Is it time to question what’s going on with Planet Earth?
Commentary by DICK DORWORTH
Can anyone imagine what James Audubon saw in 1813 along the
Ohio River when a stream of passenger pigeons estimated at one billion birds filled the
sky so that the "light of the noonday sun was obscured as by an eclipse."
Is global warming real? Are species of the flora and fauna of the earth
really going extinct at an accelerating rate? Are the waters of our planet actually too
polluted and, in many areas, insufficient to support life? Is the ozone layer which
protects the earth’s atmosphere thinning, and, in places, disappearing?
Are the deserts of the earth expanding at the same time the glaciers and
ice caps are receding? Does acid rain exist? Is it dangerous to breathe the air of, say,
Calcutta, Santiago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Gdansk, Beijing, Singapore or any number of
other congested cities indicative of the future of the world?
How long will it be before the ancient and regal ecosystems of the great
tropical jungle woods of Indonesia, Borneo, Malaysia, New Guinea, Central America and West
Central South America (especially in the Brazilian Amazon) are turned into clear-cut
lifeless slag heaps of sawdust, powdered dirt, mud and dust?
Is it true that these fecund and complex tropical forest ecosystems, the
birthplace and domicile of the world’s greatest concentration of biological wealth,
are the lungs of planet earth and that their destruction endangers the health of the
atmosphere of the entire earth?
How many millions of logs from the receding old growth forests of the
American Northwest and Alaska have been exported to Japan without being milled in America?
How many American mills have gone out of business as a result? How many of those logs have
actually been used in Japan? And how many millions of them are currently submerged in bays
along the coastline of Japan to reappear at a future time when most of the world will have
run out of trees to log? How distant or not so distant is that future?
If the deserts of the earth are swiftly expanding (and they are) and the
forests of the earth are rapidly diminishing (and they are), as has happened within
recorded history in, for instance, Lebanon and China, is this an indication that the
quality of life and standard of living our great-grandchildren will experience is akin to
that of present day China and Lebanon?
Does the world recall the passenger pigeon which 200 years ago comprised
40 percent of the entire bird population of North America? Can anyone imagine what James
Audubon saw in 1813 along the Ohio River when a stream of passenger pigeons estimated at
one billion birds filled the sky so that the "light of the noonday sun was obscured
as by an eclipse." Can one fathom that the flock Audubon noted was but one of several
passing over the Ohio River that day? Is there an object lesson in the fact that on March
14, 1900, the last wild passenger pigeon was shot by a young boy; and that on Sept. 1,
1914, as the best of Europe’s youth were slaughtering each other on the Marne, the
last captive passenger pigeon died?
Who remembers that only 130 years ago buffalo outnumbered humans in North
America, or that Wyatt Earp described just one herd of a million buffalo stretched across
a healthy grazing area the size of Rhode Island. And who remembers what U.S. General
Philip Sheridan wrote in praise of the U.S. government’s campaign of biological
terrorism against the buffalo: "The buffalo hunters have done more in the past two
years to settle the vexed Indian Question than the regular army has accomplished in the
last 30 years. They are destroying the Indian’s commissary. Send them powder and
lead, and let them kill until they have exterminated the buffalo."
And what is one to think of Sheridan, who, a decade later, proudly advised
the U.S. Congress to mint a commemorative medal with a dead Indian on one side, a dead
buffalo on the other?
Is this our national heritage, and are we still proud to perpetrate it?
Why?
Why not?
How many people reading this have seen with their own eyes the spawning
salmon who gave Redfish Lake its name, clogging the Salmon River with the color red on
their last trip home? And which advocate for the Snake River dams which are driving those
salmon to extinction will most proudly lobby Congress to issue a commemorative medal with
a dead salmon on one side, a dead Indian on the other? Kempthorne? Chenoweth-Hage? Craig?
What is the significance of the extinction of Raphus cucullatus and
why does the term "dead as a dodo" imply the ultimate in deadness?
Is there a correlation between any or all of the aforementioned
unmentionables and the ultimate unmentionable in polite conversation—that is, the
compounding over population of the earth by humans?
And is the continuously swelling human presence such that for many forms
of life on earth it obscures the noonday sun as if by an eclipse? And is the human
presence as transient as was the passenger pigeon’s?
And is the mention of such inconvenient and uncomfortable subjects only a
conspiracy by liberals, communists, environmentalists, one-world-orderists (as opposed to
corporate globalists), losers and paranoids to sabotage the status quo of the proper
business interests of that same world?
What do you think?
