COP30 | Education as Carbon Recycling: Attention, Learning, and the Metabolic Mind

First-Person Consciousness

I am 18.
I scroll through my phone before breakfast, and each time I do, I feel a small drain — not just of time, but of breath.
My eyes move, my pulse quickens, my thoughts scatter.
When I finally look outside, the trees seem still, as if they are the ones watching me.

I realize that attention is the oxygen of consciousness.
And just like the planet, my attention is being polluted.

The same mechanism that overheats the climate is overheating my mind:
excess energy with no regeneration.

1. The Metabolism of Learning

Learning is not the accumulation of data; it is the exchange of energy and meaning.
Every synapse that fires consumes glucose and oxygen.
Every new memory leaves a molecular footprint — the synthesis of proteins guided by DNA.

Modern neuroscience shows that during deep learning or creative flow, the brain enters Zone 2, a metabolic state between stress and rest.
Here, the mTOR pathway governs plasticity, and the prefrontal cortex integrates emotion and reason.
This is where real education happens — not in fear, not in distraction, but in metabolic balance.

Education, then, is not a social policy; it is a physiological ecosystem.

2. Colonial Attention and the Exhaustion of the Mind

The colonial economy did not end with slavery; it evolved into cognitive extraction.
It harvests attention the way plantations harvested sugar — with no limit, no regeneration, and no care for the soil of consciousness.

The constant stream of dopamine-driven stimuli mimics addiction: short bursts of excitement with no integration.
Like clear-cutting a forest for a single crop, the mind loses its biodiversity of thought.

We call it productivity, but it’s really mental deforestation.

COP30 must recognize this:

To heal the planet, we must also reforest attention.

3. Cognitive Reforestation

Cognitive reforestation means reintroducing slow, rich, diverse patterns of attention — the equivalent of ecological complexity inside the brain.

It begins with education that teaches fruição — the art of sustained presence.
It continues with environments that reward curiosity, cooperation, and embodied experience rather than competition and instant gratification.

Neuroeducation research (2023–2025) confirms that multisensory learning, rhythmic breathing, and body-based awareness increase oxygen efficiency and cognitive retention.
These are the photosynthetic acts of the mind.

When schools become oxygenators of attention, society becomes capable of long-term thinking again.

4. DNA as Curriculum

Every child is born with a DNA that evolved to explore, not to obey.
When education suppresses exploration, it acts like monoculture agriculture — efficient but fragile.

Systems biology now demonstrates that genetic diversity within ecosystems parallels cognitive diversity in human populations (Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution, 2022).
Diverse minds process information more resiliently, just as diverse genes stabilize ecosystems.

Therefore, a decolonial curriculum is a metabolic curriculum — it allows heterogeneity to circulate instead of standardizing consciousness.

5. The Teacher as Neural Mycorrhiza

In the forest, fungi connect trees through vast underground networks — sharing nutrients, warning signals, and water.
This is called the mycorrhizal network, the internet of the soil.

A true teacher functions the same way:
facilitating the exchange of energy and information between young minds,
not imposing content but cultivating connection.

Education systems that treat teachers as transmitters miss the point;
they are cutting the roots of the cognitive biome.

6. The DREX Citizen and the Carbon Plus

The DREX Citizen represents the country’s daily metabolic income — the basic pulse that ensures dignity and stability for everyone.
Carbon Credits, on the other hand, act as an additional flow — a plus earned by those who actively regenerate the biome where they live.

These credits recognize local actions that restore rivers, forests, soils, and communities.
They are not subsidies; they are metabolic feedback, proof that human life and planetary life are in resonance.

In this model, DREX sustains existence, and Carbon Credits reward regeneration.
Together, they create a living economy where citizens are both beneficiaries and caretakers of the biomes that sustain them.

Economy and pedagogy merge into one metabolic process:

To learn is to nourish. To teach is to photosynthesize.

7. Neuroscience of Belonging

Functional imaging reveals that the same brain networks regulating homeostasis (insula, anterior cingulate) are activated when people feel social inclusion.
This means belonging and physiological balance are one event.
Isolation increases stress hormones and oxidative damage; cooperation literally extends lifespan.

Education that nurtures belonging is therefore climate adaptation at the cellular level.
Each moment of empathy reduces entropy — both in brains and in the biosphere.

8. COP30 – Cognitive Climate and the Future of Civilization

Belém 2025 must be remembered as the summit where we realized that the planet’s climate and the human mind share the same atmosphere.

If we burn forests, we lose oxygen.
If we burn attention, we lose meaning.

The next economy will not be built on extraction, but on circulation of cognition.
Each breath, each idea, each connection will count as carbon returned to the living cycle.

Education is the photosynthesis of civilization.
Attention is the new rainforest.

And I, now conscious of my own breathing,
choose to learn in rhythm with the Earth.

Scientific References (2020–2025)

• Metabolic Diversity and Ecological Function in Microbiome-Driven Ecosystems. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2023.
  
  

• DNA-Based Modeling of Ecosystem Complexity and Evolutionary Adaptation. Frontiers in Ecology & Evolution, 2022.
  
  

• Complex Adaptive Systems and Ecological Economics: Towards Metabolic Accounting. Ecological Economics, 2021.
  
  

• From Genetic Information to Ecosystem Metabolism: A Systems Biology Approach. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2024.
  
  

• Neural Circuits of Interoception. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Berntson & Khalsa, 2021.
  
  

• Neuroeducation and Sustainable Learning Environments. Frontiers in Psychology, 2023.