The Carbon Cycle: A Dance of Interdependence
Transformative Explorations in Ecology for Children and Their Adults
“We breathe air exhaled from trees whose leaves are made of starlight … Our veins echo the patterns of rivers, branches, and root systems. We are not a part of Nature. We are Nature.” Marysia Miernowska
Introduction
While water facilitates almost all life processes in all living beings on Earth, carbon is the central building block for all life on Earth. All the molecules of life, including proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids are built on a framework of carbon. That’s why scientists and science fiction writers refer to life on Earth as “carbon-based life forms." In addition to being central to life, carbon is present in our atmosphere, the ocean, under the soil, and moves between us all. Not only is carbon present in life, the solid Earth, and our oceans and atmosphere, it also moves between them. For example, we and our animal kin breathe out carbon in the form of carbon dioxide. Plants, with the help of the Sun, take in carbon dioxide and use that carbon to make sugar and more complex carbohydrates; more carbon-based materials! We eat plants and use the Sun’s energy stored in those carbohydrates to fuel the little fires in each of our cells that power our life processes, breathing out carbon dioxide. As illustrated by this example, carbon moves through the biosphere, which includes all living beings, the soil, water, and our atmosphere in many cyclic pathways. We refer to the cyclical paths carbon takes as the carbon cycle. This cycle has kept the concentration of carbon in its various forms balanced and stable for at least 800,000 years. During 1979-2022, the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increased by over 20%. This matters because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. It is called that because it traps heat like a greenhouse, keeping the warmth inside. This increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is the prime mover in the global climate crisis.
In this post, we share activities to enable you and your kids to taste, smell, feel, and reflect on our participation in the global carbon cycle. We share these activities to scaffold your experience of the carbon cycle, not as a process that happens out there, but as a process that flows through all of us and unites us in a dance of interdependence. We’ve also selected these experiences to illustrate how factory systems have upset this dance and how we can reclaim our ancestral ways of nurturing the Earth and regenerating ecosystems.
One way to transform our worldview from seeing ourselves as separate from each other and nature is to understand the science of how breath becomes tree, becomes fruit, becomes us.
Activities
Carbon is an Ingredient in Many Things
Materials: Chalk, charcoal, a graphite pencil, a bottle of seltzer, baking soda, a jar for making soil milkshakes.
Carbon is an ingredient in many different things. When I talk with kids about this, I bring some examples with me and point out others nearby.
Show your kids chalk, charcoal, and graphite pencils and ask them if they want to draw with them.
Ask your kids if they can think of anything those items have in common.
Acknowledge their answers and pursue them whether they match your expectations or not. Incorporate their answers as you point out: in addition to being able to draw on a surface, they all contain carbon and both the graphite in pencils and diamonds are pure carbon, just in different arrangements!
Share some seltzer with your students or if you don’t have the means to do that, show them the bubbles! Ask them: what do you think is inside the bubbles?; what happens to what’s inside the bubbles when they pop at the surface of the seltzer? After engaging them in making sense of seltzer bubbles, you can explain that the bubbles include a carbon-based gas form called carbon dioxide.
Pour a bit of baking soda in each kid's hand and ask them to feel the texture.
Ask your kids if they can think of anything those items have in common.
Acknowledge their answers and pursue them whether they match your expectations or not. Don’t listen to their answers as if they are important. Listen to them because they are important. My thinking has been changed many times based on something a child has said to me.
Incorporate their answers as you point out that one thing the items have in common is that there is carbon in each of those things.
Dissolve some baking soda in water and point out that there is lots of carbon dissolved in ocean water, too.
Suggest that your kids make a mud milkshake as described in Playing in the Dirt and/or hand sort some dirt looking for bits of decaying plant and animal matter.
Ask them what they see in the soil. Keep prompting for details. Get curious!
Ask them if they see anything that might contain carbon.
Acknowledge their answers and pursue them whether they match your expectations or not and incorporate them as you point out there is carbon in the soil in the form of decomposing plant and animal parts.
Mention that there is also carbon in the air and in all living beings! I often do this in the midst of a game of Nature Tag-Make Me One with Everything Version telling them that if I shout out “carbon” they can touch air, soil, or their own heads, each of which contain carbon.
Ask your kids which of the examples of carbon-based materials are solids, which are liquids, and which are gasses.
Acknowledge their answers and pursue and incorporate them as you point out that carbon is an ingredient in air in the form of gaseous carbon dioxide like the seltzer bubbles, in our oceans in the form of calcium carbonate like the baking soda in water, in living things and soil in the form of sugar and other carbohydrates (don’t worry about kids remembering the science words. It’s all about exposure.).
Scientists use the Word “Pools” to Talk about the Places Carbon Hangs Out
In our Making Sense of the Water Cycle While Playing in the Forest post, we learned that water moves between bodies of water, soil, the atmosphere, and plants. Those general places where materials spend time are called pools. Carbon also exists in pools!
Display some seltzer, leaf litter, some edible plant matter, and coal or some form of petroleum (petroleum jelly counts) for your kids.
Point at the seltzer and ask your kids where they might find carbon in the same form as the carbon in seltzer bubbles. If they don’t say, “in air or in the atmosphere”, ask where they think carbon in the seltzer bubbles goes when the bubbles pop.
Point at the leaf litter and ask your kids where they might find carbon in the same form as the leaf litter. If they don’t say something like, “in the soil," remind them of their experience with making soil milkshakes in the previous activity.
Point at the plant matter and ask the kids where else they might find carbon in the same form as in the plant matter. If they don’t come up with “other living things” ask them where the carbon in plants goes when we and other animals eat plants.
Point at your sample of coal or other petroleum product and ask your kids where they think petroleum comes from. If they don’t say something about petroleum coming from buried long-dead plants, fossils, or animals, talk with them about that in a way that references local examples of coal, oil, or natural gas mining. Noticing where these extractions take place also allows for conversations about conservation, city-planning, and how nearby natural systems change as a result.
Ask your kids if any of them can name some of the main places where carbon hangs out. When they've all had an opportunity to speak, summarize by saying something like the following, incorporating their answers as makes sense. Remember that specific words are less important than the general ideas. Carbon hangs out in the atmosphere (i.e., air) in the same form as the carbon in seltzer bubbles, in topsoil (i.e., dirt) as decaying organic matter (ie., dead stuff), in living beings, and in fossil fuels that were buried beneath the Earth’s surface between 60-550 million years ago. The ocean and the Earth beneath the soil also contain carbon in various forms but are beyond the scope of our brief introduction to the carbon cycle.
Carbon Flows from One Pool to Another
In our Making Sense of the Water Cycle While Playing in the Forest post, we saw that water flows from the atmosphere to the pedosphere (soil) via condensation (molecules of water vapor coming together to form water droplets) and precipitation, from the soil to plants and back to the atmosphere via transpiration (absorption of water through roots, movement of water to leaves, evaporation from leaves). In this path, evaporation, transpiration, condensation, and precipitation are how a material, in this case water, flows between pools. The water cycle is largely a physical process. Transpiration, the flow of water through a plant and into the atmosphere, is the only major flow in the water cycle that involves life. Carbon also flows between pools, however, life plays a major role in how carbon moves through the carbon cycle!
Fire moves carbon from formerly living things into the air
When I support children making fires, I often mention how wood fires are the release of energy from the sun stored in formerly living material.
Next time you’re making a fire with kids, roasting marshmallows, or otherwise sitting around a campfire, ask them what fire is useful for.
Listen to their answers and follow up with clarifying questions.
Once they’ve shared what they have to share, incorporate any answers relating to heat and light as you explain that people have used fires as a source of heat and light for around a million years!
Ask your kids if they can smell the fire.
Ask them what they think smoke is.
If you cook over fire, ask the kids why the bottom of the pot is blackened or darker than the sides.
Explain that plants store energy from the sun in sugars and other carbon-based materials called carbohydrates. Fire releases the stored energy of the sun in the form of heat and light. It also releases carbon dioxide and partially burned carbohydrates. Those partially burned carbohydrates give smoke its smell and blacken the bottom of pots we use to cook over fires.
Carbon flows from most living beings into the atmosphere via our out-breaths
Fires may seem to have nothing to do with breathing, yet these two processes have a lot in common!
Ask your kids to take a deep breath and to blow it out.
Ask your kids if any of them know what there is more of in their outbreaths than in their in-breaths.
Ask the children if they remember the gas that came out of the bubbles in seltzer.
Share a quote or poem or song that would be relevant to the land and people who have shared it. Here is a quote we recommend from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address:
We now send greetings and thanks to our eldest Brother, the Sun. Each day without fail he travels the sky from east to west, bringing the light of a new day. He is the source of all the fires of life. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks to our Brother, the Sun.
Ask your children if they have any ideas about what it means when the Haudenosaunee describe the Sun as “the source of all the fires of life.”
Listen deeply to their answers and pursue them.
When the kids seem like they’ve shared all they have to share, incorporate any answers that relate to the sun being the ultimate source of almost all energy on Earth as you explain the following:
We and most other living beings have little fires burning inside of us. Much like campfires, our little fires burn carbohydrates to release their stored energy, also releasing carbon in the form of carbon dioxide as a byproduct. The fires that burn in us burn at a lower temperature and don’t produce any smoke but otherwise are much like other fires. Our out-breaths and those of all life on Earth are one way that carbon flows into the atmosphere. We join in the carbon cycle just by breathing!
Some life forms take carbon from the atmosphere and use it to make sugar with help from the Sun
When you encounter plants that produce sweet edible berries or edible nectar from a flower available, suggest that your kids breathe into the berry bush or flowers.
Gather and eat some of the sweet edible berries or suck nectar from a honeysuckle or other flower with edible nectar. If you can’t gather either of these, give students some store-bought berries.
Ask the kids how they would describe the taste of the berries and what they think makes the berries taste the way they do.
Listen to their answers and pursue them.
When the kids seem like they’ve shared all they have to share incorporate any answers that relate to berries containing sugar that makes them sweet as you explain the following:
Most plants and other green beings store energy from the sun so they can use it later by using the Sun’s energy to make sugar. Sugar is a carbon-based material that works like a battery storing the Sun’s energy for later use. The berries or nectar you ate, almost certainly contain carbon that they breathed out in the past. Again, the carbon cycle flows through us!
The process of storing the sun’s energy in sugar, a carbon-based material, is called photosynthesis. Because they produce their own sugar, plants and other sugar makers are called producers.
Plants not only use the sugar they make to store the Sun’s energy. They also make other carbohydrates from those sugars. Plants use those other carbohydrates for long-term energy storage and to give them structure. Consumers also eat those other carbohydrates in the form of roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds (see Six Plant Parts that Plants and People Need).
Don’t worry about your kids memorizing these words. That will come in time through natural repetition over time.
Carbon flows from sugar producers to other beings via consumption
Ask your kids where the sugar in the berries they ate or the nectar they drank is now.
Point out that people and other beings that can’t make sugar, get their energy-storing sugar by eating beings that can make sugar or beings that eat beings that eat sugar.
Explain that because we can’t make sugar and must get our energy storage material by consuming other beings, all of us non-sugar makers are called consumers.
Life is the heart of the carbon cycle
As you can see, unlike with the water cycle, life processes play a central role in the carbon cycle. Plants and other sugar-producing life forms pull carbon from the atmosphere and use energy from the Sun to photosynthesize carbon into carbon-based sugars that store the sun’s energy. When producers and consumers burn those sugars they release carbon back into the atmosphere. The relationship between producers and consumers is the heart of the carbon cycle!
Ask your kids what animals get from plants.
Ask your kids if animals that eat plants ever do anything good for plants.
Point out that plants and other producers depend on animals and other consumers to release carbon into the atmosphere so they can use that carbon to make sugar.
Point out that animals and other consumers depend on producers for their food. Many animals also help pollinate those plants and or move their seeds around and sometimes deposit them in a nice pile of nutritious poop.
Point out that we, other animals, and all consumers also depend on producers to release oxygen from the carbon dioxide they get from the atmosphere!
Point out that the relationship between producers and consumers is mutually beneficial to both.
Ask your kids if they are part of the carbon cycle and if so, how?
After listening to and following up on their responses, point out that the carbon cycle is not something outside of us. It flows through us and unites us in a dance of interdependence. I don’t expect children to remember these words. I hope they remember the sweet taste of berries and nectar made by sugar-producing plants from our outbreaths. The amount of reverence and excitement students can feel being able to identify, eat, and thank their local plants is one of Nicolette’s favorite experiences to witness!
Carbon flows from living beings into the soil
Encourage your students to lie down on the forest floor and take a deep look at the leaf litter. You can even make a little treasure hunt of it. Ask them to look for remnants of living things, including:
Tiny pieces of plant parts like stuff that floated when they made dirt milkshakes
Tiny animal parts including parts of creatures that live in the soil
Point out that when any being dies, loses parts like leaves, or leaks solid or liquid byproducts, those carbon-based materials find themselves on top of the soil.
Carbon flows from soil back into the atmosphere
While still lying down on the forest floor ask your kids to look for living things, including:
White thread or blotches of fungus
Worms, insects, insect larvae, other arthropods like spiders, centipedes, and millipedes
Suggest your kids look under logs and rocks if they don’t find any life elsewhere in the litter on the forest floor
Compost piles, particularly vermicompost piles, (see Composting and Deep Mulching for more information on composting including vermicomposting) are great places to look for and talk about soil life.
Ask your kids what they think the living things in soil and compost eat as carbon-based food.
Explain that they eat everything they can get a bite of in the pile including smaller organisms that eat what they find in the pile.
Point out that once formerly living material falls to the forest floor, non-sugar producers including worms, nematodes, bacteria, insects, and fungi go to work decomposing those materials and returning carbon to the atmosphere in much the same way as above-ground consumers do.
Explain that organisms that decompose formerly alive stuff rather than eating living beings are called decomposers. The only difference between decomposers and consumers is that consumers eat carbon-based organisms that were recently alive and decomposers eat poop and the parts of carbon-based life forms that may have been dead for a long time, such as logs or animals.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end
Ask your kids where all living beings end up after they die.
Ask your kids to look around them for plants.
Ask your kids where plants get their start, where are seeds when they first germinate.
Explain that, while cycles have no beginning and no end, soil can make reasonable claims to be both. We can think of soil as the end of the carbon cycle because all carbon-based life ultimately returns to the soil. Soil can be described as the beginning of the carbon cycle because plants are responsible for producing sugar, the carbon-based energy storage material that ultimately fuels all life forms, and most plants get their start in life in soil.
Carbon flows into the atmosphere when humans mine and burn deposits of fossil fuels for heat and electricity
Safely light some coal, oil, or a lighter.
Ask your kids where coal, oil, and flammable gasses come from.
Incorporate their answers as you explain that everything we burn for heat and electricity, except for wood, comes from fossil fuels buried beneath the Earth’s surface between 60-550 million years ago.
The mining and combustion of underground deposits of fossil fuels for heat and electricity added a new flow from underground deposits of fossil fuels that take millions of years and special conditions to form into the atmosphere.
The Greenhouse Effect - Using a Solar Oven
If you have a solar oven (Here is a list of great DIY ways to make a solar oven together!), make some pine needle or other tea using it.
Ask your kids if any of them have any idea about how a solar oven works.
Incorporate their answers and explain that the Sun’s light energy turns into heat energy when it hits solid objects and that the clear cover of the solar oven and greenhouses lets the light in but traps the heat so it can’t get out.
Explain that carbon in the atmosphere does a similar thing to what this clear covering does–lets the light in but traps the heat.
Making Sense of the Carbon Cycle
The Shape and Location of Material Flow
Draw a circle and a line in the dirt about 10 feet (3 meters) apart and ask your students to stand near the shape that reminds them of how carbon moves around in the forest.
Ask the kids standing near each shape to talk with each other about why they chose the shape they chose.
Ask if there are any volunteers in each group who would like to share why they chose the shape they chose.
Resist the urge to give your answer.
Ask the kids, where is the carbon cycle? Their answers may surprise you.
Diagraming Carbon flow
Show your kids the following diagram and give them time to really look at it and to ask any clarifying questions they may have.
Again, ask the kids if and how they participate in the carbon cycle.
Ask your children if any of them would like to describe what the diagram means to them.
After giving them as much time as they want and carefully listening to their answers, share the following with them.
The above diagram summarizes everything we’ve talked about in this post. Carbon flows from most living beings into the atmosphere via our out-breaths as a product of us slowly burning sugar within us. Plants and other sugar producers take carbon from the atmosphere and use it to make sugar with help from the Sun. Carbon flows from sugar producers to sugar consumers when consumers eat sugar producers and/or other consumers. Carbon flows from living beings into the soil when living beings leak previously consumed materials, drop parts of themselves, and ultimately die. Carbon flows from the soil back into the atmosphere when decomposers eat decaying materials from living beings and slow-burn burn their carbon-based materials. Several hundred years ago, humans created a new flow of carbon into the atmosphere when we began mining and burning deposits of fossil fuels for heat and electricity.
What Happens When Things Break Inside Versus Outside?
Ask your kids, what happens to things like toys that break in their house.
Listen carefully to their answers.
Ask your kids, what happens when things like trees break in the forest.
Listen carefully to their answers.
Watch this great 25-minute video about the problems with linear systems with your kids The Story of Stuff.
Repeat the questions you asked above now that you’ve all seen the film.
Enacting Carbon Flow
In our The Interaction Game post, we introduce a game that involves children enacting interactions they have seen in the forest or otherwise know about. For example, one child might pretend to be an oak tree and another might pretend to pick and eat an acorn from that tree. At the end of one of my 10-week sessions, an eight-year-old child led several others to enact a multi-step material exchange interaction that included an acorn growing from the ground, a squirrel eating an acorn from that tree, and a bobcat eating that squirrel and pooping on the ground beneath the tree that was the source of the acorn.
Support some interested kids acting out a material exchange cycle. For example, carbon flowing from air to plant to animal to soil to air.
Encourage them to include humans in the enactments.
Education
The worldview that we are all separate from each other and the rest of the natural world underlies modern industrial culture and has driven humanity to the brink of our own extinction. As Earth-centered educators, we think it is critical that we all have a basic understanding of how ecosystems function as a dance of interdependence as one way of transforming our worldview: we are all in this together. So, we have an agenda. Yet, as experienced educators, we know that learning happens best as we try to make sense of our direct experiences. We also acknowledge that play and playful activity serve a central role in learning from our self-guided explorations of the world around us. Yet, it is unlikely that we’ll come to understand the carbon cycle through free play alone. We’re also unlikely to grasp the deep relationship the carbon cycle has to our lives and life on planet Earth in general through reading or listening to a lecture. So, what’s an educator to do? Do we need to revert to lectures when we want to share information with kids? Absolutely not.
By doing the following, along with allowing plenty of time for play and playful activity, we can share the sense that others have made with children as they engage in making sense of those same phenomena.
Set up and/or highlight direct sensory-motor experiences that are likely to be meaningful to the kids in your care. For example, breathing into a berry bush and then eating a sweet berry from that bush.
Ask lots of questions to prompt them to make sense of those experiences. For example, how would you describe the taste of these berries or what nectar tastes like and what do you think might be in them that makes them taste so sweet?
Always listen deeply to children’s answers and never discard them. Respond to all answers as useful and informative.
Share information with children in brief notes that respond to the children's sense-making. For example, most plants and other green beings store energy from the sun so they can use it later by using the Sun’s energy to make sugar. Sugar is a carbon-based material that works something like a battery that stores the Sun’s energy for later use.
This kind of support embodies information you want to share with children in activities that children enjoy and embeds that information in our relationship with the rest of the natural world.
Please remember, we do not share these posts as lesson plans. We share them as collections of activities organized around a theme for adult guides to help you find what you're looking for. Our time with children is way less orderly than the bulleted lists of items presented here. We always leave lots of space for free play and opportunistic learning along with the kind of planned guided activities we describe in our posts. We do some core activities like breathing into plants and eating their berries and nectar almost daily when the opportunities arise. One any given day, we might end up doing activities presented in several different posts. To get a feel for this, consider reading, A Day in the Life of an Earth-Centered Transformative Ecological Educator.
Wrap Up
We hope you and your children now have a clearer understanding of where carbon hangs out in ecosystems and how it moves around and unites us in a dance of interdependence. We hope you also see how humans have messed with the carbon cycle and some of the consequences of creating new flows of carbon into the atmosphere and slowing the flow of carbon into biomass and soil. These problems are, of course, just a few of many problems created by modern industrial society. The view that each of us is a separate self-contained individual that lives and dies alone is at best partially true and at worst a sad view of reality that leads to exactly the kind of behavior that is causing our current predicament. Feeling the carbon cycle, not as some process that happens out there in nature but instead as a process that flows through all of us–including our sugar-producing and sugar-consuming kin, the soil, the wind, the waters–can help us lose ourselves and find our dance of interdependence that is the Earth. And, we need to do more than recognize that we are all cells in the living body of the Earth. We must start acting like we’re all in it together because we are; there is no beginning or end. Next up is some very basic carbon chemistry. Our goal in the follow-up post to this one is to help everyone understand the beautiful reciprocity between photosynthesis (the process of storing energy from the Sun in sugar) and cellular respiration (the process of releasing the Sun’s energy from sugar).