This is an excerpt from the recently released book, Dead Mars, Dying Earth (The Crossing Press) by Dr. John Brandenburg & Monica Rix Paxson

When a few infinitesimal molecules of the scent of smoke touch the olfactory tissues of a mammal, that animal (including a human) will spring to action no matter how deeply it might have been sleeping. Fire awakens a primal fear of death, triggering the flight response in birds and animals. Those with wings or legs, will run or fly away, leaving their nests and burrows in order to survive.

Trees can't run. A tree or plant must stay, attached to the ground as the flames roar toward it, as its neighbors die, as its bark begins to warm then sizzle, as flames explode up its sides and blast into its needles, as it is consumed in an inferno, giving its life-stuff back to a cycle of carbon.

There is a moment in a forest fire when a tree actually dies. One minute it is a living, growing being, the next, in a superheated flash, it is a black negative of its former self, standing silhouetted against a blazing aura of undulating flame—silver white on the inside, radiating outward in flowing bands of cobalt, orange and yellow—a tragically splendid blazing torch. By the following day, there is nothing left of the tree but a few shovels of dead and dying embers and a thick layer of ash on the ground awaiting a cycle of regrowth. The rest has rejoined the air as particles of smoke and carbon dioxide, a contribution which adds to the greenhouse effect, amplifying the problems humans make. Global warming has claimed another victory.

While many of us are aware of the endangered tropical rainforests and the critical part they play in the carbon cycle, not as many of us are aware of the threat to the Northern Boreal forests, which are found in Russia, Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, parts of the Korean Peninsula, China, Mongolia and Japan. They are particularly threatened because they thrive in a relatively narrow band of temperature range.

The boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere have lived in a beautiful harmony with the Earth for tens of thousands of years. If you could speed up the process so that you could watch the ebb and flow of the forests' growth and movement over the last eighteen thousand years (since the time when the last major ice age began to recede), you would see that the forests do "travel" slowly, in response to the movements of glaciers and changes in global climate. However, the forests can only accommodate very gradual changes, slower than the climatic changes that are being introduced today.

Like trees and plants everywhere, the firs, pines, larch and spruce of the boreal forests use carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis. Plants take in water and carbon dioxide, and in combination with sunlight, process these to produce oxygen, water and food. During most of their cycle of growth, plants take in much more carbon dioxide than they release and are thus one of the major "sinks" or methods of eliminating carbon from the atmosphere. When they decay or burn, the carbon from their cells is released back into the earth or into the air.

The ability of plants and trees to process carbon depends upon several factors--available water, sunlight, age of the plant, and the surrounding temperatures. A mature plant or tree, or one under stress from too little water or too much heat, will process less carbon dioxide than a young, healthy one.

About a fifth of boreal forests grow in areas at the edges of lakes or fens. These wet areas are covered with deep layers of decomposing vegetable matter known as peat moss, also a major carbon sink. In fact, it is precisely this situation--deep deposits of buried peat, transformed by time, heat and pressure--that led to the formation of coal and oil. Most of the fossil fuels we burn today were formed some time between the late Cretaceous Period, seventy million years ago, and the Tertiary Period, about ten million years ago. So, the coal we are burning today represents a process that has taken the Earth ten to seventy million years to produce.

There once was a time when there was far too much carbon dioxide in the air to allow the survival of modern-day humans. Modern mammals also require an atmosphere that is rich in oxygen and low in carbon dioxide. The change in atmosphere took place over a period of many millions of years. Plants and trees, which co-existed with early mammalian life as it evolved, removed so much carbon dioxide from the air and added so much oxygen that they ultimately produced the atmospheric levels we enjoy today. So, trees and plants generated the perfect mix of atmospheric gases upon which mammalian life, including human life, now depends.

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