trip to sequoias

Ch.14 (cont.)

      The sad part of losing these trees is losing their air cleansing abilities, the monsters they are required enormous amounts of air to provide the life giving carbon dioxide they need so badly to allow them to continue lock up carbon in their trunks . Having survived forest fires , the extinction of many other species here on earth, and to live through most of the eventual conquering of man’s conquest of north America only to succumb to the ravaging effects of the technology of their worst enemy . Man.

Pollution and the harvesting of timber were the most damaging to the trees overall, and what is threatening the majestic beauty of the general Sherman tree. Virgin forests are nearly unheard of in the United States and most of North America in a little less than a tenth of the time it took to grow this huge beauty.

     The early conquest and industrialization of colonial America required huge amounts of wood needed to lay the tracks and to fuel the boiler of many a steam engine of a rail line . Large swaths of forests were devastated to make America what it is today. Replanting efforts are dismal compared to the amount of trees taken from every plot of land across the United States on a yearly basis and this I small compared to what it is in comparison to the devastation and  the losses around the world annually. At least we as Americans have sense accountability and only use wood from other parts of the world when it comes to purchasing our products, because we rarely manufacture anything in the U.S.  And instead rape our forests and ship the raw materials overseas. This process of developing a global economy requires huge amounts of hydrocarbon products that add pollutants to the atmosphere and create more smog and further increase the global temperature as we now suffer from the effects of greenhouse effect.

       The one thing we need to combat the carbon war we have on with our environment is trees and we could never plant to many of them.  If we are ever going to try save the human race from major devastation we need to do something simple plant, more than we use. No matter where you are at anywhere in this planet we all have accountability for ourselves as we are all stewards of this planet and require us to leave this world a little better than we found it.

     Technology is wonderful. As easy as it has been to accept and to further modify to fit our needs and wants, it is a human made double edged sword that cuts at our mere existence on this earth. Without tree’s we would soon perish. The earths temperatures would suddenly peak and who knows what would happen is beyond our imagination. Also we would not have any other animals or biologic diversity. Rains and high sea levels would occur as vast amounts of water would be released into the atmosphere further exacerbating the greenhouse effect and possibly plunging us in to our own version of a nuclear winter. But first the poles will once again flourish with a biological bloom as they melt ice caps even older than the sequoias and expose long lost lands locked under a polar ice cap.  That bloom of algae we may have to eat some day as that may all that might be left. The Artic regions would be the last empire left to show mankind’s existence at all.

       Really we as humans are eventually going to be extinct from our own hands, unless we use technology to find yet another planet to rape and pillage much the same as we have done here. Only on another planet we won’t have to wait for evolution to develop our brains and we can immediately begin to return to our old practice of celestial rape. It was nice to understand the basis of life as we now know exists is for matter for man to utilize, manipulate and make into the forms we need to just be happy. Maybe after a million years of years of leaving mankind’s existence behind in an account of nature’s mistakes at genetic mutations, and the process of natural selection behind, and all traces of humans are finally gone, the earth may heal and return to normal but who can take that chance.

      The sad part is we know to how to exist and live in symbiosis with nature. We have the technology, and we just have to place our wants behind our needs and make needs a priority again. We need a new car, but we don’t need to die from loss of resources required to make the car happen as an example. This is what is wrong with us. We not only want to facilitate our hunting and gathering practices by letting greed of a few drive our want machine that exists in our minds, to provide products that we want. The global economy is the worse idea we as humans could ever think of. We import products made from materials in third world countries and distribute them back in the same country from which the resources came from initially. China buys our used plastic and sends us back toys for our children to play with. Why for the greed and love of money of a few, so they can provide what people want and we all pay for it, in many ways and not always for money. Lee thought to himself. Why is this? After talking with me about the news of the General Sherman tree, Lee’s mind begin to stir as now he had the freedom to finally make a difference and let one mind change the thinking of thousands and maybe millions. Make people aware of how fragile our environment is and that we are on a tipping point. And it is between placing our wants ahead of our needs.We need to live and survive as a species.  

      We need to be environmentally responsible for ourselves as an individual, recycle, reuse and refuse to accept those things in your life that may be easy but are a bad choice for the environment. To  let our wants drive technology instead of the opposite is like the tail wagging the dog. We need to spend more time developing solar and alternative methods of transportation to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Yes agreed, that Lee uses his saw which requires gas and oil; to carve items out of dead wood for sale locally. The chainsaw was made out of man-made materials , he uses it to further his existence but Lee says in his defense that he also is pruning his woodlot to make it more productive and eliminating harmful toxins from our air and tempering our environment as a whole .  And he has planted far more trees with money earned from the saw that will modify and enrich our environment as opposed to harming it . A little bit of good can come from this arrangement.  As a steward of our environment he is doing his part by making others aware of his new-found desire to educate and enrich other people’s lives by making them environmentally aware of man’s effect on nature. Lee moved over a thousand trees from his farm and offered them for sale at his new shop, and forced customers to buy trees instead of carvings. Lee would simply give them the carving and make them buy trees instead .Lees carvings were all made out of downed wood.  If someone suggested cutting a tree down for him to carve in, then he would immediately tell them don’t bother or find another carver.  He was having no part of such an idea. He absolutely hated seeing carvings in live trees as some carvers do, as this eventually led to the trees poor health overall. The practice of  Kids pounding nails into trees and parents encouraging the construction of tree houses nailed into the wood of live rees ,  and later wondering why there tree had to come down.

     All this irritated Lee and so he made it a requirement that if you wanted a carving then you had to be responsible for the planting of trees to replace it. And it wasn't one tree but instead maybe ten or twelve depending on how extensive the carving was. The end result was that people wanted his carvings and he still made money, and trees were planted helping Lee and the people he came across sleep a little easier knowing they were helping save the environment. Even at his new shop he was getting amazing attention at his practice of using trees as a commodity, then giving his carvings away. But he needed to do something about the General Sherman tree; he just needed to think this one out a little further.  He looked around his new shop and saw Susie sleeping on an old rug he brought along with him from the farm. She felt home anywhere Lee was. Lee was glad as she had been a good dog, and she didn't know how lucky she was to not have Lee’s worries.