A very pleasant December afternoon at my Cabin on the Ridge, sunshine after rain, light breeze. A sulfur butterfly flits back and forth. Sorry, no blossoms here. My daughter Mary points out the spiderlings that have ballooned and set up little webs among the dead aster branches. And the webs are catching little flies. You can see the aerial plankton revealed in the sunlight.
Back in Athens, Georgia, azaleas are beginning to blossom. Crocus blooms beside my driveway. In December.
January is coming. What will become of the spiderlings and the aerial planktors? El Niño promises rain (which came) and cool weather when the jet stream dips south (it hasn’t, not yet).
I just finished reading The Annihilation of Nature (Geraldo Ceballos, Anne Ehrlich and Paul Ehrlich) about the extinction of birds and mammals. I was surprised to read that some 500 new species of mammals have been discovered in the past few decades. Most are tropical and in remote habitats, but still…
Yes, we’re in the midst of a major extinction event and it’s human-caused. Habitat destruction is the major driver. Will climate change become another? What does extinction really mean for our own survival?
We argue the importance of “biodiversity,” without a clear understanding of it. In the protected remnants of the Eastern Deciduous Forest, we’ve lost the major plant species (American chestnut), a very influential bird (Passenger Pigeon), the woodlands buffalo. Are those areas still “natural?” The good news – beavers return to our eastern streams.
As we convert our landscapes to harvest solar and wind power, we pay an environmental cost of unknown magnitude. Hey, this is our life support system we are monkeying with. Isn’t it?
Dac Crossley
December 30, 2015
“The first rule of tinkering is, keep all the parts.” – Paul Ehrlich.