Wildfires Downgrading Environment As Political Issue

The great wildfires out west are making a shambles of the environment as an issue in this year’s political campaign.

Millions of acres of trees that could have been used to build homes have burned. Not to worry, say earth scientists; this is nature's way of balancing the environment. The forests will regenerate.

Not so long ago we were exhorted by Smoky Bear that “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Now we know that lightning causes most such conflagrations.

The relationship of so-called “natural disasters” to earthly habitat is widely misunderstood. Tree huggers would save a lot of their angst if they would bone up on current environmental thinking based on the “Gaia” books by Dr. James Lovelock.

Gaia is the Greek goddess who drew forth the living world from Chaos. Lovelock is a British scientist considered the father of the environmental movement. His theories and findings first published in 1979 sparked a revolution in earth science. Lovelock’s “living earth” postulations have not yet moved fully from the realm of science to every day practice. The principal obstacle is politics.

Tree huggers, led by Al Gore, stampeded environmentalists at the 1997 Kyoto conference in Japan. All kinds of regulations were proposed. Some were adopted by alarmist governments, which now are reconsidering.

The Gaia premise is that life on earth has evolved over millions of years. It now is a delicately balanced organism of oxygen-breathing animals and carbon-breathing plants.

“Feed back” mechanisms enable the collective organism to act ruthlessly in protecting itself from upsets.

Lovelock points out that air is made up of a soup of gasses– 77 percent inert nitrogen and the rest a mixture essential to life in many ways.

Plants, for example, convert sunlight and carbon dioxide gas into starch and exhale oxygen. Animals breath oxygen, eat starch (or other animals who eat starch) and exhale carbon dioxide.

Air gases beneficial to one form of life are poison to the other one. Upset the balance by 2 percent and both forms of life sputter out. Nature seeks to maintain the balance by stimulating or repressing the separate forms.

Thus, it can be supposed that protected forests and grasses are producing too much oxygen, This over populates the environment with polluting people, cows and termites.

Earth balance is restored by a few lightning bolts in forests and a few epidemics among oxygen-breathers. It is kind of spooky, but it’s not nice to try and fool Mother Nature.

Another environmental scare popped up last week when the Arctic ice cap parted and flooded Santa’s workshop.

Wurra wurra! The world is warming. Polar ice is melting. The oceans are rising. Coastal cities will be inundated. Deserts will overtake us.

Well, yes and no.

The world has been extremely warm and extremely cold, off and on, for millions of years before there were humans. The oceans rise and fall over the eons in response to sunspots and earth wobble.

Arctic ice is melting, but this has little effect on sea level. Floating, frozen water is equal to the liquid water it displaces.

Antarctic ice – partly floating, partly weighing down terra firma – and the Greenland glacier do affect sea level to a degree not yet known for certain. The weight of ice pushes land down into the earth’s molten core. As the ice overburden melts, the land rises.

The climate is warming within its eonic cycle; but this will produce lusher jungles, not vaster deserts. As in the distant age of dinosaurs, more rain is produced by more heat evaporation. We can expect more floods and less desiccation.

Our problem will be rearranging populations as temperate farmland migrates toward ice-free poles.

In the meantime, Gore should can his uninformed tirades about the environment. George Bush should stop trying to one-up his opponent on the subject.

If either, or both, want to truly help us adjust to the effects of pollution and climate change, let them promise more funds for research. We don’t yet know what we don’t know.

PARTING SHOTS

It is hard to understand why Democrats squelched the Playboy mansion party for wealthy donors. She was just trying to help working bunnies.

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Pundits attribute Al Gore’s big bounce in post-convention polls to the X-rated kiss he and Tipper exchanged on the rostrum. We shudder to think of what they might do if his ratings start to fall again.

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George Bush in his speeches has trouble telling the difference between a billion and a trillion dollars. He should have no trouble working with Congress.

*it Lindsey Williams is a Sun-Herald columnist *io

williams –gaia

Sunday 00 aug. 27, 2000

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