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continued...
The planet is telling us we must either manage her needs as we meet our own, or she will be unable to sustain us. At present rates, the British Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre for says that substantial desertification of present-day rainforests will begin to accelerate wildly by about 2070.
And so, soon, within the lifetimes of children alive on the planet right now, we may see the completion of the infertile crescent—an arc of denuded land that already stretches all the way across Mexico, across Africa, through the Middle East and onward through Afghanistan all the way to the Gobi Desert in China and, now to the doorstep of Beijing. Soon it may include the lands of the rainforest in Southern Asia and those in South America and Africa, and it may well come to include the parched lands of the American Southwest and South (where there has been a horrible three-year drought) and the Southern countries of Europe, who are suffering in the face of a five-year drought.
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A Hungry Desert
This is the great threat of our lifetimes: That our unending consumption may consume the very resources we must have to survive. That our willingness to mindlessly drive gas-guzzlers and to have our homes powered by coal-fired electrical plants may so warm the atmosphere that we remove the vast seas of life, the forests and savannas, from the entire middle of our planet.
We Can, We Must
What can we do? There are many things to do. See Garden Earth Enterprise Solutions for many of them. See Thom Hartmann’s book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight for a wealth of information about how to live sustainably in communities. See Cool Companies for how to reduce industrial and home production of greenhouse gases (and reaps big financial gains in the process). See Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth by William E. Rees for insights on how to reduce consumption and begin to live lightly on the Earth.
Oh, and buy a Ford Taurus, or a Dodge Caravan or a Chevy S-10 and fill it up with E-85, an 85% ethanol blend and start to force the move away from petroleum. Or buy a hybrid car from Honda or Toyota.
In the future, there will be vast deserts where today there are forests, or else there will be vast forests where today there are deserts. It is your hands and the life you live that will make the difference. It is hard to believe that you can make such a difference but you can, and, if you still need inspiration, read The Man Who Planted Trees.
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...back
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©2004 GardenEarth on SolarCafe, Inc., all rights reserved |
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