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Edited on Fri Dec-16-05 01:32 PM by Peace Patriot
understand--the highly complex "web of life" that sustains us. In ancient, unlogged redwood forests, for instance, there is a barely noticeable fungus that only grows at the bases of the most ancient trees. Nobody knows what its function is in that highly complex ecology. Remove all the old trees, and you wipe out that apparently insignificant fungus. Perhaps it contained a vitamin needed by mice, which in turn transferred a mineral to the northern spotted owls who eat the mice, that fortifies the owls' egg shells. Who knows? The removal of owl habitat (big old trees) then, combined with a slight weakening of their eggshells, is responsible for the failure of their young to thrive (one of the phenomena that is leading to their extinction).
All we know is that, with the ancient forest IN TACT, the owls thrive. And if we go in there with high-powered tractors, and armies of loggers, and remove all the old trees and 80% of the forest volume, and open the canopy to the sun, and chew up the ground with logging operations, and pollute the streams with mud, and poison unwanted (non-commercial) tree species with pesticides, SOMEHOW, the owls don't thrive, nor do the fish or anything else. The impacts are gross and obvious. But, really, we have no idea what-all we have destroyed. The function of that fungus that only grows on old redwoods, and that may transfer a mineral to the owls' eggs, may be THE key factor in the owl's ability to recover. The tipping point. The very edge at which an ecology collapses forever.
Similarly, with global warming, what we know is that, with earth's ecology as it was 100 years ago--before deforestation and pollution--the climate was stable. We have grossly interfered with things. What is the key factor? (i.e., the "chaos theory," the tipping point, the unknown complication that changes everything; that pushes a whole lot of other complications, massed together, over the edge). Since we may never know what that is, the wisest course is to STOP WHAT WE ARE DOING and return to stasis as quickly as possible.
That "unwanted" tree species, that I mentioned above, is an interesting item. It is the tanoak tree--a tree whose bark was used to cure leather (in the period of high leather use). It is native to the redwood forest, but it now has no commercial value. When the logging companies come in and clear-cut an area (removing and selling all the high end species for lumber--redwood, Douglas fir), what the earth does in response to that assault is to IMMEDIATELY begin covering itself with the fast-growing tanaok. The earth acts almost like a naked human immediately trying to cover his/her naked parts, when stripped of clothing. The tanoak environment creates shade, moisture, cooler temperatures, and wildlife habitat (including spotted owl habitat). In natural forest succession, this environment encourages young redwoods and Doug fir, which eventually overtop the tanoak, and reassert dominance, creating a high volume, deep, dark, wet forest environment (in which the strongest, best, most fine-grained wood is created--SLOWLY, over time).
What the logging corporations do, after a clear-cut, is come back in and poison and kill all the tanoak--and then try to grow redwood and Doug fir in highly unnatural conditions, at which they are very unsuccessful. The resultant redwood is called "yellow redwood"--weak, pulpy, disease-prone wood, hardly suitable for fence posts.
This apparently insignificant, "useless," "non-commercial" species--the tanoak--is trying to tell us something: The earth needs its forest cover in order to produce more life, and to nurture and sustain a diversity of life. It CANNOT produce abundance and prosperity on open, naked, dry, hot ground. (It seems like a no-brainer--deserts have LESS life--but no-brainers need to be re-stated in this era of corporate lies.)
The melting of the polar ice caps and the frequent, big hurricanes, and all the rest, are delivering a similar message: If you drastically alter the conditions in which life evolved and prospers--if you start pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and THEN, in ADDITION, remove earth's ability to heal itself, by cutting down all the forests--you WILL destroy the complex, ancient, natural system that sustains you. It is a delicately balanced system of various forces, large and small, that needs all of its parts.
The fools (and greedbags) who poison tanoak (and destroy redwood forests) tell us all kinds of lies about it, just as the gas corporations and the Bush government lie about global warming. It's interesting to think of the greed and the lying--and even industrialization itself--as a natural phenomenon (we humans are, after all, products of this ecological system). A few of us--the rich--are apparently suffering a kind of stupidity, thinking that each can exist as a single tree, sucking up all the water, nutrients and sunlight to itself, and not as a forest, a community of trees and other life that is mutually sustaining. A single, isolated tree is subject to wind-throw, and without a forest sustaining a bird population, may have trouble reproducing. And its nutrients will run out, with no fish, mice and other carcasses feeding the soil. The rich seem suicidal in this respect. Thick-skulled; good at hoarding things, short-term; but unable to grasp the complexity and variety that makes life possible, and that ALL must be sustained, that ALL must prosper, for any one to prosper.
The rest of us want to live, however--want the environment protected, want our planet to survive and prosper in all its rich variety and mystery, and want ourselves and everyone to share in it--with many of us busily thinking how we can outwit the stupids who "can't see the forest for the tree"--and somehow salvage our only home in spite of them. It is a contest between outmoded egocentricity and evolving global intelligence, both of them natural phenomena. And since nature clearly favors abundance and variety (and, hopefully--given all the planets that astronomers are now discovering in distant solar systems--abundance and variety everywhere), I think we, the many, will win, in the end, and will prove that we humans are not some cancerous carbuncle on nature, but are a deeply understanding part of it.
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