Scientists have figures, there’s math to be done. But scientists often get their money from
large corporations who have a vested interest in coming up with a certain
result. Put simply, the scientist whose
trials show that a specific, about-to-be-launched antidepressant is likely to
have its consumers throwing themselves down the atrium of the campus Psych Building ,
just may not get rehired by the lab that depends on corporate dollars for its
very existence. This is no laughing
matter, either, none of this—the guys in the white coats feed their children
with that money, dirty or no. The guy
lying in his own pulp at the bottom of the atrium left family behind, and maybe
hungry mouths as well.
Numbers, in short, can be manipulated, proof of corruption
can be flushed or shredded or waved away with sly lawyers and cunning PR. Words are all too often the pink frosting on
a pan full of moldy turds. And you and I
might be too busy to sort it all out on the fly, so whom do we believe?
Thankfully, there’s common sense, and there’s grade school
biology. Right now, the buzz (of words
and saws) is about the Amazon
Rain Forest and other
relatively pristine ecological (read “oxygen making”) juggernauts that are
being crippled and dismembered before the collective eye. While we worry about our bills, huge tracts
of the Amazon are being leveled and converted into desert. While we worry about the Amazon, the forests
of the great Northwest are being used to provide jobs and profits to the
weary. If we happen to concern ourselves
with Oregon spruce trees, we may not hear the
last trees falling in Africa . If we turn off our mass media for a minute,
or at least cover eyes and ears, we might hear the echo of bygone trees falling
all over Europe, where once a monk could walk from Austria to the west coast of
Spain without being able to see the sky, and where now you’d be lucky to find one
patch of forest that blotted out the blue as you passed.
Just where did all that freaking oxygen go? Because my grade school biology tells me that
trees convert a lot of CO2 into our next breath.
Or, take Southern Illinois, which is right now fairly well
carpeted with juvenile forest (and Lyme-disease carrying deer ticks), but
which, nevertheless, should sport more topsoil than the couple inches sprayed
over thick clay that one finds there. It
was always a mystery to me—again, using grade school biology with its
elementary knowledge of composting—why the soil wasn’t thicker. All those years of leaves falling (millions years’
of trees’ worth) should have left a lot more humus than is evident now.
Finally, in the middle of a hike through this territory, I came across a
publication in a restaurant which explained the enigma: when people first
settled those hills, they did what they knew how to do (you see, they’d come
from Europe, where a view of the sky overhead was once a rare commodity): they
cut down all the trees and tried to farm it (one tiny patch of near-virgin
forest, Beall Woods, is left in the northeast corner of the Shawnee Forest in
Southern Illinois). Being hill country,
two or three feet of topsoil slid into the Mississippi
and Ohio Rivers .
Ouch.
Now, I may not have a Ph.D. in nature-ology, but I am
willing to bet that A) relatively little of the original forest we now call the
Shawnee is left and B) that an extensive, mature forest, blessed with a yard
deep of rich topsoil built up over ages of leaf mold composting, can much more
efficiently supply you and I with our next breath than an pre-adolescent swath
of woods with only a few inches of dirt at its disposal.
WE’RE TALKING ABOUT OXYGEN,
PEOPLE!
Survivalists will tell you that, if you’re lost or roughing
it out in the wild, water is much more important than food. Most of us (let’s face it—we’re Americans)
could live off our fat for a lot longer than we think. But there’s only one thing more important
than water (unless it’s an environment that’s not cooking you or changing you
into freezer meat—but I’ll get to that later), and that’s oxygen. So why the hell is
nobody worked up about our VERY most precious resource?
Here’s a question I have, looking around at my home state of
Illinois (“The Prairie State”, home of the
very least expanse of intact prairie of any state except for Iowa , “The Tall Corn
State”). Again, I am thinking about oxygen
here. I have had the privilege of
walking through prairie here in the city of Champaign , IL. It doesn’t take long to do so; you can figure
the dimensions of this patch of green, tucked behind a billboard downtown, with
a construction worker’s tape measure. But I
notice that nobody ever cuts it down and leaves the ground there an ugly
stubble. Of course, fall and winter
temperatures certainly cut down and even cut off any oxygen production going on
in this mini-prairie, but a prairie field produces more O2 than a
cornfield even before harvest (since every square inch is covered in plants),
and, since its not barren ground, yay much more than corn stubble. This is all the more true since every
effort has been made during the life of the corn field to eliminate everything
but corn by way of handy herbicides and the icy touch of sterilizing liquid nitrogen fertilizers.
The irony is that Champaign
was never a prairie. It was a swamp that
supported a stunning profusion of life, if reports are to be believed that once
a person could shoot 100 ducks an hour here.
Now it’s got a lot of lawns, a fair amount of trees (for a city), and
some songbirds, but it sure doesn’t have 100 ducks an hour. And I don’t suppose I even have to point out
the supreme lushness of an environment that could support that much
waterfowl—but it would, of course, be an environment that supported a huge
number of water plants (which is what ducks eat), which would in turn create a
huge amount of oxygen (which is what we breathe).
So far: a gajillion fewer trees + a gajillion fewer prairie
and swamp plants = two-gajillion fewer O2
factories. And they didn’t
move to China , Taiwan , or Indonesia ; they’re gone, and pretty
much forgotten. The reckless belching of
CO2 (burnt O2) means less oxygen; ditto the mass sawing,
tilling, bulldozing and spraying (if not paving) to death of green plants. WHY IN GOD’S NAME IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT
OXYGEN?!?!?!
Global warming is not just about oxygen depletion nor
exponential increases in carbon dioxide.
They keep saying that the CO2 acts as a blanket that keeps Earth’s
heat from radiating out into space. Now,
if you put an early rising iguana (before she’s had a chance to bask and raise
his temperature) under a blanket, you’ll only end up keeping her cold, since
she has no warmth to trap. Ditto the
Earth. But every reaction that took O2
and burned it onto a carbon molecule to make CO2 also created heat
in the bargain....try lying across your engine block after a nice warm drive in
July, and you will see what I mean.
Campfires, cars, furnaces and factories all create both heat and
the carbon dioxide to trap it in the atmosphere.
Which is bad enough.
But after the skin grafts have healed from your experiment with the
engine block, lie naked on a rooftop at high noon on a sunny summer day. The iguana might feel quite nice, but you
will surely be frying and baking at the same time. Sidewalks also get quite warm, also bricks, cars as well (inside and out), and you wouldn’t want to make love on a sun-drenched parking
lot unless you’re into some very disturbing S & M....Once you have enough burn cream gingerly spread
across your back, try the same experiment by lying in some prairie grass, or
the floor of the nearest woods under the same weather conditions. After you’re done scratching, you might
notice that it was a hell of a lot cooler to lie down on natural stuff than it
is to lie down on man-made stuff. That’s
because rooftops and parking lots convert the sun’s energy to heat (and glare),
while trees and other plants convert it to stems, leaves and flowers and beauty and—yes!—cool,
clean oxygen. In the bargain, they
swallow up glare and turn it into oxygen and shade.
If you consider just the sheer number of cars in the world,
and all the heat they are generating by burning or just sitting there in the
sun (this would include, then, cars parked anywhere outdoors; or, if indoors,
the roofs of the parking garages they are in work just as well), and then
consider all the green plants that they and their roads and lots and garages
have replaced, you might just come to the conclusion that, hey, we are creating
and trapping quite a bit of heat that never existed until we as a race proudly reached
our newsworthy critical mass of population and technology.
Then, consider the obvious: that the aim of the so-called
global economy (I don’t find it very economical, myself. For that matter, I don’t find the term
“conservative” very fitting—they’re not trying to conserve anything but profits) is to increase sales of heat
creating/heat trapping stuff indefinitely.
It’s grow or die, and I know I am not the first to point this out but
that would a great go-fight-win motto for cancer, or plague.
Deserts also create heat.
Sand, like asphalt, gets quite hot.
Barren ground, compared to rain forest, creates a lot of heat. Cut down the rain forests, which miraculously
grow up out of poor and scanty soil, and you have barren ground, which can
boast of only the banal skill of heating up when hit by sunlight. Desert.
Again, more heat, less oxygen.
The fires set in the slash-and-burn technique of converting rain forest
to arable land (for a year or two) will be a small factor in the heat equation,
because the land itself will now create heat whenever touched by the sun,
indefinitely.
So why is nobody talking about heat except in terms of the carbon dioxide that traps it? As if 99% of our activities weren’t
constantly creating more HEAT? In
Spanish, you don’t say “I’m hot”, you say, tengo
calor—I have heat. Here’s what I
think: tenemos calor—we have
heat. Tenemos mucho calor. Oof!
…OK, I have done a bit of research. Here’s why no one is talking about oxygen,
it’s because there is so much of it. The
amount of CO2 in relation to O2 right now is .17%. Oxygen is the second most common component of
the Earth’s atmosphere at 23.1% by weight.
CO2 is less than .06% by weight. There’s so much freaking oxygen, we NEVER
have to worry about it’s running out on us, right?
Where have I heard this before? There’s so much freaking oil, land, water,
forest, glacial ice, blah, blah, blah, whatever might stand in the way of the
next contract. Virtually ALL of the
oxygen blessing this planet came from plants, and if the plants go, eventually
so will the oxygen. All I know is, they
keep revising the speed at which global warming is increasing—every ten years I
hear, “10 years ago, no one thought that global temperatures (or glacial
melting, or coral reef die-off) could have progressed to where it has
now.” Meanwhile, oil rigs are set to
rise out of the sea off the formerly prohibited coast of California .
Meanwhile, the automakers conspire to sell every man, woman and teenager
in China a new car—and everyone there, as well as in every Third World country,
wants a new car, would feel left out,
deprived, poor and pathetic if they were to not own one.
Oh—shit!
It makes me want to wear a houseplant on my back, with a
tube in my nose leading to the plant. Oxygen!
Author's note: since I have written this speculative article, it has come out that atmospheric oxygen levels are indeed falling (faster, alarmingly, than carbon dioxide levels are rising). See link: http://disinfo.com/2013/01/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-are-dropping-faster-than-atmospheric-carbon-levels-are-rising/ Also, there are major hypoxic ocean zones due to blooms of inedible phytoplankton, themselves a consequence of farm runoff and treated sewage. A healthy marine ecosystem's plants would be creating oxygen for itself and the world, but...