We think of humans as suffering from stress but as often as not humans cause stress. Humans have always stressed their environment. Many of the environmental changes have occurred as a result of humans placing the environment under stress. I have already written about how I think this occurred on Easter Island; another example is how the fields of grain that surrounded ancient Athens regressed into difficult land to farm, as the topsoil eroded due to the human methods of farming.
In larger ecosystems stress seems to cause a regression of that ecosystem into regression into an earlier state. For example some seas were once abounding with herring and mackerel. When these fish were removed by human over fishing, smaller species thrives, like the sand eel, which were species that could grow quickly to fill up the available space and food. If humans remove trees from a forest the species that then grow are faster growing species and the land regresses into a pre forest state, sometimes never to be able to return, because of the impact of cutting trees.
Sometimes the trees do return on the basis that the slowest can win the longest race, but as trees do have a major impact on local climate, the stress on the environment by removing trees may be fatal. We have stressed that environment and in doing so adversely affected the life forms that were established there. We have conquered like an army that wastes the countryside it conquers.
There will always be tension between people and the other life forms that inhabit the places where people live. You cannot walk, eat, or even breathe without affected some other life and without ending the life of some living thing. We have to eat carefully, tread lightly and breathe deeply.
Filed under: climate change Tagged: | cutting trees, environment, humans, nature, sand eel, stress
Man has been deforesting the planet for tens of thousands of years first maily and sustainably for his well being and latterally for the remainder for control and for profit.
The huge grass plains in North America where buffallo roaming in their millions was man made after the early explorers left horses behind and the natives themselves domesticated these horses and cleared the amazonian sized forests by fire to make hunting the animals…Which were predominantly forest animals, then easier to hunt in the open on horseback intothe tens of millions of natives at their peek as the second and final wave of explorers arrived, the majority of the early explorers who saw those early forest were all but gone, only.the higher plains and mountains sujrviving intact prior to the cathedral farming methods begining.
The enclosure movement cleared first people then woods for profits created bt the new found technologies in the towns.
Everywhere man and empire touches things take on the same cyclical phases and nature will never rest easy untile the profit paradigm destroys all that came before, we humans are very good at it.
However the most re-forested country upon earth which only truly left their woodage 200 years ago is Japan at around 78% forest, a most responsible and sustainable model which in itself creates more trees to be planted instead of being cut and converted for profit.
The oil indusrty in its ability to do without timber has single handidly controlled things to the detriment of growing trees, Japan has proved this in how they have done things.
There is no need whatsoever of cutting down a single rain forest for profit when the trees could be planted sustaianably, not one exotic need be destroyed, which take hundreds of years to grow versus a decade or two for other useable softwood species.
Mans greed and unsane policy of controlling himself will create many more deserts to come.