Most times, I can find some clarity by listening to one of the Bruce's. Maybe Cockburn can shed something here:
Lyrics:
Rain forest
Mist and mystery
Teeming green
Green brain facing labotomy
Climate control centre for the world
Ancient cord of coexistence
Hacked by parasitic greedhead scam -
From Sarawak to Amazonas
Costa Rica to mangy B.C. hills - Cortege rhythm of falling timber.
What kind of currency grows in these new deserts,
These brand new flood plains?
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
Anybody hear the forest fall?
Cut and move on
Cut and move on
Take out trees
Take out wildlife at a rate of species every single day
Take out people who've lived with this for 100,000 years -
Inject a billion burgers worth of beef -
Grain eaters -
methane dispensers.
Through thinning ozone,
Waves fall on wrinkled earth -
Gravity, light, ancient refuse of stars,
Speak of a drowning -
But this, this is something other.
Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
Where wild things have to go
To disappear
Forever
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
If a tree falls in the forest does anybody hear?
Anybody hear the forest fall?
January 1997 "[Interviewer: The decimation of the forest is something many of us here are very concerned with. A trip to Brazil,
no doubt, compelled you to write "If A Tree Falls."] "Actually, it wasn't a trip to Brazil. My exposure to rain forest, with the
except on one brief day in Australia, has been in the Northwest, the western coast of North America, which is as much rain forest
as anything else. It's just not tropical. So a lot of the time when people talk about the rain forest, they don't realize that they are
also talking about the large groves that grow on the west coast of Canada and North America.
But I was aware first hand of the destruction of these forests and aware through many sources of the destruction of the tropical
rain forests."
10k has a better ring than 15k. Desides, when the legislator from the Lake Wobegon district brought up the point of not being boastful or overstating, he carried the day.
Sure there are alarmists on both ends of the spectrum. The choice is to decide to make up your own mind rather than listening to only one source.
BD wrote:
just don't believe in not using (and developing) resources that we can
responsibly manage with minimal effects for the good of all mankind.
You need to define two words, responsibly and minimal.
It all gets back to the fart in the elevator.
The polar ice sheets are thousands of feet thick, and thousands of square miles wide. That's a chunk of ice, pal! And you don't think that the ocean's will rise? They already are. It may be hard to notice but the studies on the Pacific Islands are valid.
If you still don't believe in climatic change, do some reading on dendrochronolgy. The climate record is written in tree growth rings. If you have a basic understanding of tree physiology you should be able to grasp the value of this information.
I can see how some people may not believe that human effect on the Earth is leading to global warming. I can't see how our impact isn't acknowledged. There is a possibility that we are going through a natural warming cycle. If so, the effects are becoming more evident, faster, than any other time. How is this known? By listening to scientists from many disciplines. Geologists, botanists, ecologists, archeaologists, glaciologists, marine scientists. If you choose to not believe the overwhelming bits of information because there isn't one large bit, you're living a life with a bag over your head.
Oh, well...
Tom
