Article: Tennessee wildfires

Article: Tennessee wildfires

Article: Tennessee wildfires

Article: Tennessee wildfires

As the world burns…

Civilized humans play, quite literally, with fire. Through global warming we trigger certain processes that get out of hand very easily, creating an autonomous dwindling spiral of reaction after reaction, all perpetually contributing to an ever-increasing average temperature (concomitant with sea level rise, forest loss, famine, acidification of the oceans, top soil erosion, desertification and mass extinction). It is just a matter of time until things completely get out of control.

One example is Greenland and other big landmasses of ice, where the rapid melting of the last decade created (together with particles from air pollution) a dark layer of dirt on top of the ice, causing it to melt even faster. So even if we would all switch to a non-pollutive way of life tomorrow, the ice would still continue to melt.

The other example is the increasing likelihood of devastating wildfires through droughts caused by global warming, with those forest fires in turn releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and therefore contributing to even more future droughts and wildfires.

It seems more and more obvious that we make ourselves the enemy of the world, we see Nature as a foe to be defeated in combat. People “fight” floods with erecting huge dams, “combat” evaporation by dumping plastic balls into artificial lakes, “retire” from villages being taken by the sea, desperately “defending” civilization’s strongholds against the overwhelming forces of Nature that strike with increased brutality.

The “fight against Nature” is a fight that can only be lost, since we ourselves are but one single part of this tremendous organism of interdependent species and ecosystems, and Nature will inevitably put us in our place.
It is up to us to decide how this is going to look like. Will we realize what we did, admit our mistakes and start doing things differently (and thereby avoiding the worst punishment), or will we stubbornly continue to cut down forests, dam rivers, blow up mountains, dump poisons and kill off species, so that the last judgement will be merciless.
It is time for us to stop our futile, pathetic attempts to fight the symptoms and start going to the root of this problem.

Play with fire, and you just might get burned.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/tennessee-wildfire-gatlinburg-20921?utm_content=buffere91bf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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