Do You believe that our planet is fragile? From one point of view It is true... You know all that stuff about deforestation, climate change, greenhouse gases and decreasing the polar caps. But I recently had a chance to watch really nice BBC documentary named Earth: the Biography. I found It pretty educative. Check this out, very interesting ideas: ....1 This is the most famous places in Madagascar. These giants are the baobab trees, the island’s national symbol. They are actually a symbol of something else as well. The only reason you can see them is that other trees have been cut down. The baobabs remain because to the local people, they are sacred. Right across Madagascar the forest is under attack. Wherever you go, you catch the smell of wood smoke, the small of farmers clearing the jungle because the local practice, known as ‘tavy’ (slash-and-burn) uses fire to open up new land. These days, there is only about a fifth of the island’s original jungle left. 2, 3 Of course, deforestation is not only a problem that is confined to Madagascar. In Bolivia, this area of rainforest covering more than 20,000 square miles was turned into farmland and towns in just 20 years. 4 Each year across the planet, an area of forest about the size of South Carolina is destroyed. 5, 6 You only have to go to Mexico, the place where the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs landed, to see our influence on the planet from a very different perspective. This is the pyramid of Nor Uxmal. It was build more than a thousand years ago by the Mayans, and was at the heart of a city of 50,000 people. Today, little remains of that once-thriving culture. .. It is a reminder that no civilization will last forever. In the human imagination the 2,000-year rise and fall of the Mayan Empire seems incredible. But it is nothing compared to what has happened here over Earth’s lifetime. This area has not always been jungle. At times it has been beneath the sea. At other times, it may have been covered in ice. And 65 million years ago this is where the Chicxulub meteorite landed. But even that has not left much of a trace. Earth and life recovered, sometimes even benefited, from this and from every other major catastrophe. It is this ability to deal with catastrophe that is a truly special thing about Earth. Our planet is really tough, and there is nothing to suggest that that is going to change anytime soon. In the long run, Earth can cope with anything we can throw at it. We could clear all the jungles, but the jungle can re-grow over a few thousand years. We could burn all Earth’s fossil fuels, flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, but even then it would take the planet only a million years or so for the atmosphere to recover. Even the animals we’re wiping out may eventually be replaced by others equally rich in diversity, as the relentless work of evolution continues. So in changing this world, we are altering the very environment that has allowed the human race to thrive. We could be creating conditions that threaten long-term survival of our civilization. So, all this stuff about saving planet Earth, well that’s not the problem. Planet Earth doesn’t need saving. Earth is great survivor. It’s not the planet we should be worrying about, it’s us.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 19:13:55 +0000
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