Student reflection on the "lifted Lithosphere"
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I just moved from Naples to Lakeland, and the drive between the two is a visual summary of everything this module is about. Naples is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the state, and the landscape reflects that. Gated communities, golf courses, HOA-enforced lawns, commercial strips surrounded by parking lots. It looks green from the street. But most of that green is decorative, not functional. Those lawns are maintained with chemical fertilizers, pesticides, mowing, and fossil-powered leaf blowers, and they produce more greenhouse gases than they could ever absorb. Meanwhile, the actual functioning ecosystem next door, the western Everglades, keeps getting squeezed. Collier County grew 147% between 1990 and 2020, with gated golf course communities spreading east into what environmental groups call the last refuge for endangered species in Southwest Florida (Zorach, 2022). The Conservancy of Southwest Florida has warned that if planned development in eastern Collier County is built out as approved, the county could add over 300,000 residents directly adjacent to the Everglades (Conservancy of Southwest Florida, n.d.). Half the original Everglades has already been lost to development. The pattern in Lakeland is different but heading the same direction. Polk County is one of the fastest growing in the state, and former cattle ranches and citrus groves are being replaced by subdivisions and warehouses. Residents have described farmland being erased and development pushing closer to natural wetlands across the county (Heideman, 2025). This is landscape change happening in real time, and the part that connects it to climate is the soil underneath all of it. Soil is not just dirt. It is a living system that actively pulls carbon from the atmosphere and stores it. Every acre of it we pave over is an acre of carbon sequestration we permanently lose.
The question this module asks is whether that process can be reversed, and the answer is surprisingly optimistic. Culhane introduces the concept of "lifted lithosphere," the idea that buildings are just rocks and dirt moved upward. If you accept that framing, then every rooftop is ground that has been relocated, not eliminated. A green roof puts growing medium back on top of that surface, and suddenly the building is doing what the soil underneath it used to do. But it does not stop at rooftops. In places like South Florida, where sunlight hits the ground at an angle, a south-facing building wall actually captures more light per square foot than a flat field because the wall is more perpendicular to the sun. The taller the building, the more growing surface you have created. Cities already pipe clean water to every floor and carry wastewater back down by gravity. That wastewater contains phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, and micronutrients that are nearly ideal for growing plants. The infrastructure for urban agriculture is already built into every building. We are just not using it that way. Green Roofs are ranked as Drawdown Solution #73, with an estimated 0.77 gigatons of CO2 reduction and nearly a trillion dollars in net savings (Hawken, 2017). Commercial LED Lighting, Solution #44, has a negative net cost of -$205.1 billion, meaning it pays for itself, and those efficient LEDs can be used to grow food on north-facing walls that get no direct sunlight, making every side of a building productive. These are not hypothetical technologies. They are available now.
What brings this home for me is my group project this semester. We are working on AI-enabled energy efficiency in commercial buildings, analyzing how building management systems and machine learning can optimize how facilities use energy. That project is essentially the beginning of what this module is describing. If commercial buildings can be made smarter about energy, the next step is making them smarter about ecology, using the same infrastructure to support green roofs, vertical growing systems, and closed-loop nutrient cycling. Culhane references the Eight Forms of Capital, and his argument is that cities are rich in every form except the most important one: Living Capital. That absence is what makes cities feel like the problem. But the flip side is that all the other forms of capital, the financial resources, the intellectual capacity, the infrastructure, the concentrated population, are already there. The missing piece is not money or technology. It is the decision to use what we already have differently. I watched Naples grow for years, and the decision was always the same: pave over the ecology, landscape it to look pleasant, and move on. Lakeland is making the same choice right now. The soil that could be drawing down carbon is being buried under concrete, and nobody is asking whether the buildings going up on top of it could be doing the work the soil used to do. That is the gap this module identifies, and it is one that is completely within our ability to close.
References
Conservancy of Southwest Florida. (n.d.). Everglades restoration. https://conservancy.org/everglades-restoration/Links to an external site.
Project Drawdown. (n.d.). Green and cool roofs. https://drawdown.org/solutions/green-and-cool-roofsLinks to an external site.
Heideman, D. R. (2025, August 1). We are experiencing the same overdevelopment in Polk County. Ocala-News.com. https://www.ocala-news.com/2025/08/01/we-are-experiencing-the-same-overdevelopment-in-polk-county/Links to an external site.
Zorach, N. M. (2022, November 10). Sprawlhaven, Florida: Suburbs in the age of climate change. The Handbuilt City. https://handbuiltcity.org/2022/11/10/sprawlhaven-florida-suburbs-in-the-age-of-climate-change-fort-myers-hurricane-ian/Links to an external site.
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