4 minute read
A breath of fresh air
By Paul Kandarian
REBOOT. That’s a popular word in technology. Your computer, iPhone, cable, Alexa, acting wonky, screwing up? Shut it off and turn it back on.
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Refresh. Another popular one, if a sluggish Google’s grinding your gears, refreshing your browser usually helps it get back up to speed.
Renew. That’s more personal, usual ly referring to ourselves, taking a break, getting a spa treatment, meditating, do ing the Zen thing and practicing mindfulness, all that stuff that gets us to slow down, relax, chill out.
And now our planet is doing exactly that.
One very good benefit of a very bad sit uation – the pandemic – is that the planet is cleaning itself, due to drastic drop in human activity that for centuries now has been bound and determined to destroy it.
Newsflash: there is not one damn thing we can do to destroy the planet. The planet will destroy us long before we can destroy it.
And some are saying the pandemic is doing just that. I’m not a conspiracist, nor do I believe in the invisible man in the sky, so I don’t buy the God-is-pissed theory, either.
But the fact is, we have screwed up our home for a long time. You know how if you let your house go to crap, don’t do main tenance, don’t clean up, don’t fix that leaky roof or the holes in your windows or the crack in the foundation, it will eventually collapse around you? Your mother always told you, “Clean up af ter yourself.” Now Mother Nature’s telling us the same thing.
Because that’s where we’re headed, folks – whether you want to believe it or not, the major reason being global warming, something a lot of people still don’t buy. They are the naysay ers, the deniers, the head shakers. I prefer the term “idiots.” Our home is warming up faster than normal, and that’s a fact. And it’s also a fact that it’s due to our neglect of the environment for a long, long time. The science is there. And understandable. Even to idiots.
And when man takes a break from mucking up the environmental works, the planet doesn’t waste time getting back to a normal it knew for the longest stretch of its life, that stretch being when man wasn’t on it mucking up the environmen tal works. Consider this: the planet is 4.5 billion years old. Modern man has walked it upright for roughly 200,000 of those years.
This from The Guardian as of this writ ing in early April:
“As motorways cleared and factories closed, dirty brown pollution belts shrunk over cities and industrial centres in coun try after country within days of lockdown. First China, then Italy, now the UK, Germany, and dozens of other countries are experi encing temporary falls in carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide of as much as 40%, greatly improving air quality and reducing the risks of asthma, heart attacks, and lung disease.”
There is no denying that. This is science. What is not science but just my personal preference is I love how the Brits call roads “motorways” and spell “centers” as “centres.” I won’t even get into “lift,” “lorry,” “WC,” “roundabouts,” “pushing the pram,” or my personal favorite, “wanker.”
Remember the very interesting History Channel series, “Life After People?” It used CGI technology to show what would happen to our planet if humanity just went *poof* (pandemic, anyone?), focusing on cities, buildings, bridges, etc., after a day, week, year, and so on. It was entertaining in a horror/sci-fi movie sort of way, to see the Earth rebound quite nicely, thank you very much, when we just went away and left it alone.
The evidence of how we’ve mistreated our home is there. In China, the world’s biggest source of carbon, emissions were down about 18 percent this past pandemic stretch. Europe and all of the industrialized nations saw a massive drop in crap be fouling our air. U.S. passenger traffic, a major source of air pollution, dropped by about 40% as of early April.
The planet. Where we live. Our home. We’ve mistreated our giant blue house for too long. Global warming? Yeah, it’s a thing, a deadly thing, it’s happening and the pandemic isn’t gonna re verse that long-term – unless man is wiped out. But we need more than short-term memory to benefit from what the planet is telling us has been very long-term neglect.
Many scientists say that after only several thousand years, maybe 10,000 (a veritable blink of the geologic eye; remember, Earth is 4.5 billion years old), there’d be nary a sign that man ever existed, that we were ever here. The memory of us would be swallowed up whole in a rebooted, refreshed, and renewed blan ket of green and blue.
Chances are, we’ll get through the pandemic. And chances are, we’ll forget how clean our planet got while we were hunkered down inside not mucking up the outside.
But we can’t forget that, human race. Listen to your moth er. Clean up after yourself. Treat your home nicer from now on. Don’t be a wanker.
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