Why women have better sex under socialism - Part 2

 This is a review and analysis of the book "Why women have better sex under socialism" to illustrate how economic independence shapes relationships and how capitalism profits from lack of love, affection and connection. 

Jena, Oct. 2026

"Women, Like Men, but Cheaper"

One of the oldest ways to keep a woman powerless is also the simplest: never let her control her own money. If a woman can't own property, can't work without permission, can't walk away because she has nowhere else to go, dependence on a man stops being a choice and becomes the whole structure her life is built on. For most of legal history, marriage made this literal, a woman's property, her labor, even her legal identity got absorbed into her husband's. In West Germany, married women legally needed their husband's permission to work outside the home until 1957. This logic survived well into modern capitalist societies, and not just in West Germany. In France, married women couldn't open a bank account or take a job without their husband's permission until 1965. In Switzerland, husbands held formal legal authority over whether their wives could work until a 1988 marital law reform. In Spain under Franco, the permiso marital required a husband's written consent for a wife to sign an employment contract, and it wasn't abolished until 1975. Even in the United States, where no law formally blocked women from working, banks could legally require a husband's signature before issuing a married woman her own credit card until 1974. None of this is distant history, it sits within the lifetime of our own parents or grandparents.
This dependence wasn't unique to Christian Europe, but it also wasn't universal. On property and money, historically, Islamic law was actually ahead of the West by over a thousand years. Classical Islamic law gave married women an independent legal and financial personality from early Islam onward, a wife's property and earnings were legally hers alone, the husband had no claim on her wealth, and she kept her mahr (the money or property paid to her at marriage) as personal property. Western coverture law did the opposite: a married woman's property, wages, and legal identity were absorbed into her husband's, and that didn't start reversing until the Married Women's Property Acts of the late 1800s in the UK and US. 

hat advantage on property didn't carry over everywhere, though. On work, mobility, and guardianship, Islamic law varied enormously by country and era, and some restrictions lasted longer than in the West. Tunisia's 1956 Code of Personal Status was genuinely progressive for the region (banned polygamy, ended a wife's legal "obligation of obedience"), though the explicit right to work and bank without a husband's permission came through later reforms, not the 1956 Code itself. At the other end, Saudi Arabia's male guardianship system required a woman to have a male relative's permission to travel until 2019, and working or opening certain accounts was similarly gated through guardianship. 

Put these pieces side by side and a clearer picture emerges: women's economic dependence on men propagated through economic, civil, and religious institutions alike, although it cannot be denied that it oppressed differently depending on the country, and it was not a rule that Islam equaled oppression while western Christianism equaled freedom. 

Whatever the religious or legal starting point, capitalism inherited this dependence and adapted it efficiently: men tied to wages, women tied to men. Work done inside the home stayed invisible and unpaid, while work done outside it got undervalued simply because a woman was doing it. During industrialization, this had a name, almost a business case: women were hired because they were "like men, but cheaper", just as productive, paid less. At the same time, employers called women unreliable, because women were the ones expected to drop everything for a sick kid or an aging parent. Paid work undervalued, unpaid work assumed, that double force still runs most of the world. It shows up in strange places too: J.K. Rowling and E.L. James published under initials, not because they wanted to, but because a male-coded name still opens doors a female one doesn't. And none of these lands the same way for every woman: race, class, disability, and sexuality stack different weights on top of the same basic structure.
Here's where socialism, actually broke something: it refused to treat women's place in the workforce as optional. Female labor participation across the Soviet bloc sat around 40–50%, compared to roughly 30–37% in the US and much of Western Europe at the time. Women became doctors, engineers, scientists, administrators, not because patriarchy magically disappeared (it didn't; the pay gap and the unpaid second shift stuck around), but because the state made dependence structurally harder to maintain. Public-sector jobs tend to enforce equal pay and equal access more consistently than private ones, simply because hiring and wages answer to public rules instead of a boss's discretion. 

That link between weak states and dependent women isn't just historical. It shows up right now in the current discourse of rising right-wing populist parties of “making the State more efficient by reducing it to its minimal” and “keeping traditional women’s roles”, since a weak State guarantees less women’s rights implementation. A strong public sector isn't charity, it's an engine that creates jobs while expanding the childcare, healthcare, and education that let people actually use them.

Compare that to how capitalism treats its own failures: calling the private sector efficient while quietly saving it from bankrupt whenever it collapses, or funding private universities through student debt that enriches investors more than it educates anyone. "Efficient" apparently means profitable when things go well and someone else's problem when they don't. Clear examples are the Covid 19 pandemic and the economic crisis it unchained. In Colombia, when the airline Avianca went bankrupt in 2020, the government stepped in with about $370 million in public credit, roughly a fifth of the airline's $2 billion rescue package, while private lenders covered the rest. But the bigger story was in the pandemic payroll support given to businesses across the country: researchers later found that half the workers covered by it worked not at small struggling businesses, but at companies owned by Colombia's richest families. That included hotel and media businesses owned by Sarmiento Angulo, snack and publishing brands owned by Gilinski, a soft drink and broadcasting group owned by Ardila Lülle, and television and cinema chains owned by Santo Domingo. One study found that Colombia gave nearly half of all its pandemic business aid to large companies, more than any other country studied in South America.

Germany told a similar story, just bigger. The airline Lufthansa received a nine billion euro rescue in 2020, and in exchange, the German state became a 20% owner of the company. The tour company TUI received more than four billion euros across several rounds of aid. In both countries, the same pattern repeated: when the market failed, the state stepped in to cover the losses. When the companies recovered, the profits went quietly back to private shareholders, not to the public that had carried the risk.

The lesson from Lufthansa and Avianca is really the same one from the start of this chapter: whoever controls the means of survival controls the people who depend on it. That question is about to repeat itself in a new form. As AI and automation replace more paid labor, the danger isn't liberation, it's deeper concentration, wealth and control pooling upward into whoever owns the machines. A universal basic income, funded through taxation or public enterprise, is one serious answer on the table. Without something like it, the future doesn't flatten inequality between men and women, it just makes everyone equally dependent on whoever owns the technology.

"What to Expect When You Are Expecting Exploitation": On Motherhood

Motherhood gets treated like a private choice, but women are the ones who pay for it, alone. The logic works like this, and it keeps repeating itself: employers think a woman might leave her job once she has children, so they pay her less from the start. Because she's paid less, it "makes sense" that she, not her partner, is the one who quits when a child comes. Discrimination creates itself and then calls itself natural. The market will never fix this on its own, there's no profit in fixing it, so the state has to.
It helps to be clear here: sex is biology. Gender is the story society tells about that biology. Gender discrimination happens exactly at the point where a biological difference turns into a social ranking: man is productive and independent; woman is caring, self-sacrificing, and economically second. That ranking isn't natural. People built it, and people keep it going.

Socialist feminists were saying this over a hundred years ago. In 1897, the German feminist Lily Braun proposed state-funded maternity insurance. Her point was simple: having a child shouldn't mean falling into poverty or losing your job. This wasn't a small issue. Industrial workers at the time worked 60 to 65 hours a week with no maternity leave at all, and maternal and infant death rates showed it. Capitalist economies needed children, future workers, future taxpayers, but made individual women carry the entire cost of having them. The Second International, the alliance of socialist and labor parties that pushed for the eight-hour workday and basic worker protections, demanded tax-funded support for mothers as a normal part of their program. A lot of what we now think of as "normal", paid leave, labor protections, social insurance, started out as a socialist demand, not something given freely.

Where these ideas were actually put into practice, the results were real. Sweden guaranteed 180 days of job-protected leave at 80% of salary by 1963. Bulgaria gave free university education to students who completed national service, so a woman could study and raise a child at the same time instead of choosing between them. East Germany went even further, building housing for mothers and children at universities, so students could raise a baby and keep studying at the same time. By 1989, about a third of births in East Germany happened outside marriage, far more than in the West, and importantly, that did not mean poverty, because childcare and housing support didn't depend on having a husband. That's the important part: a woman shouldn't need to stay in a relationship just to have a place to live.

None of this was simple or purely good. The Soviet Union legalized abortion on demand in 1920, the first country in Europe to do so, only to take much of that back under Stalin in 1936, for reasons tied to growing the population. Across socialist countries, childbearing was often controlled by the state, sometimes in ways that helped women, sometimes in ways that controlled them. But some of these states also pushed, as early as the 1950s in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, for fathers to actually share housework and childcare, recognizing decades before it became a common feminist point that equality can't exist if women are still doing two full jobs, one paid, one not.

When the Soviet bloc collapsed, privatization tore this system down fast. Childcare centers closed, unemployment went up, and the cost of raising children went quietly back onto individual families. Birth rates in East Germany fell sharply after reunification, not because women stopped wanting children, but because the conditions that made having children manageable disappeared. And in an interesting twist, East German women then changed things in the West: when they moved there after 1989, they expected something West German women had never had, that the state, not just the mother, should help carry the weight of raising a child. They pushed for daycare and kindergartens because they had never lived without them.

This is also why maternity leave can't be left up to individual companies to decide on their own. No company wants to be known for offering the most generous parental leave, because it just attracts the workers most likely to use it, and that looks like an extra cost to the company. But when every employer is legally required to offer the same protections, and the state shares the cost, no woman gets punished for being pregnant at the wrong company. Paid leave, free childcare, job protection, these were never extra comforts. They were tools built specifically to take away men's control over women's work, bodies, and survival. Much of today's resistance to these policies is, underneath, really just resistance to losing that control.

Why women have better sex under socialism - Part 1

This is a review and analysis of the book "Why women have better sex under socialism" to illustrate how economic independence shapes relationships and how capitalism profits from lack of love, affection and connection. 

Jena, Sept. 2026

When the Wall came down, she was standing right there

Summer of 1990. Kristen Ghodsee is backpacking through a Europe that has just watched one of its founding myths collapse overnight. The Berlin Wall is down and the entire project of the State Socialism of the Eastern Bloc dissolved, but what follows isn't the parade of freedom everyone promised — it's chaos, uncertainty, entire economies dissolving under people's feet. She doesn't look away. She goes deeper: Bulgaria, East Germany, years of fieldwork asking the question almost nobody else was asking — what actually happens to women when a system like this falls apart? Not to GDP. Not to geopolitics. To women, specifically — their jobs, their childcare, their marriages, their bodies, the love inside their relationships. That question followed her through the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock and the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, both in Eastern Germany, and it's the question this whole book is built to answer.

Two words nobody wants to put in the same sentence: democratic and socialism

Before we even open to chapter one, there's something worth noticing: the word socialism has been welded to its worst moments of the 20th century — the authoritarian systems of Eastern Europe — until the word alone triggers images of control, repression, food rationing, nothing else. That link isn't accidental, and it isn't fair. Two very different things have been merged into one.

On one side, there's state socialism: the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, one party in charge, elections that weren't really free, almost no room for disagreement. Power moved from the top down, imposed on people rather than chosen by them. On the other side, there's democratic socialism which seeks to overcome capitalism through democratic means, advocating for stronger public ownership, greater social control over the economy, and cooperative forms of organization, accepting capitalism but trying to regulate it and make it fairer through welfare protections and redistribution. Democratic socialism has the same underlying goals as state socialism but reached through free elections, real political competition, and protected civil rights. Power here depends on people choosing it, not on force. For this reason, democratic socialism must be separated from its historical baggage, because confusing these two is exactly why so much of the modern criticism of socialism misses its target: people picture  secret police and food scarcity when what's actually on the table is closer to what built the public healthcare system, paid vacation and parental leave, and balanced working times in the contemporary society.

Many of the protections we now take for granted: public healthcare, paid parental leave, labor rights, were won through socialist or social-democratic movements, not despite them. After World War II, British voters elected a majority democratic-socialist government under Clement Attlee, and that government built the National Health Service and much of the modern welfare state — the same system people in Britain still argue about protecting today. Or look at Bulgaria: one of the poorest countries in the European Union, and yet a poor person there often still enjoys stronger social protections than a poor person in the United States.

Yet today neoliberal ideology dominates mainstream political thinking, teaching people to see the market as natural and alternatives as dangerous and irrealizable. Under that belief of the “private as efficient and less corrupt”, austerity policies cut public services while wealth keeps piling up at the top. Women feel it first, because they are expected to take care for the children, the elder and the sick when public health systems weaken or simply don’t exist. It's usually women who quietly absorb the consequences of failed support social nets.

None of this exhaustion happens by accident. The people who benefit from things staying as they are have every reason to want the rest of us tired, cynical, and disconnected from politics — a hopeless population rarely demands anything. So the point isn't nostalgia for a socialism of the past. It's using socialism as a language again, a set of tools for imagining a future that could actually be fairer.

One more thing worth noticing before moving forward: capitalism rarely gets the same scrutiny, even though it reaches into the most private corners of our lives. It sells sexuality through advertising, television, the beauty industry, dating apps — constantly whispering that we're not attractive enough, successful enough, wanted enough, unless we keep buying some bullshit to fix it. Love, desire, self-worth, all turned into products for sale. However, once we notice how the market prices our bodies, our relationships, our emotions, we can start pushing back against that logic, and take back a sense of worth and human dignity that can’t be sold or measured by profit. 

Introduction: "You Might Be Suffering From Capitalism"

The central idea is simple: unregulated capitalism is bad for women, and some socialist ideas can make women's lives materially better. The system works well for a small group of women at the top, but for most women, reality looks different — lower wages, less security, less access to healthcare, more dependence on men, less control over their own bodies and futures. Women are usually the last to be hired and the first to be fired, and when budget cuts hit education, healthcare, pensions, or childcare, it's mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives who quietly absorb the unpaid work of caring for the young, the sick, and the elderly.

Economic dependence reaches into intimacy too. Women with less economic freedom often have less control over their own reproduction, more pressure to stay in unhealthy relationships, and fewer real choices about motherhood. By contrast, where the state provides childcare, paid leave, healthcare, and labor protections, something shifts: women get to choose a relationship because they want it, not because they need it to survive.

That shift was one of the real, material achievements of state socialism. In the Soviet Union, East Germany, and much of Eastern Europe, bringing women fully into paid work became an actual political goal — not a slogan. Women entered medicine, engineering, and science, professions that had mostly excluded them, backed by public childcare, shared cafeterias, laundry services, paid leave, and legal rights to work, own property, and live independently. This independence was real enough to be seen as a threat elsewhere: for years after World War II, a woman earning her own wage in the United States or West Germany was treated almost like a sign of communist danger, and that fear helped fuel political reactions. It was also real enough to force capitalist countries to compete — women's rights improved partly because capitalism had a rival to keep up with. None of this makes those socialist systems fair or free of serious problems; many were deeply authoritarian. But it does break a common myth — that these societies were defined only by hunger, repression, and surveillance. They lasted for decades and produced real gains beyond that image.

Once the Soviet Union collapsed, the pressure to compete disappeared. Free-market policy expanded fast, protections shrank, and selling off public services was sold as common sense — the state was called inefficient, until private companies failed and had to be rescued with public money anyway. Clear examples are everywhere: in 2008, the US government poured close to $180 billion into the insurance giant AIG and roughly $80 billion into General Motors and Chrysler to stop them from collapsing, while the UK nationalized most of Royal Bank of Scotland almost overnight. Argentina went through its own version of this in 2001–2002: after the peso's fixed exchange rate collapsed and the economy defaulted, the state forced a currency conversion that left banks holding huge losses — and then compensated them with billions of dollars in public bonds, quietly transferring private losses onto public debt. In every case, the pattern repeats: markets fail, and the public ends up paying for a system that never shared its profits the same way.

Women across Eastern Europe who had once worked as professionals were pushed into unstable, low-paid work: cleaning, domestic labor, or the international sex trade. At the same time, nationalist governments opposed to abortion rights told women to return to traditional roles, restricting abortion while asking them to have more children for the nation. The irony is hard to miss: women who once had more independence are now told that this new insecurity is what freedom looks like.

Criticizing capitalism today still gets dismissed with a single word — "communism" — as if history only ever offered two choices. But believing capitalism is the final, fairest system humanly possible is just as naive as believing kings once ruled by divine right. No socialist experiment was ever allowed to grow without outside pressure or open conflict from rival powers, so other paths were never fully explored. The real question isn't whether past socialism was perfect. It wasn't. The real question is why imagining any alternative to today's inequality still feels so hard.

And here's the part worth keeping in mind: in more equal societies, where women depend less on a man's money, a certain kind of male power — built on money, status, and control — loses its grip. That discomfort reveals how much of what is called romance is often just hierarchy disguised as nature.

Radiocarbon Dating. The Time Machine that Reveals How Long Carbon Hides in Soil

 

Carbon as a time machine: How long does CO₂ remain in the soil?

What does a flask of air reveal about climate change? We use it as a time machine to measure how quickly carbon returns from the soil to the atmosphere. In doing so, we show which ecosystems help slow climate change—and why protecting ancient carbon stores is crucial.

It is a rainy summer day in northern Sweden. Pine trees stretch endlessly around me. I kneel for the twenty-fourth time and place a small glass bottle over the soil. For fifteen minutes, I must stay still while mosquitoes find every bit of uncovered skin. At first, it feels strange that I am collecting air. But after some contemplation, I realize that it is not just air. It is the breath of the soil that brings with it a piece of history. Beneath my boots, soil has rested quietly for decades, sometimes since long before humans built cities. That soil contains carbon that has been slowly accumulating like a living archive that stores stories about Earth’s past and that now is threatened to open and release.

Carbon is the backbone of life. Look around: everything you see contains carbon or depends on it—plants, food, clothes, and the people you love. Life on Earth runs on a giant loop called the carbon cycle where plants take carbon from the air to grow and animals and microbes return it to the air when they breathe and decompose. For millions of years, this loop moved at its own patient pace—until humans suddenly broke its rhythm. By burning fossil fuels and cutting forests, we moved huge amounts of carbon from underground and living ecosystems into the atmosphere within only a few generations. Plants have not been able to absorb this excess of carbon fast enough. The result is climate change.

Earth’s temperature depends on how much carbon stays in the ground and how much escapes into the air as carbon dioxide. Even a small increase of this carbon in the air can warm the planet. So one question becomes critical: how long does carbon stay in the soil before it returns to the air? The answer helps us understand where we can store carbon without disturbing the climate. It is like knowing where patients can rest without getting worse or making everyone else sick.

Carbon has different ages depending where it resides, for example it can live in leaves for days, in wood for decades, and in soil for centuries or even thousands of years. Soils matter because they store more carbon than the atmosphere and all living plants combined. Although soils look quiet from the outside, inside they are busy with life. The speed at which microbes eat organic matter and breathe out carbon dioxide depends on how favorable temperature, water, and oxygen conditions are. Hence, whether soils slow or accelerate climate change depends not only on how much carbon they hold, but on how long they can keep it.

For a long time, scientists struggled to answer this time question, since to measure time we needed a clock. The clock was in the least expected place: inside carbon itself. A tiny fraction of carbon carries a special mark called radiocarbon. It is extremely rare—like a few colored grains of sand on an entire beach—but it is everywhere, even inside our bodies. Radiocarbon slowly fades with time, and the fainter it becomes, the older the carbon is, like ink that gradually disappears from a letter, which allows us to tell when it was written by reading how much of it remains. This clock became even clearer after nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s added large amounts of radiocarbon to the air. By tracking this signal, we can follow carbon as it travels through plants, animals, and soils, allowing us finally to disentangle the mystery of the time question: how old is the carbon that soils breathe back into the air?

My research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena collaborated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of California, Irvine, and the Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science. Together, we studied soil types from very different regions that all store large amounts of carbon: grasslands, peatlands, Arctic tundra, and forests.

In our laboratories, we processed samples from China and Sweden. Through experiments, we recreated the climate of the future — heat, rain, drought — and observed how the soil responded to these different conditions.

The results are as varied as the origins of the soils themselves. Some ecosystems store young carbon — grasslands, for example, pass carbon from leaves and young roots into the soil, where microbes decompose it within years or decades and release it as carbon dioxide. As temperatures rise, this process speeds up, meaning these environments react quickly to change. Other systems, such as peatlands and frozen tundra, have been accumulating carbon since the end of the last ice age. Extreme conditions — low temperatures, flooding, lack of oxygen, and frost — reduced microbial decomposition activity, keeping this ancient carbon from returning to the atmosphere.

This protection, however, depends on stable conditions: when peatlands lose their water, oxygen enters the soil, activating microbial species. These in turn quickly process the abundant carbon that had rested safely for centuries, releasing it within weeks.

Farther north, in Alaska, climate change is bringing more snowfall. There, we studied deeply frozen soils in an experiment that has added extra snow to the ground since 1994. Snow acts like a thick blanket, keeping the soil warmer in winter and allowing deeper thawing in summer. This gives microbes access to a feast: carbon that had previously been locked in ice. Using radiocarbon, we discovered that ancient carbon is making its way toward the surface and escaping as carbon dioxide. In this way, carbon from the distant past is beginning to mix with today's atmosphere.

The forests, too, revealed a secret that now challenges a common belief: that planting trees permanently removes carbon from the atmosphere. Yes, trees do store carbon — but unfortunately, only for a relatively short time, because once they die, much of that carbon returns to the atmosphere. In our forest studies, fresh material — new leaves, young roots, and recent plant remains — released most of the carbon within days to decades. Only a minimal portion made it into the soil and stayed there long enough to influence the global climate.

These findings reach far beyond the laboratory. Many climate policies focus only on capturing new carbon by changing land use or planting more trees. But our carbon time machine teaches us this: planting new forests helps, yet if the carbon never reaches the soil and stays there, we have gained nothing. Our generation must now do one thing above all: protect the carbon stores that already exist. Peatlands must stay wet. Frozen soils must stay frozen. Forests must stay resilient. If these systems fail, they release carbon that no technology can simply put back into the ground.

One thing is important above all: no matter exactly where carbon is released, it affects the entire planet. That is why climate research requires us to work together across borders. Our work has connected muddy boots in remote landscapes with shared lab work, experiments, and ideas. It shows that science works best when knowledge flows freely — just like carbon.

When I stood soaked in the rain, I was convinced I was only capturing air in a bottle. Today I understand: I was holding time in my hands — a message that had bridged decades, or even centuries. It told me that climate change concerns not only the future but already our here and now, as it shakes the past awake from its deep sleep. Understanding how long carbon remains in the soil teaches us something simple yet powerful: time matters. Every moment that carbon stays underground is time in which we protect the world above it.

 

Zeitreisen durch eine Flasche Luft

Kohlenstoff als Zeitmaschine: Wie lange bleibt CO₂ im Boden?

Was verrät uns eine Flasche Luft über den Klimawandel? Wir nutzen sie als Zeitmaschine und messen, wie schnell Kohlenstoff aus Böden in die Atmosphäre zurückkehrt. So zeigen wir, welche Ökosysteme das Klima bremsen – und warum der Schutz alter Kohlenstoffspeicher entscheidend ist. 

 Es ist ein regnerischer Sommertag im Norden Schwedens. Umzingelt von unzähligen Kiefern knie ich mich zum 24. Mal hin und stelle ein Glasfläschchen auf den Boden. Meine ehrenvolle Aufgabe: Luft sammeln!

Aber es ist doch mehr als bloße Luft. Die Atmosphäre um mich herum ist der Atem der Erde, der ein Stück Geschichte in sich trägt. Unter meinen Stiefeln liegt der Boden, der über Jahrtausende hinweg – lange bevor Menschen überhaupt damit begannen, Städte zu bauen – ein Element angereichert hat, das Aufzeichnungen der Vergangenheit offenbart: Kohlenstoff. 

Kohlenstoff bildet das Fundament unserer Existenz. Schau dich um: Alles, was du siehst, enthält Kohlenstoff oder hängt davon ab – Pflanzen, Nahrung, Kleidung und die Menschen, die du liebst. Das Leben auf der Erde läuft in einem riesigen Kreislauf, dem Kohlenstoffkreislauf. Dabei nehmen Pflanzen Kohlenstoff aus der Luft auf, um zu wachsen, während Tiere und Mikroben ihn durch Atmen und Zersetzen als Kohlenstoffdioxid wieder in die Atmosphäre zurückgeben. Millionen von Jahren bewegte sich dieser Kreislauf in seinem eigenen geduldigen Rhythmus – bis der Mensch plötzlich seinen Takt störte. Durch das Verbrennen fossiler Brennstoffe und das Roden von Wäldern haben wir in nur wenigen Generationen enorme Mengen an Kohlenstoff aus der Erde und ihren Ökosystemen in die Atmosphäre verlagert. Bereits ein sehr geringer Anstieg von Kohlenstoffdioxid erwärmt den Planeten. Das Ergebnis: der Klimawandel. 

Und genau daraus ergibt sich eine spannende und entscheidende Frage: Wie lange bleibt Kohlenstoff eigentlich im Boden, bevor er wieder in die Luft wandert? Die Antwort darauf ist der Schlüssel, um zu verstehen, wo wir Kohlenstoff speichern können, ohne das Klima ins Chaos zu stürzen. 

Kohlenstoff hat je nach Aufenthaltsort unterschiedliche Speicherzeiten: In Blättern kann er Tage, in Holz Jahrzehnte und im Boden Jahrhunderte oder sogar Jahrtausende verweilen. Böden speichern sogar mehr Kohlenstoff als die Atmosphäre und alle lebenden Pflanzen zusammen. In ihrem Inneren zersetzen Mikroorganismen organische Reste, wobei Temperatur, Feuchtigkeit und Sauerstoffangebot bestimmen, wie schnell das geht. Ob der Erdboden den Klimawandel verlangsamt oder beschleunigt, hängt also nicht nur davon ab, wie viel Kohlenstoff er enthält, sondern auch davon, wie lange er ihn speichern kann.

Lange haben sich Forschende an dieser Frage die Zähne ausgebissen – denn um Zeit zu messen, braucht man schließlich eine Uhr. Die Lösung befand sich an ganz unerwarteter Stelle: Unsere Uhr ist der Kohlenstoff selbst. Ein winziger Teil des Kohlenstoffs trägt einen ganz besonderen Fingerabdruck: den Radiokohlenstoff. Er existiert natürlicherweise in der Atmosphäre, ist aber extrem selten, wie vereinzelte bunte Sandkörner an einem riesigen weißen Sandstrand. Dennoch ist er überall, sogar in unseren Körpern. Radiokohlenstoff verblasst mit der Zeit, wie Tinte, die allmählich von einem Brief verschwindet. Indem wir messen, wie viel davon noch übrig ist, finden wir heraus, wie alt der Kohlenstoff ist. 

Meine Forschungsgruppe des Max-Planck-Instituts für Biogeochemie in Jena arbeitete mit der Chinese Academy of Sciences, der University of California in Irvine und der Swedish Infrastructure for Ecosystem Science zusammen. Dabei untersuchten wir Bodenarten aus sehr unterschiedlichen Regionen, die alle große Mengen Kohlenstoff speichern: Grasland, Moore, arktische Tundra und Wälder. 

In unseren Laboren bearbeiteten wir schließlich Proben aus China und Schweden. In Experimenten stellten wir das Klima der Zukunft nach – Hitze, Regen, Trockenheit – und beobachteten, wie der Boden auf die unterschiedlichen Bedingungen reagiert. 

Die Ergebnisse sind so unterschiedlich wie die Herkunft der Böden selbst: Einige Ökosysteme speichern jungen Kohlenstoff, beispielsweise Grasländer, die Kohlenstoff aus Blättern und jungen Wurzeln an den Boden weitergeben. Dort zersetzen ihn Mikroben innerhalb von Jahren oder Jahrzehnten und setzen ihn als Kohlendioxid frei. Bei steigenden Temperaturen beschleunigt sich dieser Prozess, was bedeutet, dass diese Umgebung schnell auf Veränderungen reagiert. Andere Systeme hingegen, etwa Moore und gefrorene Tundra, sammeln Kohlenstoff seit dem Ende der letzten Eiszeit an. Extreme Bedingungen wie sehr niedrige Temperaturen, Überschwemmungen, Sauerstoffmangel und Frost verringerten die Zersetzungsaktivität der Mikroben. Das hielt den uralten Kohlenstoff von der Rückkehr in die Atmosphäre ab. 

Der Schutz hängt allerdings von stabilen Bedingungen ab: Verlieren Moore ihr Wasser, gelangt Sauerstoff in den Boden, wodurch Mikrobenarten aktiviert werden. Diese wiederum verarbeiten dann schnell den reichlich vorhandenen Kohlenstoff, der jahrhundertelang sicher ruhte, und setzen ihn innerhalb von Wochen frei. 

Weiter nördlich, in Alaska, führt der Klimawandel zu mehr Schneefall. Dort untersuchten wir in einem Experiment tief gefrorene Böden, denen seit 1994 zusätzliche Schneemengen zugeführt wurden. Schnee wirkt wie eine dicke Decke, hält den Boden im Winter wärmer und ermöglicht im Sommer ein tieferes Auftauen. Mikroben erhalten dadurch Zugang zu einem Festmahl: Kohlenstoff, der zuvor im Eis eingeschlossen war. Mithilfe von Radiokohlenstoff entdeckten wir, dass sich alter Kohlenstoff seinen Weg Richtung Oberfläche bahnt und als Kohlendioxid entweicht. So beginnt Kohlenstoff aus der fernen Vergangenheit, sich mit der heutigen Atmosphäre zu vermischen. 

Auch die Wälder verrieten uns ein Geheimnis, das nun eine gängige Vorstellung infrage stellt, welche lautet: Wer Bäume pflanzt, entferne damit den Kohlenstoff dauerhaft aus der Atmosphäre. Ja, Bäume speichern zwar Kohlenstoff, aber leider nur für relativ kurze Zeit. Denn sobald sie sterben, kehrt ein Großteil davon in die Atmosphäre zurück. In unseren Waldstudien setzte frisches Material, zum Beispiel frische Blätter, junge Wurzeln und neue Pflanzenreste, den meisten Kohlenstoff innerhalb von Tagen bis Jahrzehnten frei. Nur ein minimaler Teil gelangte in den Boden und blieb dort lange genug, um das globale Klima zu beeinflussen. 

Diese Erkenntnisse sind weitreichender als nur das Labor. Viele Klimapolitiken konzentrieren sich nämlich nur darauf, neuen Kohlenstoff zu speichern, indem sie die Landnutzung ändern oder mehr Bäume pflanzen. Unsere Kohlenstoff-Zeitmaschine lehrt uns jedoch: Es hilft zwar, neue Wälder zu pflanzen, aber wenn der Kohlenstoff am Ende nicht im Boden landet und auch dort verbleibt, haben wir nichts gewonnen. Unsere Generation muss jetzt vor allem eines tun: bestehende Kohlenstoffspeicher schützen. Moore müssen nass bleiben. Eisige Böden müssen gefroren bleiben. Wälder müssen widerstandsfähig bleiben. Versagen diese Systeme, so setzen sie Kohlenstoff frei, den keine Technologie einfach wieder in der Erde verstauen kann. 

Eins ist dabei besonders wichtig: Ganz egal, wo genau der Kohlenstoff freigesetzt wird, er wirkt sich immer auf den gesamten Planeten aus. Deshalb erfordert Klimaforschung, dass wir über Grenzen hinweg zusammenarbeiten. Unsere Arbeit hat schlammverschmutzte Stiefel in entlegenen Landschaften mit gemeinsamen Laborarbeiten, Experimenten und Ideen verbunden. Das zeigt: Wissenschaft funktioniert am besten, wenn das Wissen frei fließt – genauso wie Kohlenstoff. 

Als ich klitschnass im Regen stand, war ich überzeugt, nur Luft in einer Flasche einzufangen. Heute ist mir klar: Ich hielt Zeit in den Händen – eine Botschaft, die Jahrzehnte oder sogar Jahrhunderte überbrückt hat. Sie verriet mir, dass der Klimawandel nicht nur die Zukunft betrifft, sondern bereits unser Hier und Jetzt, da er die Vergangenheit aus dem Tiefschlaf rüttelt. Zu verstehen, wie lange Kohlenstoff im Boden verbleibt, lehrt uns etwas ganz Einfaches und doch Mächtiges: Zeit zählt. Jeder Moment, in dem der Kohlenstoff im Untergrund bleibt, ist Zeit, in der wir die Welt darüber schützen.

Poster _ GYSS - Using machine learning to predict greenhouse gases in peatlands

 

PhD Defense _ Timescales of carbon cycling in organic rich soils under environmental change

 

Presentation - How long does carbon remain in the different parts of a forest and where should we then store it? - ICOS Conference 2024

 

Poster - How long does carbon stay in the soils, vegetation and air in a boreal forest?

 

Poster - How temperature and moisture affect the time that carbon stays in soils from grasslands and peatlands in the Tibetan Plateau. WCRP Open Science Conference 2023 - Kigali, Rwanda

 

A life purpose

 Every one of us brings an implicit life purpose and a life mission. This statement does not mean that we all have a destiny to follow. It does not even implicate that anybody is controlling what we do or what path we walk. There is however, a tacit duty in our existence given by the very specific gifts that all of us receive. Or, let me ask you, do not you feel responsible to do what you are good at and to fulfill those inner desires you keep inside? Yeah, right?

But unfortunately, the place in which we are or the horizon we head to not always coincide with our passion or our dreams. And then we feel it, more than usual, that our feelings are not in the same wave as our everyday life and our ideas do not converge with our actions. Clouds descend on our heads, our vision blurs inflicting a bitter taste in the existence, a sense of tasteless pass of time. After some divagation, we remember those gifts we account with, we feel the fire that transports us to the enlightenment and that we are ignoring. We fight against our decisions and all the circumstances that brought us to that situation. We are there working 40 hours a week in a topic we do not like and living the life others want we live. We are so miserable, we are not even able to choose our own actions.

At any point of our lives, we all receive the call. A call to do what we really want, a call to choose with freedom what makes us happy, an opportunity landing from nowhere that invites us to get out of our comfort area. It will require all the bravery and courage to attend it, to answer that call to follow our hearts, our dreams. It will ask you to stand on your own and believe in your convictions. Too coach? Do not go after anybody, follow yourself!

And when we you do it, when we take that opportunity to pursue our life balance, it is as if the entire universe had been waiting for that heroic action. Because it requires bravery, determination and decision to break the chains, take your own individual position and trust yourself. 

Only those ones who attended the call have been able to reach the full realization and transform the world.
Take action, take possession, make your own decisions, master your life.
 

Jena, February 2021

Mardin y Mesopotamia: Viaje al Kurdistán Turco

Gänseblümchenblütenblatt

The beauty of the colors

Fractal perfection of primavera

When I feel the daisies odors

Fühle ich mich als ob in my vez primera.

Who could for me recover?

A bouquet of tiny flowers

To make me feel again a lover

And forget the trivial others.

To the one who defies the grassland 

und schenkt mir ein Gänseblümchenblütenblatt

promise I my heart and an island

where we will share the sky in our habitat. 

But if after all my generosity

Nobody dares even for curiosity

I will take that adventure for me

The daisies, my dreams and my tea. 

Jena, Germany, November 2024

 

An undelivered letter

 

Here you have a letter. One that should never be delivered, but with words that burn inside my chest. Maybe inside yours too. I must admit that I am still learning to describe my emotions, because before putting adjectives and substantives to my tears, my smiles, and my desires, they flowed through my entire body as the light that bathes me since the day I was born.

I know we dream of escaping, of running beyond the wall, and bringing together our alchemy to discover the secrets of eternal passion. 

I can write all the verses this afternoon

How can we ignore that our encounter brought more life to the summer than the majestic sun? How can we ignore that the heavy weight of the gray clouds in the rainy autumn dissipated when our arms surrounded each other?

I can write all the verses this afternoon

Drowning have I been in my hallucinating visions, immersed in the depth of the brownish universe of your pupils, blinded by the clear revelations of our looks. 

I can write all the verses this afternoon

Your eyes told me a secret some days ago. There were only five centimeters of thin air in between us. We could even breath each other, and the sparkling cocktail of desire made our atmosphere drunk.

I can write all the verses this afternoon

There alone, as the time paralyzed our doubts, your eyes shyly kissed the edge of my mouth. And me, weakened by the intoxicating heat of my lustful soul, extended the tip of my tongue to taste the elixir of your fleshy lips. 

I can write all the verses this afternoon

 Our fantasies, unsatisfied with having just a token of flavors, untamable after getting to know the pleasure of crossing the borders of curiosity, brought us through a whirl of naked caresses. 

I can write all the verses this afternoon

Cansados de tentar el prohibido destino, las puntas de mis dedos navegaron sobre las olas de tu piel y mi voz, en un sonido silencioso que solo los dos pudimos escuchar, embriagada de éxtasis exclamó.

I can write all the verses for you. 

Jena, Germany, Noviembre 2024

There is no calm in the storm... you have to wait

If you ask for patience, you will not be given patience. You will be presented with all the obstacles so you can practice it.

I was in the most turbulent stage of my life. I was 33 years old, my mother had passed away just a few months before, and I was trying to transition to a friendship after almost six years of a relationship with my partner. Additionally, time was running out, and I had to finish my PhD in five months.

Of the seven years I had been a migrant in Germany, most of the time, I had exceptional company and felt truly supported. Now, without a partner here and without a mother there, I felt orphaned and abandoned. I found myself without ground and without a horizon, with canceled dreams, because those two people who knew me best and who had been present in my future would no longer be in the same way. 

Even so, I tried to keep my balance, working only eight or nine hours a day and dedicating the rest of the time to myself. I tried to entertain myself with exercise twice a week, going to festivals here and there, walking in the forest, seeing friends, and reading a bit at night. But when I returned to what should be my safe place, my apartment, I felt the weight of loneliness, of memories, of absence. I felt that my future was sealed and doomed. 

In one way or another, the stories of other people around me had taught me something for life. Although sadness requires moments of introspection, mourning, and isolation, when it becomes a habit, it can lead us to increasingly darker places in our minds, to the point where we can no longer see and cannot find our way back. My father used to tell me the story of when my uncle Alonso fell into a deep depression when he was 19 years old and locked himself in a room at the farm for 11 months, abandoning himself to the world's fate, without bathing, without talking to anyone, receiving the food his brothers brought him, and lying in bed all day.

For me, locking myself away to seek answers under a daily routine that only allowed me to see one perspective of the problema, was not an option.

One day, in the midst of that emotional storm, I decided to go for a walk in the mountains. My goal was to find a place where I could set up a tent and a hammock to come and sleep in nature in the coming days. It was summer, but this year, the season had proven to be unpredictable; there were very gray days where it didn't stop raining, others hot and sunny, and sometimes sun and rain on the same day. I looked at the forecast for that day, and it promised rain after 9 p.m. I would be back home by then, so I put on my shorts, packed my hammock, prepared some food, and set out at 2 pm.

I went out to walk my anxiety, I thought to myself, as this feeling of being and not being had been with me for several months. It happened when I was alone, that I couldn't quiet my mind or be only with myself and my surroundings, as if a cascade of urgent and unavoidable tasks had to be done at that very moment. I was almost always thinking about what I would do next, living in the future rather than the present. I needed urgent answers to my questions, and that search caused me restlessness, demanding that my mind give me solutions, and of course, the pressure was immense because much of my vital energy went into self-pressuring and rethinking all possible scenarios of my life, many of which were unreal.

To quiet my mind a bit, I decided to call my friend Eira and have her accompany me with her stories while I walked. She told me she was struggling to cope with the breakup of her last relationship, that she couldn't sleep well, that she thought about her ex every day, that she had questions left to ask him and things to tell him. But above all, she needed to find the meaning of her life at this moment. Eira's words conveyed anxiety and impatience, an urgency to find the meaning of her life.

Just then, something clicked. I could see the absurdity of the situation from the outside and said to her: “Why do you have to find answers so quickly? Why put so much pressure on yourself right now, like jumping from one storm to another, from suffering for another person to causing suffering to yourself? Allow yourself not to think about the transcendental aspects of life, not to be rushed into making big decisions. I think it can be a beautiful moment to simply release that pressure and take care of the basics: your emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.”

"Talking brings understanding," she used to say, and I would add, "and you also understand yourself." By the end of our conversation, we concluded that the call had been as beneficial for me as it was for her.

The first half hour of conversation and walking passed through the residential buildings in downtown Jena. Then I crossed the neighborhoods of gigantic houses on the outskirts of the Saale river valley to start climbing the mountain and cross a strip of forest. Finally, I reached the summit called Sendemast Kernberger, where there is a telecommunications tower. From there, you can see the city from about 300 meters above. At that moment, the sky turned gray, and soft raindrops began to fall. I said goodbye to Eira to make some decisions. I was alone once again. I continued walking towards the meadows, crossing an undulating topography of grasslands with forest remnants on the side.

It was evident that it was going to rain, and I felt increasingly far from a safe place. The first thunders were heard, and the forecast now spoke of an imminent thunderstorm. It was only 3 p.m. I considered returning to the apartment, even though I knew I wouldn't make it before the storm started. "At least I'd be on my way to a warm and sheltered place," I told myself. I walked for several minutes, anxious to choose between the two paths I thought I had: on one hand, returning home defeated without achieving my goal; and on the other, the fear of being at the mercy of a force greater than myself.

Just then, as the raindrops grew thicker, the winds more violent, and the sky more threatening, I noticed a wooden cabin a few meters above the ground, used by hunters to wait for the wild animals to appear. I realized there was a third possibility, that I didn't have to make a big decision, that I could simply "wait" for the circumstances to change and not pressure myself to take a definitive path.

I took refuge in that square meter of the cabin and simply waited, watching as the drizzle evolved into rain, then into a downpour, and finally into a thunderstorm. I could see everything from inside, as these cabins are not completely closed. I was getting a little wet and doubted my decision when the strong winds threatened to topple the structure. However, I also appreciated the beauty of the storm from inside; I even embraced and accepted it as part of my day.

I dedicated myself to waiting for more than an hour, with unwavering patience, until the rain stopped and I felt confident to continue. I left the cabin, stretched, looked around, and said, "I'm glad I didn't turn back." I continued walking east, seeing landscapes my eyes had never seen, touched by the beauty of nature, the softness of the meadows, and excited to find trees where I could hang my hammock. I walked empowered and with a smile on my face. 

At that moment, I understood that storms are inevitable, and if you are in one, you will get wet, maybe a little, maybe a lot. But they will not last forever, and overcoming them does not necessarily mean leaving them while they are happening but sitting and waiting for a better moment to make a decision.

Jena, Germany. July 7, 2024

No hay calma en la tormenta… hay que esperar

Si pides paciencia, no se te dará paciencia. Se te presentarán todos los obstáculos para que la ejercites. 

Me encontraba en la etapa más turbulenta de mi vida, tenía 33 años, mi mamá había fallecido solo unos meses antes, y estaba tratando de transitar hacia una amistad después de una relación de casi 6 años con mi pareja. Además, el tiempo corría y debía terminar mi doctorado en 5 meses. 

De los 7 años que llevaba como migrante en Alemania, la mayoría del tiempo había tenido una compañía excepcional y me sentía realmente apoyado. Ahora, sin una pareja aquí y sin una madre allá, me sentí huérfano y abandonado. Me encontré sin piso y sin horizonte, con los sueños cancelados, porque esas dos personas, que eran quienes mejor me conocían y que habían estado presentes en mi futuro, ya no lo estarían de la misma manera. 

Aún así, intentaba mantenerme en equilibrio, trabajando únicamente las 8 o 9 horas al día, y dedicándome el resto del tiempo a mi mismo. Procuraba entretenerme con ejercicio dos veces por semana, yendo a festivales aquí y allá, saliendo a caminar al bosque, viendo amigos y leyendo un poco en las noches. Pero cuando volvía al que debía ser mi lugar seguro, mi apartamento, sentía el peso de la soledad, de los recuerdos, de la ausencia. Sentía que mi futuro estaba sellado y condenado. 

 De una u otra manera, las historias de otras personas de mi alrededor me habían enseñado algo para la vida. Que, aunque la tristeza requiere momentos de introspección, de duelo y de aislamiento, cuando este se vuelve un hábito, puede llevarnos a lugares cada vez más oscuros de nuestro pensamiento, al punto que no podemos ver más y no encontramos el camino de vuelta. Mi padre solía contarme la historia de cuando mi tío Alonso cayó en una profunda depresión cuando tenía 19 años y se encerró en un cuarto de la casa de la finca durante 11 meses, abandonándose a la suerte del mundo, sin bañarse, sin hablar con nadie, recibiendo la comida que sus hermanos le traían y tendido en la cama todo el día. 

 Para mí esa no era una opción, encerrarme a buscar respuestas bajo una cotidianidad que solo me permitía ver una sola perspectiva del problema. 

 Un día, en medio de esa tormenta emocional, decidí salir a caminar a las montañas. Mi objetivo era encontrar un lugar donde pudiera extender una carpa y una hamaca para venir en el futuro a dormir en medio de la naturaleza. Era verano, pero esta temporada había demostrado ser impredecible, había días muy grises donde no paraba de llover, otros calientes y soleados, y a veces sol y lluvia en el mismo día. Miré el pronóstico de ese día, y prometía lluvias después de las 9 de la noche. Estaría de vuelta en casa para esa hora, así que me puse mis shorts, empaqué mi hamaca, preparé algo de comida y emprendí mi camino. 

 Salí a pasear mi ansiedad -pensé para mí-, pues ese sentimiento de estar y no estar llevaba conmigo varios meses. Me ocurría cuando me encontraba solo, que no podía aquietar mi mente ni estar únicamente conmigo y con mi entorno, como si una cascada de tareas urgentes e inevitables tuvieran que ser hechas en ese mismo momento. Casi siempre estaba pensando en que haría después, como viviendo en el futuro más que en el presente. Necesitaba respuestas urgentes para mis preguntas, y esa búsqueda me causaba intranquilidad, demandaba que mi mente me diera soluciones, y claro, la presión era inmensa, porque mucha de mi energía vital se iba en auto presionarme y en repensar todos los posibles escenarios de mi vida, muchos de los cuales eran irreales. 

 Para acallar un poco mi mente, decidí llamar a mi amiga Eira y que me acompañara con sus historias mientras caminaba. Me contó que le estaba costando mucho asimilar la ruptura de su última relación, que no podía dormir bien, que pensaba en su ex todos los días, que le habían quedado preguntas por hacerle y cosas que contarle. Pero que, sobre todo, tenía que encontrar el sentido de su vida en este momento. Las palabras de Eira transmitían ansiedad e impaciencia, una urgencia por encontrar el sentido de su vida. 

 Justo entonces, algo hizo clic. Pude ver desde afuera lo absurdo de la situación y le dije: “¿Por qué tienes que encontrar respuestas tan rápido? ¿Por qué ponerte tanta presión en este momento, como saltar de una tormenta a otra, de sufrir por otra persona a causarte el sufrimiento tu misma? Permítete no pensar en lo trascendental de la vida, en no estar acelerada tomando decisiones grandes. Creo que puede ser un momento bello para simplemente liberar esa presión y ocuparte de lo básico: el mantenimiento emocional, físico y espiritual de ti misma.” “Hablando se entiende la gente” solía decir ella, y yo le agregaría, “y también te entiendes tú mismo”. Al final de nuestra conversación, concluimos que esa llamada había sido tan provechosa para mi tanto como para ella. 

 La primera media hora de conversación y caminata transcurrió en medio de los edificios residenciales del centro de Jena, después crucé los vecindarios de casas gigantescas en las periferias del valle del rio Saale para empezar a subir la montaña y cruzar una franja de bosque. Finalmente, alcancé la cima llamada Sendemast Kernberger, donde se encuentra una torre de telecomunicaciones. Desde allí, se puede apreciar la ciudad a unos 300 metros de altura. En ese momento, el cielo se tornó gris y unas suaves gotas de lluvia empezaron a caer. Me despedí de Eira para tomar decisiones. Quedé solo otra vez. Continué caminando hacia las praderas, cruzando una topografía ondulada de pastizales con relictos de bosque a su lado. 

 Era evidente que iba a llover y cada vez me sentía más lejos de un lugar seguro. Los primeros truenos se escucharon y el pronóstico hablaba ahora de una inminente tormenta eléctrica. Eran solo las 3 p.m. Pensé en regresar al apartamento, aunque sabía que no alcanzaría a llegar antes de que la tormenta empezara. "Al menos estaría de camino a un lugar cálido y cubierto", me dije. Caminé durante varios minutos, ansioso por elegir entre los dos caminos que creía tener: por un lado, volver derrotado a casa sin mi objetivo realizado; y por el otro, el miedo de estar a merced de una fuerza que me sobrepasaba. 

En ese momento, mientras las gotas se hacían más gruesas, los vientos más violentos y el cielo más amenazante, observé una cabina de madera que se levantaba unos metros sobre el suelo, usada por los cazadores para aguardar. Me di cuenta de que existía una tercera posibilidad, que no tenía que tomar una decisión grande, que simplemente podía "esperar" a que las circunstancias cambiaran y no presionarme a tomar un camino definitivo. 

Me refugié en ese metro cuadrado de cabina y simplemente esperé, viendo cómo la llovizna evolucionaba a lluvia, luego a aguacero y finalmente a tormenta eléctrica. Podía verlo todo desde adentro, ya que estas cabinas no están completamente cerradas. Me estaba mojando un poco y dudé sobre mi decisión cuando los fuertes vientos amenazaban con derribar la estructura. Sin embargo, también pude apreciar la belleza de la tormenta desde adentro, incluso la abracé y la acepté como parte de mi día. Estuve dedicado a esperar por más de una hora, con una paciencia inclaudicable, hasta que la lluvia cesó y me sentí convicción para continuar. Salí de la cabina, me estiré, miré a mi alrededor y dije “qué bueno que no me devolví”. Continué caminando hacia el oriente, viendo paisajes que mis ojos nunca habían visto, enternecido por la belleza de la naturaleza, por la suavidad de las praderas y emocionado por encontrar arboles donde podría colgar mi hamaca. Caminé empoderado y con una sonrisa en mi rostro. 

 Fue ahí cuando entendí que las tormentas son inevitables y si estás en una, te vas a mojar, tal vez un poco, tal vez mucho. Pero no durarán para siempre y superarlas no implica necesariamente salir de ellas mientras ocurren, sino sentarse a esperar a un mejor momento para tomar una decisión. 

 Jena, Alemania. Julio 7 de 2024

Escalas de tiempo del ciclo del Carbono

Spatiotemporal variability of stable isotopes in precipitation and stream water in a high elevation tropical catchment in the Central Andes of Colombia

On the importance of time in carbon sequestration in soils and climate change mitigation

Moisture and temperature effects on the radiocarbon signature of respired carbon dioxide to assess stability of soil carbon in the Tibetan Plateau

 

Let's talk about feminism - Part 1

This text builds upon, reanalyzes, and expands on the work "Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto," written in 2019 by scholars who have been studying feminism, gender dynamics, social reproduction, and the concept of justice for decades. They were instrumental in organizing the International Women's Strike on March 8, 2017.

This manifesto, comprising 11 theses, holds valuable synthetic value by correlating the dynamics of current women's struggles worldwide within the economic and social context in a way that touches us and is tangible for all of humanity.

Let's discuss feminism, but let's converse from an analytical standpoint rather than a media-driven one, and certainly not from the position of a passive observer judging a scene from afar. Let's talk about feminism as if we were women, examining the situations that 99% of women worldwide experience—not those in the Global North or the affluent class featured in the media or leading in political and business elites in poorer countries, creating a false illusion of emancipation. Let's think of feminism for the 99%. If the women you're using as examples are Shakira, Hollywood actresses, or a few managers of multinational corporations, I invite you to step away from the internet and hop on a public bus in any country outside the Global North, visit a factory or farm in Latin America, Asia, Oceania, or Africa. I invite you to look at the women sustaining the structure, families, food, and production that benefit us all—the ones manufacturing 60 to 80% of the world's clothing, working in cleaning, child-care, and health services.

A fork in the road

In 2018, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, stated that "the world would be better if half of the countries and companies were run by women and half of the households by men." Sandberg has been a well-known representative of corporate feminism and has not hesitated to argue that gender equality would be achieved through perseverance and tenacity in the business world. The same year, a feminist strike of 5 million women paralyzed Spain completely with a call for "a society free of sexist oppression, exploitation, and violence." The strikers announced that "on March 8, we will cross our arms to interrupt all productive and reproductive activity," declaring that they "would not accept worse working conditions or lower pay than men for the same work."

Currently, we are facing a division between two paths: corporate feminism and feminist strikers. The first advocates for equitably sharing the right to oppress and dominate poor and powerless people between men and women. It asks ordinary people to be grateful that it is a woman, not a man, who destroys their workers' union, orders a drone to bomb their city, or locks their child in a cage at the border. This corporate feminism, backed by the economic elites of Silicon Valley and the financial institutions of the richest countries (and which has managed to echo in some privileged spheres of poor countries) defends the right to oppress equally between men and women. In contrast, the strikers or feminist strike, organized and composed of women from all social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, demands an end to capitalism as the system that generates the boss, impoverishes countries, produces borders, and manufactures the drones that guard them.

The contrast is stark: one path leads to a planet where every aspect of human life is subordinate to the laws of money and the market, while the other leads to a world where wealth is shared, and freedom and equity are the premises. The landscape does not include any alternative in the middle; we owe this absence to neoliberalism, a financial form of capitalism, extremely predatory, which has captured the world for the last 40 years, contaminated the atmosphere, sabotaged every attempt at democratic governance, limited our access to fundamental rights, and deteriorated living conditions for the vast majority.

At first glance, one path seems unfair and the other utopian. In many debates, it is common to encounter the argument "but ending capitalism is not possible, it's unrealistic.". However,  if we reflect on the connection between the history of capitalism and its emergence through practices such as slavery, colonization, and plunder in the Global South, we realize that it has actually consolidated only in the last 400 years. Despite this relatively short duration, it has profoundly influenced our perception of the world, to the point that it seems unimaginable to conceive of ourselves without its presence.

However, the foundations of its existence are crumbling, and the narrative that it is a system based on opportunities and freedom clashes with the harsh daily reality, where access to these opportunities largely depends on wealth. This is where feminist struggles and the proliferation of movements surrounding them outline a path toward realizing a just society.

Stay tuned for the discussion of Thesis 1: A new feminist wave is reinventing the strike.

Bogotá, December 11, 2023

Hablemos de feminismo - Parte 1

Este texto retoma, reanaliza y expande la obra “Feminism for the 99% A Manifesto”, escrita en 2019 por académicas que han estado estudiando el feminismo, las dinámicas de género, la reproducción social y el concepto de justicia por décadas. Así mismo, fueron fundamentales en la organización del Paro Internacional de Mujeres o Huelga Internacional Feminista del 8-M en 2017. 

Este manifiesto, que consta de 11 tesis, tiene un valor sintético valioso por el hecho de correlacionar las dinámicas de las luchas actuales de las mujeres en el mundo dentro del contexto económico y social de una manera que nos toca y que es tangible para la humanidad entera. 

Hablemos de feminismo, pero conversemos partiendo de una base analítica y no desde la mediática, ni tampoco desde la posición de observador pasivo que juzga un escenario desde afuera. Conversemos sobre feminismo como si fuéramos mujeres y estudiando las situaciones por las que pasan el 99% de las mujeres del mundo, no las del Norte Global, ni las de la clase alta que aparecen en los medios o que gobiernan en las élites empresariales o políticas en los países pobres y que crean una falsa ilusión de emancipación. Hablemos del feminismo para el 99%. Si las mujeres de las que vas a sacar tus ejemplos son Shakira, las actrices de Hollywood o las pocas gerentes de multinacionales, te invito a que te salgas de internet y te montes en un bus de servicio público en cualquier país fuera del Norte Global, a que visites una fábrica o una granja en Latinoamérica, Asia, Oceanía o África. Te invito a que mires las mujeres que sostienen la estructura, las familias, la alimentación y la producción de las que todos nos beneficiamos, a las que manufacturan entre el 60 y el 80 % de las prendas que viste el mundo, que están en los servicios de limpieza, cuidado y salud. 

 

Una encrucijada en el camino

En el 2018, la jefe operativa de Facebook Sheryl Sandberg dijo que “el mundo estaría mejor si la mitad de los países y compañías estuvieran administradas por mujeres y la mitad de los hogares por hombres”. Sandberg ha sido una reconocida representante del feminismo corporativo y no ha tenido escrúpulos para defender que la equidad de género se alcanzaría a través de la constancia y tenacidad en el mundo de los negocios. El mismo año, una huelga feminista de 5 millones de mujeres bloqueaba España por completo con un llamado a “una sociedad libre de opresión sexista, explotación y violencia” y las huelguistas anunciaron que “el 8 de marzo cruzamos nuestros brazos para interrumpir toda actividad productiva y reproductiva” anunciando que “no aceptarían peores condiciones laborales ni recibir un menor pago que los hombres por el mismo trabajo”.

Actualmente nos encontramos ante una división entre dos caminos. El feminismo corporativo y las huelguistas feministas. El primero, aboga por compartir equitativamente entre hombres y mujeres el derecho a oprimir y dominar a los pueblos pobres e impotentes. Pide a la gente corriente que agradezca que sea una mujer, y no un hombre, quien destruya su sindicato de trabajadores, ordene a un dron bombardear su ciudad o encierre a su hijo en una jaula en la frontera. Este feminismo corporativo, respaldado por las elites económicas de Silicon Valley y los organismos financieros de los países más ricos (y que ha logrado anclarse en algunas esferas privilegiadas de países pobres) defiende el derecho a oprimir equitativamente entre hombres y mujeres. En contraste, las huelguistas o huelga feminista, organizada y compuesta por mujeres de todos los orígenes sociales, étnicos y culturales, exige acabar con el capitalismo como el sistema que genera patrones, empobrece países, produce fronteras y fabrica los drones que las custodian.

El contraste es abismal: un camino conlleva a un planeta donde cada aspecto de la vida humana es subordinado a las leyes del dinero y el mercado mientras que el otro conduce a un mundo donde la riqueza sea compartida y la libertad y equidad sean las premisas. El panorama no incluye ninguna alternativa en la mitad, esta ausencia se la debemos al neoliberalismo, la forma financiera del capitalismo, extremadamente predadora que ha capturado el mundo por los últimos 40 años, contaminado la atmósfera, saboteado cada intento de gobierno democrático, limitado nuestro acceso a derechos fundamentales y deteriorado las condiciones de vida para la gran mayoría. 

A primera vista, un camino parece injusto y el otro utópico. En múltiples escenarios de debate es común encontrar el argumento “pero acabar con el capitalismo no es posible, es irrealista”. Si reflexionamos sobre la conexión entre la historia del capitalismo y su surgimiento a través de prácticas como la esclavitud, la colonización y el saqueo en el Sur Global, nos percatamos de que, en realidad, ha adquirido una consolidación significativa solo en los últimos 400 años. A pesar de esta relativamente corta duración, ha influido de manera profunda en nuestra percepción del mundo, al punto de que parece inimaginable concebirnos sin su presencia. 

No obstante, los cimientos de su existencia están desmoronándose, y la narrativa que sostiene que es un sistema basado en oportunidades y libertad choca con la cruda realidad diaria, donde el acceso a esas oportunidades depende en gran medida de la riqueza. Es aquí, donde las luchas feministas y la proliferación de movimientos que las rodean delinean un camino hacia la realización de una sociedad justa.

Espera pronto la discusión de la tesis 1: Una nueva ola feminista está reinventando el paro. 

Bogotá, 11 de diciembre de 2023