We’re not even a third of the way through 2024 and I didn’t have heavy flooding in Dubai on my Bingo Card. If you haven’t heard and you just read that previous sentence, I didn’t mean Dublin, Ireland which has about 26-27 inches of rain recorded a year. No, I mean, Dubai the capital of the United Arab Emirates which received over five and a half inches of rain in a 24-hour period starting on April 15 and finally ending on April 17. Dubai doesn’t even get four inches recorded a year. It’s a desert dry climate.
Some people are blaming cloud seating, which is when airplanes are flown into clouds to dump particles like silver iodide into the clouds. This allows the water vapor to condense more easily and turn into rain. Today is Earth Day and it’s been celebrated on this date since 1970. Granted, people don’t take it seriously as they should. Mainly because a lot of people think either the world will just be fine or they’ll be dead before it really gets bad. The temperatures of the Earth has increased about 2.6 percent since 1970. While that may not seem like a lot, it should be a cause of concern.
This past winter, we had another horrible winter. Temperatures dropped to four below at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City on Jan. 13 for the Chiefs/Dolphins game. People who attended the game have reported frostbite which has led to amputations. This was the second winter in less than five years that a polar cold snap his this area with temperatures below freezing and a wind chill that can freeze water within seconds.
On April 20, Fort Gibson, Okla. celebrated its bicentennial. Five years ago, parts of the town were underwater as flooding occurred all over Muskogee County. Some was 10 inches deep. Several businesses were flooded and people were relocated from their homes. I live near Fort Gibson Lake and I could drive and the was so up at the levees that you could pull off the side of the road and fish from your driver’s seat. It was a hot summer that year. It was very, very hot.
Funny thing was the next summer, the weather wasn’t too bad during the summer. It was hot but it was like 90s summer hot, not 110s heat index hot. Yes, it gets hot in Oklahoma during the summer months as it does in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, California and Nevada. But the summer of 2020 was a relatively nice summer. Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic was in full swing and people rarely got out as much as they did. Vacations and trips were canceled. People didn’t drive or go places unless they absolutely had to. I’m sure the lack of carbon emissions had something to do it. While it has been reported it was a hoax that the marine life could be seen clearly in the waters of Venice, I do think human interaction (or lack thereof) has something to do with our weather and climate.
Scientists have reported there was a drop in the Earth’s temperature during the era that Genghis Khan ruled the Mongol army and they killed about 30 percent of the 115 million people they encountered. That’s over 34 million people killed that resulted in the regrowth of 55,000 square miles of vegetation. In the 54 years since the first Earth Day, the world’s population has more than doubled. An estimated 3.695 billion people existed on the planet. As of 2024, there over 8 billion people on Earth.
Naturally, with that many people using more resources, it’s going to cause some huge problems. More people need clothing. They’re using more chemical products. They need more food to eat. That’s why most of the meat you probably have ingested in the last half century had to have antibiotics in so that beef, swine and poultry could have gotten fatter faster. And those antibiotics are being passed to our bodies which are causing a change to our bodies. Therefore, all these animal body parts got to go somewhere and animals themselves used for livestock have to urinate and defecate which causes more ammonia and methane gases.
Now, I’m not saying anything against the consumption of meat. I’m a meat eater myself. I enjoy ground beef, ground chuck, bacon, sausage, pork chops, chicken and steak. Yet we don’t think about what the effects of one thing will be. I’ve also had bison meat before. It’s good meat, but we almost lost bison thanks to the trade in the 1800s that nearly wiped them off the planet. Thankfully, the market went bust in the 1870s but if it hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been a single bison left in North America. And I’m sure the exchange of bison with cattle has change our environment.
And you add to that the industrial revolution, smoke is blowing chemicals into the atmosphere as well as dumping chemicals out on the ground and into the waterways. We’re drinking that water. If not us, then it’s being drank by the livestock that we are eating. The movie Dark Waters reported that 90 percent of the Earth’s population has PFAS chemicals in their bodies because of Teflon. That’s over 7.2 billion people on the planet. And what about our own bodily waste? It has to go somewhere itself too.
Following the movie Jaws, there was an increase in shark hunters throughout the rest of the 1970s and 1980s. Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel and co-wrote the first movie, spent the last couple of decades of his life promoting shark conservation. Twenty years after Jaws, we had nearly wiped out certain species that many were placed on the endangered species life. It’s not just shark hunting but overfishing and we’re dumping plastics and other trash in the ocean.
But with less apex predators around, more prey are going to allowed to populate. Despite popular myth, great white sharks don’t care for human flesh. Their idea of surf-and-turf are sea turtles and sea lions. So, more sea lions and sea turtles are able to survive and sharks are noticing there’s more food in their areas. Ergo, they’re swimming closer to shore and accidentally attacking people. If God wanted us to swim in the ocean a lot, we would’ve made us amphibians. We’re always swimming with sharks. There’s no such thing as “shark-infested waters” as long as it’s an Olympic-size swimming pool.
Over the past five years, I’ve noticed that most Gen Xers are slowly turning into the next generation of Boomers. And I’m afraid of that. But I will tell what I mean. Baby Boomers grew up during the Civil Rights era followed by the Vietnam War, Woodstock and Watergate. They act like they were going to change the world, but most of them settled down quickly in their 20s and got into the normal regime. They even voted for “that sumbitch Reagan” twice, three times if you look at George H.W. Bush basically being an extension.
Gen Xers grew up on the MTV generation and acted in their youth like they were going to change the world. But then, we changed tactics and the same people who supported Bill Clinton in the 1990s are jumping up and down for George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in their older years. Mainly, Gen Xers are too busy thinking the world was a better place when they got to eat cereal and watch Saturday morning cartoons. It wasn’t. We were kids. We were being prepped to be extensions of our parents, elders and their beliefs.
And Reagan/Bush was just an extension of the Richard M. Nixon Administration. At least Nixon was smart enough to create the Environmental Protection Agency, even though I think he did it just to win over some of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s. That happened in 1970, the same year the Clean Air Bill were passed. In 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed. However, in a dick move, Nixon vetoed the EPA’s budget as one of his last acts as president before leaving office.
In 1971, Dr. Seuss published The Lorax, which was a warning tale about deforestation. But there has been controversy the book and its animated special produced in 1972 and feature movie released in 2012 were a criticizing of the logging industry. But Earth conservation should be something everyone at any age is learning, not just for kids.
It shouldn’t be an insult to be called a “tree-hugger.” So what? Trees and vegetation help us breathe. and we give them carbon dioxide to live. But even if we didn’t need the oxygen, there are still ecosystems that survive in all trees and plants. There is no reason in the fall/winter months to rake up leaves because it hurts ecosystems. Lawn care and maintenance is something that is sold to people by stores and corporations to sell machinery and products. As people moved from the more populated cities to the suburbs and small-town America, people were told it’s nice to have a lawn. Municipalities passed code enforcement laws so that you can be fined for not mowing your lawn or even having a weed.
But what we need are weeds and other items chemicals destroy to help the insects and other critters. Just watch Cane Toads: An Unnatural History to see what happens when we mess with Mother Nature too much. In June 1935, Australia introduced cane toads, which weren’t indigenous to the continent, because they preyed on the cane beetle, which was a pest to the sugar cane products. Only 102 toads were introduced in 1935. But 2011, they had expanded to 200 million. Cane toads spread diseases which is to believed to affected biodiversity and even the beetles themselves.
And when Europeans came to the continents known as the Americas now, they brought a lot with them that changed the world. It’s reported that many trees grow by accident. A squirrel will bury an acorn and forget about it or be killed by a predator. Or a tree will die and fall in a dense forest or storms will cause limbs to break. This allows more sunlight to come through and help the vegetation grow. While some people put trees in chippers to use for mulch, a lot are just burned as the ground is paved.
On CBS Sunday Morning, they had stories about underground and viaducts that are being built to help wild animals cross major highways. We need to be more conscious about what we’re destroying not touting what we’re building. I believe that if Trump and the Republican Party (in its current form) get back in power, the focus will be on helping business and industries destroy the world more. We don’t need more mining jobs. All it’s doing is helping rich people get richer. The same is for the Keystone XL Pipeline.
It doesn’t matter. Most of the wealthy people in this country probably won’t make it to 2050 or even 2030, which is the year scientists believe climate change and global warming will reach its threshold. That’s less than six years away. If we don’t change by the 2030s, it will be the point of no return. The fact that people are more afraid of the world that Civil War will create and happy for the world that Fallout will create that there’s a TikTok filter for the latter shows that we’re not taking things as seriously as we should. Yes, they’re both fiction.
But the only way to keep them fiction is to make sure it doesn’t happen. Every day should be Earth Day.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 