Getting Hot

THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE in the United States has increased by one full degree Fahrenheit, from fifty two point three to fifty three point three over the past twenty years. One full degree hotter, just since the beginning of the millennium. Does this mean that by the beginning of the twenty second century the average temperature will have warmed by four degrees more, if not more?  The rate at which climate change is accelerating, which used to be called "global warming", but was changed to more accurately describe the actual effects of the process, is increasingly alarming to scientists, as it should be to everyone. "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest" is a glorious new book by Suzanne Simard, which describes in detail the intimate manner in which every tree in every forest is directly related to every other tree, sharing resources such as water and mineral nutrients, sharing shade and sunlight, sharing information. Mother trees actually pay special attention to the well being of their seedling children, making sure they have the necessary resources to survive and thrive. Trees live for decades, and take decades t o die, letting go of life with deliberate dignity,  and as they slowly fade away they release as least forty percent of their considerable carbon content for use by their neighbors. Trees are social "beings", and love to grow in groups. "Primitive" societies have always tended to regard nature as a single, living organism, and trees as living beings; we should consider doing likewise. At the dawn of neolithic human civilization it is estimated that about seven trillion trees were alive on Earth; that number has been cut in half to our current three point five trillion. It has been widely suggested that a massive global tree planting project could restore the natural abundance of trees and help reverse climate change by removing excess carbon from the atmosphere. It turns out that there is enough land on the planet on which to plant enough trees to make enough of a difference, so far has global warming advanced while humanity failed to take action. But planting trillions of trees would still help, in concert with all the other measures we are hearing and talking increasingly about, measures such as setting aside half the world's land for wilderness habitat protection, limiting human population, converting to an all green fossil fuel free economy, removing carbon from the atmosphere by using technologies now in development, and so forth. Nature, as the billboard said in the nineteen sixties, symbiotic. The name of the earth is "Gaia"