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