity over the last decade, as fracking became the predominant practice for new oil and gas wells. According to The Conversation, as of April 2023, 23 states required oil and gas companies to provide data to the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry to improve transparency. Stepping up to face the issues of proper waste water disposal and contamination of local water sources and groundwater by fracking fluid. The Marcellus Shale Coalition, spanning Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and New York, discovered their fracking wastewater contains massive amounts of lithium. In Pennsylvania alone, they estimate that this fracking byproduct could yield 40% of the US supply of lithium for EV battery manufacturing. Let’s see more of that kind of thinking!
Worth calling out that reinventing these industries to curtail their biogeochemical flows is a massive undertaking. I’ve assessed what this will take in the mining industry. It took me years to comprehend the scope of effort and the capital required. Now I’m watching investors and board members go through the process of comprehension. It’s difficult. There’s an elephant in the room. This massive undertaking requires massive energy. Which means more carbon.
Love, Aventurine
Aventurine is a fictional character from a forthcoming novel series by Author Jeffrey Griffith.
