The Waste Land
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow | |
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, | |
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only | |
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, | |
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, | |
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only | |
There is shadow under this red rock, | |
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), | |
And I will show you something different from either | |
Your shadow at morning striding behind you | |
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; | |
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
~ T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land |
“Humans are just like any other invasive species,” Stanford University biology professor Elizabeth Hadly said. “If we use up our resources, we will decline. It is stating the obvious, but our study shows that even over vast geographic areas such as continents, humans can consume too much, too fast.”
The researchers reconstructed the history of human population growth in South America using radiocarbon-dating data from 1,147 archaeological sites.
Our species first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago, then spread to Europe and Asia and eventually crossed into the Americas roughly 15,000 to 20,000 years ago using a land bridge that once connected Siberia and Alaska.
The first phase of colonization in South America coincided with the extinction of many large animals including elephant relatives, saber-toothed cats, big ground sloths, armadillos and huge flightless birds.
During this period, human populations underwent “boom-and-bust cycles” as people exhausted local plant and animal resources, Stanford anthropologist Amy Goldberg said.
More than one in 10 of the UK’s wildlife species are threatened with extinction and the numbers of the nation’s most endangered creatures have plummeted by two-thirds since 1970, according to a major report.
The abundance of all wildlife has also fallen, with one in six animals, birds, fish and plants having been lost, the State of Nature report found.
Together with historical deforestation and industrialisation, these trends have left the UK “among the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, with most of the country having gone past the threshold at which “ecosystems may no longer reliably meet society’s needs”.
North American skies have grown quieter over the last decades by the absent songs of 1.5 billion birds, says the latest summary of bird populations
The survey by dozens of government, university and environmental agencies across North America has also listed 86 species of birds — including once-common and much-loved songbirds such as the evening grosbeak and Canada warbler — that are threatened by plummeting populations, habitat destruction and climate change.
Castlerigg |
Global Dimensions
Many regions of the globe are currently exposed to levels of surface O3 and other air pollutants that are high enough to promote plant damage in natural ecosystems, cultivated forests and agricultural fields, also affecting human health. Reductions in crop yield, pasture and in forest productivity have important economic consequences, being responsible for losses of several billion dollars per annum in the USA, EU and East Asia. Such detrimental effects of O3 have caused countries to establish increasingly stringent air quality policies. However, due to the high mobility of air pollutants in the atmosphere, plumes of anthropogenic O3 and its precursors can be transported into the free troposphere and across country boundaries to expand over large geographical scales. Regions located very distant from the pollutant source are now suffering from enhanced O3 background levels or episodes (e.g. Ireland within the lee of North America).
Did I mention I could see Ireland from the shore of Islay?
• Chronic exposure to high levels of common air pollutants like ozone and nitrogen oxides is damaging to forest health. The effects of air pollution mimic drought and have the potential to increase fuel loads in forests, exacerbating the risk of wildfire, especially near urban centers where air pollution is more concentrated.
• When Jeffrey pine trees are stressed by drought, they send biochemical signals that may be an attractant to bark beetles. Since the signaling trees are already significantly stressed, they are easily overwhelmed by beetles, setting the stage for an outbreak. The same biochemical signaling may also happen in other important forest species.
The San Bernardino Mountains, which help define the Los Angeles Air Basin, are one of the most polluted mountain ranges in North America. The air pollution is the result of a combination of emissions from vehicles, industrial manufacturing, and agriculture production. These greenhouse gas emissions, ozone and nitrogen oxides in particular, are especially damaging to forest health. Increased ozone and nitrogen deposition change the chemical composition of individual trees and have significant impacts on fuel loads at the stand and forest level.
…Inside the leaf, ozone changes the way trees transpire, or exchange gasses. Leaves, or needles in the case of conifers, have pores called stomata. Properly functioning stomata are crucial to a tree’s ability to regulate water loss, uptake carbon dioxide, and produce energy. In the presence of high concentrations of ozone, trees lose stomatal control and the ability to manage their water and nutrition. Too much air pollution can kill a tree outright. But what’s more likely, with high but not excessive exposures to ozone, is the slow dwindling of health. Since water is lost from the tree, the results of chronic ozone uptake mimic or exacerbate tree drought stress.
Nitrogen deposition is also a problem facing forests. Some nitrogen is generally good for trees, but too much nitrogen can change the amount of growth, the timing of growth, and resource allocation within the tree that can compromise its health and ability to withstand stress. Working in concert with ozone, increased nitrogen may affect the way carbohydrates—the energy needed for growth and survival—are stored and used, and stunt root growth. These two factors can also make a stressed tree much more susceptible to drought and its follower— beetle outbreaks.
Both ozone and nitrogen deposition cause increased leaf turnover and self-pruning, which lead to more litter on the forest floor. Nitrogen deposition also acts to slow the decomposition of forest floor litter, particularly the excess branches and leaves being shed. As a result there is a potential to have more fuel in a drying forest, enhancing the potential for catastrophic wildfires.
Nancy Grulke has been studying the effects of air pollution on forest health for the past two decades for the Pacific Southwest Research Station. Her research reveals links between high doses of ozone and nitrogen to forest stress, and shows there is a compounding relationship between stressed trees, beetle outbreaks, and wildfire.
Air Pollution in the Background
Thanks in large part to regulation and education in past decades about air pollution in the Los Angeles Air Basin, sources of pollutants are now better controlled. On any given day, there is less air pollution being emitted than there was a decade ago.
The problem though is that the overall dose is steadily climbing, not only around Los Angeles, but across the globe. The current atmospheric background rate of ozone is 50 parts per billion (ppb), up from 10 to 12 ppb in preindustrial times, and it is expected to increase another 50 percent between 2020 and 2050. “We have continuously increasing ozone,” says Grulke. Pollution is worse in some places than others, for example, downwind from large urban areas. But even forests far from urban centers are showing higher levels of ozone. The Sierra Nevada, generally synonymous with clean mountain air, now has a background rate of 67 ppb during the summertime when plants grow.
“We’re dealing with completely different atmospheric chemistry,” says Grulke, “when ozone is greater than 70 ppb, stomata function very differently than they do when ozone is 50 ppb.” At some of her study sites of ponderosa pine scattered throughout the San Bernardino Mountains, the rates of summertime ozone uptake ranged from 62 to 80 ppb. The higher ranges are closer to urban Los Angeles, whereas the lower exposures are farther east, out toward the Mojave Desert…
The Models
The effect of ozone and nitrogenous pollutants are often left out of climate models, which favor measuring and predicting the rise and consequences of increased carbon. Not quantifying and including ozone and nitrogen in models, according to Grulke, may be a big oversight. Unlike some other greenhouse gasses, there is still little understanding about specific plant thresholds of ozone and what happens after that threshold is exceeded. Besides ponderosa pine, Grulke has also measured the tolerance in a handful of other plants and trees, but a wholesale cataloging of “what proportion of plants are in trouble,” she says, is still lacking.
In addition to modeling, Grulke’s research can also inform other forest management strategies, like thinning. At some study sites, she’s looking at whether stand density plays a role in buffering the effects of air pollution and how those stands deal with the subsequent stress of drought and beetles. The effect of air pollution on plant health is not just a forestry issue. In Europe, researchers are trying to figure out ozone tolerances for important agricultural products and certain types of heritage trees. “Air pollution is the one link that ties everything together,” says Grulke.
There ought to be a word that expresses in a few syllables the totality of ecocide – not just the horror in recognizing the physical manifestations of looming extinction, but the ensuing pain upon realizing the futility and meaninglessness that has been wrought by human folly, hubris, stupidity and blindness. But I don’t know what it is.
It especially seems useless to bear witness to the final countdown when headlines proliferate along the lines of “An American tragedy: why are millions of trees dying across the country?”
Don’t these idiots notice that trees are dying not just in America but ALL OVER THE WORLD?
Won’t they ever get Grulke’s statement: “Air pollution is the one link that ties everything together”. What is so hard to understand about that?
Georgia |
Flowers emit mixtures of scents that mediate plant-insect interactions such as attracting insect pollinators. Because of their volatile nature, however, floral scents readily react with ozone, nitrate radical, and hydroxyl radical. The result of such reactions is the degradation and the chemical modification of scent plumes downwind of floral sources…Results indicate that even moderate air pollutant levels…substantially degrade floral volatiles and alter the chemical composition of released floral scents. As a result, insect success rates of locating plumes of floral scents were reduced and foraging times increased in polluted air masses due to considerable degradation and changes in the composition of floral scents. Results also indicate that plant-pollinator interactions could be sensitive to changes in floral scent composition, especially if insects are unable to adapt to the modified scentscape. The increase in foraging time could have severe cascading and pernicious impacts on the fitness of foraging insects by reducing the time devoted to other necessary tasks.
Abstract:
Air pollution and climate change are inherently linked to each other. After introducing into the presently prevalent air pollutants and their relevance for forest tree and ecosystem performance, the account focuses on nitrogen deposition and troposphere ozone (O3), the latter being regarded as potentially most detrimental to vegetation, and hence, as negating carbon sink strength and storage. Mechanisms of O3 action in trees and stands are highlighted, stressing interaction with other abiotic and biotic factors, including volatile organic compounds, as a fundamental pre-requisite for understanding O3 effects. O3 is emphasized as a globally effective agent of climate change, regarding relevance for forest productivity, in particular, at hot spots of air pollution in the southern hemisphere, prognosticated for the upcoming decades. Adaptation capacities of forest trees are discussed in view of the rapidity in the progression of environmental change.
Given the paramount role O3 currently plays in air pollution at global scale, the major focus of this chapter will be on tropospheric O3 and its impact on forest trees and ecosystems.
p. 123 – At this level of ecosystem N saturation, tree mortality may increase, and the once stimulated NPP is now suppressed, as the proportions among nutrient elements gradually shifts to an imbalance dominated by nitrogen (Aber et al. 1998). However, a balanced nutrient supply is crucial for tree growth. Imbalance is indicated by lowered Ca/Al and Mg/Al ratios (reinforced by a high affinity of roots to passive Al uptake) as indicators of forest decline. A shortage in Ca can restrict radial stem growth (Lautner et al. 2007), limiting water transport capacity. In this way, the development of tree foliage may be reduced, which can lead to progressive crown transparency. In addition, leaves may become yellowish as a consequence of Mg limitation (Schulze et al. 1989). Mg is crucial for chlorophyll functionality so that shortage reduces photosynthesis and C gains and is accompanied by the loss of chlorophyll. In particular, advanced needle age classes of evergreen coniferous tree species can turn yellow, as the retranslocation of Mg from old needles to new represent a strong sink during needle growth. Further adverse effects of luxurious N availability may be an increasing attractiveness to herbivores and pathogens and an enhanced susceptibility to early and late frosts, as high specific leaf area is induced during differentiation at the expense of leaf robustness. High N supply in addition favours aboveground relative to belowground organs in whole-tree C allocation, so that trees may become susceptible to soil drought.
p. 128
Air pollution is one component of climate change. Among other anthropogenic pollutants, tropospheric O3 is the ecologically most significant compound, given its toxic potential for plants and widely spread occurrence at enhanced concentrations (see Sect. 7.1). O3 impact, therefore, must be understood in concert with other factors of relevance in a changing environment (addressed in this section), because multiple interactions determine the plants’ sensitivity to stress (Mooney and Winner 1991; Ska¨rby et al. 1998; Matyssek and Innes 1999). Because of this, principles of O3 action in trees, as highlighted in Sect. 7.2, may be moderated or even masked (Matyssek and Sandermann 2003).
Still, our judgement largely relies on findings from young trees and chamber experiments, although evidence has increased recently on tree performance at advanced ontogenetic stages and under ecologically relevant field conditions (Kubiske et al. 2007; Matyssek et al. 2010a, b). Section 7.3.1 will highlight interactions of O3 with temperature, drought, and irradiance, followed by Sect. 7.3.2 on the relevance of nutrition. Sections 7.3.3 and 7.3.4 will address such interactions with VOCs and CH4, and between O3 and CO2 respectively. Biotic influences on the O3 response of trees will be highlighted in Sect. 7.3.5, comprising the significance of tree genotype and effects by competition, host-pathogen/herbivore relationships and mycorrhizospheric interactions.
One final word about the cause of forest decline and then barring some truly earth-shattering revelation, I seriously doubt I will find any reason to bring up the subject again. The drought in California that is so widely blamed for tree deaths is not considered to have become severe, certainly not unprecedented, until 2012 – and the trees were dying long before then. What IS widely acknowledged is that deforestation causes droughts and ultimately desertification, and this has been known throughout history, back to the story of Gilgamesh in the third millennium BCE – and even earlier. See a “top ten” list of examples from the past.
Consider that by poisoning trees with ozone we are, in effect, deforesting the entire world and THIS is causing the droughts, in a hellish cycle of destruction.
Here is a current example in Madagascar, which like the rest of Africa, is logging to produce charcoal for fuel:
Charcoal — cleaner and easier to use than firewood, cheaper and more readily available than gas or electricity — has become one of the biggest engines of Africa’s informal economy. But it has also become one of the greatest threats to its environment.
…The village chief, Evomasy, 48, said he believed that the trees’ disappearance had caused the recent severe droughts.
“We cut down everything,” he said, looking at the shrub land now surrounding his village. “We used to have trees all around us.”
Humans have long settled in places where there is adequate and predictable precipitation, and large forests play a crucial role in generating dependable amounts of rainfall. Trees take up moisture from the soil and transpire it, lifting it into the atmosphere. A fully grown tree releases 1,000 liters of water vapor a day into the atmosphere: The entire Amazon rain forest sends up 20 billion tons a day.
The water vapor creates clouds, which are seeded with volatile gases like terpenes and isoprene, emitted by the trees naturally, to form rain. These water-rich banks of clouds travel long, wind-driven distances, a conveyor belt for the delivery of precipitation that scientists call flying rivers.
The sky-borne river over the Amazon carries more water than the Amazon River itself. It begins as moisture that builds over the Atlantic Ocean, and then flows westward over the emerald crown of the Amazon, where it picks up far more moisture. The laden clouds eventually bump up against the Andes and are steered south and then east, which means rain for Bolivia and Brazil.
One way forests may move water is known as “biotic pumping.” As water transpires into the atmosphere above the forest, the theory holds, it creates a low-pressure system that sucks in air surrounding it, eventually and continually pumping moisture inland from the ocean. Cutting down forests degrades these low-pressure systems, essentially turning off the pump. Large-scale deforestation is thus believed to be a major contributor to the extreme drought in Brazil. Scientists have long known that vegetation has a profound effect on weather.
In 1907, officials built a 2,000-mile-long fence across Australia to keep invasive rabbits from crossing from the wild outback into farms. On the side with native vegetation, rain clouds formed in the sky above, but the farm-field skies were clear. The “bunny-fence experiments” charted a decline in rainfall of 20 percent on the cultivated side.
Researchers are still trying to explain why, but the leading theory is that the darker native plants absorb more heat and release it into the atmosphere, along with energy and water vapor to form clouds.
Here is another example, the Mayan civilization:
In the past few years, scientists have been gathering evidence that drought and deforestation made life in the cities unsustainable, leading to the collapse of not only Tikal but dozens of cities in the southern part of the empire.
…when the population density reached 2,000 people per square mile — similar to that of Los Angeles — the Maya were engaged in a massive clear-cutting of the surrounding forests, unintentionally amplifying drought conditions.
While the rainwater Mayan cities depended on for drinking and irrigation was becoming more and more scarce, they were also clear-cutting their forests using a
“slash-and-burn” technique similar to the one used today. The method is exactly what it sounds like: They cut down the surrounding jungle and set it ablaze to make room for crops.
…For centuries, Mayan civilization practiced environmental management successful enough to build a powerful, sophisticated, and possibly most advanced society of the precolonial Americas.
But in the end, unchecked growth hastened the demise of the empire, even before conquistadors landed.
A recent article about India laments the trend towards desertification:
Nearly 30% of India’s land is now undergoing desertification, primarily as a result of the land degradation accompanying overcultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, and the overexploitation of water resources in dryland regions, according to a new report from the Indian Space Research Organization.
The root causes of the situation, though, are fundamentally linked to growing population levels and the inevitable growing exploitation of the land, so there are no easy, effective actions that can be taken. Any potential “solutions” are likely to be very costly, whether with regard to resources, economic systems, or society.
The findings are the result of an analysis of satellite images over an 8-year period of time.
Land degradation and desertification has been a major issue throughout the Holocene for agricultural cultures and civilizations. Land degradation through the actions of agriculture, deforestation (and triggered changes in aridity and rainfall patterns), overgrazing, and accompanying desertification are thought to have played a prominent role in the decline and fall of a great many notable cultures and civilizations.
Many thanks to my fellow travelers from The Panic Room.
Source: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-waste-land.html
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