Geese and Golden Eggs

In these testing times, when as a species, we seem to be under attack from all directions, it is easy to forget that our place in this world only came about because of trees. That’s right. The Oxygen in the atmosphere is only there because trees put it there. What’s more, it took them several billion years to do it.

But after all of that unimaginable length of time, and having only been here ourselves for 10000 years or so, we wanted more than the planet was offering us. So our inventive nature came to the fore two or three hundred years ago, and we thought we’d got it made.

But not content with just pumping as much foul smoke into the air as we possibly could, we’ve also been cutting down those life giving trees at a rate that is barely possible to calculate, Forgetting all the while the fundamental truth which is that the Carbon Dioxide in our atmosphere is also, amongst other things, filtered out by and stored in those trees.

So I’m reminded of the old saying about not killing the Goose that lays the Golden Egg. And I wonder still, even after all of the publicity and air time that has been given to the life-threatening reality of Climate Change, if we still are too set in our ways to care about it one way or the other.

And when the last of the ice has finally gone ….

… and the last of the creatures who live there are also finally gone, whether the remaining human population will also think – “Well, there was really much too much for us to give up just to save the likes of them”