Tuesday Top 10: Earth Day Thoughts
Today is Earth Day. One day to not chuck that plastic bottle into the trash (or ditch) then we can go back to doing what we can to wreck the environment for the poor souls who are younger than us.
Individually, it’s hard to see progress in what we do to help the planet, but collectively…well it doesn’t seem like that’s doing much good either sometimes.
Top Ten Earth Day Thoughts
10. Coal/Oil: What if the Earth in the past didn’t create the conditions to make fossil fuels? Well, we like to burn stuff, so there goes the forest. Not as efficient as coal, but we leaned how to make charcoal by smoldering wood. Maybe we would have started a sustainable way to harvest and reforest. Naw. Probably not.
9. Over hunting: The greater the population, the more animals we had to kill for food. In nature, when the prey starts to wane, so do do the predators until the the balance returns. But we learned to farm and domesticate animals so we didn’t have to worry about that.
We also learned how to hunt to extinction…
8. Farming: One person needs about 1 acre (about 1/2 a hectare) to grow and raise enough food to sustain themselves. But then you’d have to grow corn, wheat, carrots, beets, potatoes, quinoa, apples…then there are the chickens.
The solution? Different people raise specialized crops. But eventually some one is going to open a store and they’ll have to tear down the trees and put up a parking lot.
7. Natural Resources: There’s stuff around us. We are going to use it, right?
6. Nature’s Toilet: Don’t want or need it? Dump it in the river and it goes away. It goes away, doesn’t it?
5. Chemicals: Chemistry started as alchemy, the science of turning one thing into another, most notably lead into gold, but eventually someone learned how to make chlorine and then we decided it would be good for killing people in WWI.
4. Stuff: Do we really need all that stuff? Duh. Yeah…
3. Ozone: Do we really need that layer? Turns out we really do. Thanks a lot, chemicals.
2. Climate Change: Rising sea levels. More intense storms. Droughts. Melting ice caps. Dying coral. Who’s to blame? The Chinese? Wait? What? According to facts, the earliest use of coal was in China about 4000 years ago. But it was in Britain where the use of coal boomed and was responsible for the Industrial Revolution. So we have to blame the Brits*, right?
1. People: There’s too many.
Right?
-Leon
*No Brits were actually blamed in this post. Except for Sir George Bruce maybe…
Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words, and his latest sci-fi mystery, Euphrates Vanished.
My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/
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