Picture a sky turned grayish-brown. Now feel your nose getting plugged and your
throat scratchy.
For those of us who live in South Texas this is the time of year when we
are doused with an array of particles arriving as smoke, fine dust and tiny
pollen grains. Everywhere people
are sneezing and coughing. I imagine the
pharmaceutical brigands are gleeful because nose sprays, pills and assorted
concoctions are flying off drugstore shelves.
Remember, where there is suffering there is profit. The smoke seems to arrive earlier each
year. The dust has become endemic as more
and more habitat is destroyed. And
pollen counts are exacerbated by ever warming temperatures. The smoke arrives from southern Mexico and
even Central America. The dust is home
grown. The pollen is a product of short
winters and an early springtime.
I keep track of particulate amounts via the Internet,
especially 2.5 micron levels. Those same
Internet sources provide forecasts for the smoke arriving as hazy clouds when, far
to the south of us, indigenous people slash and burn their fields as they have
done for centuries. The only problem is
that population numbers have grown meteorically. Flash back a thousand years and the numbers
of agrarian farmers were few. Today they
number in the millions. Add to that the
ongoing droughts that plague much of those regions and the increased numbers of
pests resulting from warming temperatures.
It used to be that an area could be left alone for decades before the
people came back to burn off the brush and plant their crops. But today the land is continuously
ravaged. A few years back the president
of Mexico was asked about the burning that sends murky clouds north every year
and he said, “Well, it’s what the people do.”
In other words, he offered no solutions.
A political copout or a figurative throwing up of the hands; either way,
nothing was done and nothing seems to be planned. So now the smoke is arriving. Back in 1998 the smoke was so thick it wafted
all the way north to the Upper Midwestern United States. My oldest son was going through basic
training in Oklahoma at the time. He
said the smoke (thousands of miles from its source) made it hard to breathe. In South Texas the
air quality got so bad people were told to stay inside.
Decades of land destruction in South Texas (Read my books, Adios to the Brushlands and Keepers of the Wilderness from Texas
A&M University Press) has left huge swaths of former brushland naked to
erosion. When the winds blow the land is
literally lifted into the air. In places
where dry-land farming has been employed the soil levitates in the sky like a brown
curtain. The curtain drags overland
where it clogs towns and cities as if someone had dumped millions of buckets of
dirt on everything. In fact, that is literally
what happens. And then, as if the smoke
and dust were not enough, the pollen counts go wild. On the pollen-count meter the color becomes
dark red indicating extremely high amounts of pollen are in the air.
Now here’s my point, folks.
If you are reading this then more than likely you are a nature
person. You might be a hiker or camping
enthusiasts. Perhaps you are a bushcraft
aficionado. Lots of people who read this
blog are all of the above and they are also birders and native plant lovers. I received an email today from someone who
longs to experience the sort of quiet I wrote about in my post, “There’s
nothing wrong with quiet.” I get mail
every day from people telling me about their part of the country or of the
world. All of them share an affinity for
nature. We are, in fact, a sort of
brother and sisterhood. What matters to
us is the land. I’ve written several
times about saving our lands. For us
this means preserving the land so that we (and future generations) can partake
of its beauty. We also know that it
encompasses more than mere beauty. The
health of our planet, and thus all the living things on this earth, depend on
nature being preserved. So then let’s
all work together to save the land. We may
have different ways of accomplishing things and that is our strength. In other words, our diversity makes us
strong. Some of you might join a
conservation organization. Others might
write letters. Still others might become
active in a local issue relating to preserving nature. But the bottom line is that we all do
something. If we don’t then the skies
will get browner: the air will become more polluted; the climate will get even
more chaotic. Folks, it’s not as if we
get a second chance to run this experiment.
Isn’t it more prudent, logical, indeed rational to err on the side of
actually getting out and doing something to save the land?
Here are some websites you might find interesting.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (Air Quality
Forecast)
Air Now site
Directory of Air Pollution Sites
EPA Air Pollution Site
American Lung Association
Soil Erosion Organizations
World Allergy Associations
ayam laga indonesia
ReplyDelete