The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our
activities are changing the climate, and act forcefully. We will continue to
see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods,
and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict and hunger
around the globe.
As Dunwiddie states, literally in a matter of decades the
forests was cleared- there is no more oak pollen, and all of a sudden lots of
grass pollen.
According to Bill Mckibben, in his book, the end of nature,
“Human beings were ending the very idea of wildness as our cars, factories and
burning forests filled the skies with green house gases. According to Prof.
Gregory Benford from University of California, “Lessening solar UV radiation
would lower skin cancer deaths now about a million per year. Crops under less
UV grow better and yield more food especially in the tropics.In his state of union address 2015, President Obama “ 2014
was the planet’s warmest year on record- one year doesn’t make a trend, but
this does- 14 of the 15 warmest years on record have all fallen in the first 15
years of this century”
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| President Obama on Climate Change. |
There is a big danger of changing the flora and the fauna
everywhere in our beloved planet earth.
As Bill (2007) states, “Nature as something separate from
man has vanished…..it should depress us to live on a planet that becomes less
complex and wild with each passing day, and it should depress us even more that
we are the cause of that change” (P.13) unfortunately, the Florida comedy of
2000 never allowed the Democratic candidate AL Gore to achieve his vision for
this planet earth. The earth’s forests used to cover about a third of the
planet land surface- but of recent, vast tracts of forest have vanished from
Japan, the Philippines, and the mainland of Southeast Asia, from most of the Central
America and the horn of Africa, from the Indian Subcontinent and sub-Saharan
Africa……..Southeast Asia resembles a dog with the mange. Malaysian Borneo is shaved,
clearing spreads to Siberia and the Canadian north. Forests disappear so
suddenly from sp many places that it looks a plague of locusts have descended on
the planet.
As William Cronon in his book’ Changes in the land’ writes,
“Nothing could be further from the truth” It is tempting to believe that when
the Europeans arrived in the new world, they confronted Virgin lands, the
forest primeval, a wilderness which had existed for cons uninfluenced by human
hands. “New England lumbering used forests as if they would last forever.
As Bill(2007) states, “ the colonial squandering of
resources is best typified….by the use of firewood to heat homes.(P.22) They
consumed on average, more than thirty cords of wood a year, or about an acre of
forest. One of the prominent forest researchers Douglas Mac-cleery noted,
“Total land in grain and vegetables had grown to 76 million acres, a number
that quadrupled to 319 million acres by 1900. Sometimes new technology helped
coal and oil began to replace wood as fuel source in the late nineteenth century.
As Andre Michaux (1805) noted, “ In more than a thousand
leagues of the country over which I have traveled at different times in North
America, I do not remember having seen one to compare with the Ohio valley for
the vegetative strength of its forests.
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| The time is now to act- President Obama |
As noted by Ohio state university professor using satellite
data and ground maps recently compared the region as it was in 1938 with that
of 1988. He found that fifty years ago, there were 2146 polygons- farm fields, clear
cuts and other definable boundaries in 1988, the number was down to 710 the
woods were reclaiming pasture and road. It should be noted that as the last animals were vanishing,
Theodore Roosevelt banded together to oppose market hunting, enact game hunting,
enact game laws and establish refuges and reserves. Unfortunately, as games
have spread, so have predators. The most
fearsome are probably family dogs, capable of killing huge quantities of deer
for sheer sport.
We must operate within certain limits- most nitably the
large population not faced by the first Europeans to reach the US. Climate and
whether are now influenced by our gaseous contribution to the atmosphere-
remains sufficient vigor to reassert itself for its original species to press
up through the weight of our settlement and reestablish themselves.
Charles (1890) states, no other true grows so rapidly or to
such great so rapidly or to such great size on the gravelly hills of the
northeastern states…in early summer, long after the flower of its companions has
disappeared, the crestnut covers itself with great masses of spikes of yellow
flowers and is then the most magnificent object of the sylvan landscape.
Computer projection of climate change indicates that by the
end of the next century, hemlock trees- which shade the streams in some places,
cooling the water for the trout may not survive south of the Canadian border.
We are the ones desperately in need of missionaries but could show us how to
live closer to the ground.
