combined with population growth results in global warming, the effects of which are not immediately obvious. Human beings and institutions have heard the experts, seen the graphs and statistics, and respond in much the same way that individuals who are addicted to cigarettes hear but do not heed the necessity to stop smoking. The beginning effects of global warming are insidious and even disputable. The attitude is that there is nothing to get excited about even if the experts are right.
Once before, an alarm went off that wasn't initially heeded. This was the crisis over the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. Some people then were like those that warn against global warming now, who think that people are reasonable and will respond to information. Numbers, statistics of those affected depending on how close or how far from ground zero, were given. There were photographs of mushroom clouds caused by nuclear bombs. Experts as well as activists in the beginnings of an anti–nuclear proliferation movement were speaking out. Children were taught to duck under their desks in school and people were building bomb shelters in their backyards.
In photographs of the Earth from space, our atmosphere can be seen as a very thin translucent blue layer covering the planet. These photographs move us by their beauty and the knowledge that this is our home planet. The photographs of Earth are in the shape of a mandala, the Sanskrit word for “circle” that has come to refer to Tibetan sacred paintings, and the geometric symbol as C. G. Jung described, for the archetype of the Self, the meaning-giving center of the psyche and a shorthand designation for the many names of divinity. All of which may have subliminally or subconsciously contributed to the effect of scientist and author Carl Sagan's words. He described how in even a very limited nuclear war, so much pollution would be sent into the atmosphere from the destruction that this lovely halo would become a dirty pall, preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth. The beautiful blue and white sphere that is our Mother the Earth would cease to be an abundant, life-giving and life-sustaining planet.
If any country initiated a nuclear war and the other retaliated, radioactive dust and debris from the destruction would be sent into the atmosphere, and wind patterns would distribute this over the entire Earth. “Nuclear winter” would result. There can be no photosynthesis without sunlight, so all green vegetation and life that depends on vegetation for food would starve. Trees would die. Temperatures would drop. Earth would become a wasteland.
On top of the experts and activists that had sounded the warning, I think it likely that the beautiful photographs of the Earth as it is, contrasted to how it could be if the nuclear arms race continued, contributed to bringing that race to an end.
Now there are many other countries that have nuclear capability or are intent on acquiring it (Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran). The situation is analogous to having stopped the growth of a potentially fatal cancer, which temporarily went into remission, and now finding that it has metastasized.
Global Warming and Tree Forests: Flying over Montana
When I traveled to the Feathered Pipe Ranch outside of Helena, Montana, I could see from the air the indirect damage to trees brought about by climate change. There were large swaths of reddish brown running through hills that used to be covered by green trees. Montana is called “Big Sky Country” for the visual impact of vast blue skies over mountainous horizons. Only now, it was more like flying into Los Angeles on a smog-alert day. Fires set off by lightning had hit parts of the forests that were now tinderboxes.
Once on the ground and driving up through Colorado Gulch to the ranch, I could see individual rust-colored dead lodge pole pines everywhere. The cause: the pine beetle that is threatening pine forests from New Mexico to British Columbia. It is the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America. Drought and global warming together have made trees vulnerable. The black hard-shelled beetle, the size of a fingertip, drills through pine bark and digs a gallery in the wood where it lays its eggs. When the larvae hatch under the bark, they eat the sweet, rich cambrium layer and inject a fungus to stop the tree from moving sap, which could drown the larvae. The tree's vascular system (the phloem and xylem channels) is blocked, cutting off nutrients and fluids. The Latin name for the pine beetle is Dendroctunus ponderosae, which means “pine tree killer.”
To fend off an infestation, pine trees emit white resin, which looks like candle wax, into the beetle's drill hole. Sometimes the tree wins and entombs the beetle. Often, though, the attacker puts out a pheromone-based call for reinforcements and more of the beetles swarm the tree. In a drought, the tree has trouble producing enough resin, and is overwhelmed. As with infectious diseases in humans, whether a body is overwhelmed and succumbs depends on the strength of the body's immune system compared to the strength of “the bug,” the virus, bacteria, or parasite.
Drought-weakened trees lose resistance and can't fight off an infestation as well as a healthy tree, and when winters are not cold enough to freeze the eggs, they will develop into the larvae that will kill the tree in the spring. The pine forests are dying as a result, and when they die, the fire hazard increases. Summer thunderstorms bring both welcome rain to green trees and lightning that can set off raging forest fires as dead pine trees are highly flammable. Flying home from Montana, just after the autumn equinox, I hoped for a cold winter, for snow and ice that would kill the beetle eggs that were probably already in the living pines I could see out the small window in the plane.
While my thoughts were on the green trees, I was seeing them through the air pollution. As trees burn, they send smoke and particles into the air, using up oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases, which traps heat in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. The thinning and the depletion of the ozone layer caused by pollution from man-made chemicals (chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs) reduces the ability of the atmosphere to protect living things from harmful ultraviolet radiation, which causes skin cancer and cataracts in humans. Part of Patagonia at the tip of South America lies directly under the hole in the ozone layer, where hunters report blind rabbits, and fishermen catch blind salmon. Less widely known is that ultraviolet radiation affects the ability of trees to photosynthesize, diminishing the production of oxygen.
Easter Island
In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond's description of what happened to Easter Island could be a scenario for planet Earth if we continue to cut down or lose the trees and the population increases. (Diamond, a professor of geography at UCLA, was awarded the Pulitzer prize for Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies.) Easter Island is an all-by-itself island in the Pacific Ocean. Chile is 2,500 miles (4,020 kilometers) to the east; the Pitcairn Islands are 1,300 miles (2,090 kilometers) to the west. It is small, only 66 square miles (226 square kilometers), a mere dot in the vast ocean. It is now a barren place, famous for numerous mysterious and massive strange stone statues. These are look-alike huge heads with long ears and prominent noses and chins on legless male torsos carved from volcanic rock.
When Polynesian settlers arrived around 900 CE, Easter Island was covered with dense forests. There were twentytwo different kinds of trees, including the largest palm tree ever to exist in the world. We know about the species of trees from palynology, the study of pollen. Samples are obtained by boring out a column of sediment, the age of each layer is dated by radiocarbon methods, and then through tedious microscopic work, pollen is examined, counted, identified, and compared with pollen of known species. We know about the palm tree from fossil nuts that turned out to be very similar, but larger than those of the world's largest existing palm tree, the Chilean wine palm, which grows up to sixtyfive feet (about twenty meters) tall and three feet (.9 m) in diameter. Fossilized casts of the Easter Island palm trunks and root bundles found buried in the lava flow from a few hundred thousand years ago proved that the Easter Island palm, with a trunk that was twice the girth of the Chilean palm, would have dwarfed it. While it existed, the biggest, most magnificent palm tree in the world could be found on Easter Island. Reading this brings
