Blog 1490 – 10.17.2019

The Silent Sentinels

As Pocahontas sings in the Disney movie, “How high the sycamore grows, if you cut it down then you’ll never know.” Trees, they say are the oldest living creatures on the planet. They have watched the rising, flourishing, and dying out of many species of plant and animal life most profoundly under a late arrival’s stewardship – mankind. Up until the Industrial Age which began less than two hundred years ago, man’s carbon foot print was relatively small, consisting mainly of cutting down and burning trees. Initially for heating and cooking, later some steam inventions like the early locomotives were wood-fired but would all be converted to fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas, along with many other inventions.

The afore mentioned three are among the biggest culprits and root causes of man-made global warming. Oh, the profiteers deny it, their “scientists”, lawyers, and public relations people just like the tobacco interests, the lead industry, and the asbestos manufacturers all denied their products were harmful so they could continue profiting at the expense of many. The taxpayers are still paying to clean up those messes and will be for sometime and indeed have been also been paying to clean up the Super Fund site messes of the fossil fuel producers for many years now. Companies should have to pay to clean up their own messes.

I would not at all be surprised if it was the Big Three or their proxies who coined the phrase “tree hugger” for environmentally conscious people who know how important trees are to human life on planet earth. Unless we come up with a more efficient way to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, that we and many animals breath out and in respectively, we may wish we had let more of those silent sentinels stand watch for us. Trees have had our backs for a long long time. It is high time more of us had theirs, before our fate is carved in stone not wood, “We woke up too late.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White