Making Miracles, the Teen Aged Way

THERE IS A REPORT that in Ethiopia, three hundred and fifty million trees were planted in one day, setting a world record. Simultaneously, it was announced that a teenager has invented a method for removing micro plastics from water. Whether these two reports are true is immaterial. What matters are two things. One, that humanity needs to plant, and is perfectly capable of planting billions of trees, perhaps trillions, in a very short period of time, and that humanity is perfectly capable of removing the ambient and over abundant plastic pollution from the Earth's air, water, and soil, and indeed from all of our human bodies. These are two key components in our fight to save our environment, and ourselves. It is estimated that at the dawn of human neolithic existence, some several thousand years ago, there were approximately seven trillion trees on Earth, and that now, due exclusively to human activity, the spread of habitat designed for human living alone, there are now roughly half that number on the planet, or about three point five trillion. These numbers were arrived at through high resolution satellite photography, and extrapolations of the likely number of trees thousands of years ago, based on reversing the impact of human encroachment and estimating the probable number of trees on land which has over the millennia been cleared by people. Scientists say that if we could get a trillion saplings into the ground within the near future, we could make significant progress in substantially reversing climate change. It would not eliminate or reverse global warming, but would be a great start, since one trillion growing tress would sequester billions of tons of atmospheric carbon, of the nearly one trillion tons now floating in the air, due to human industrial activity. I'm living proof of this. Exactly fourteen years ago I bought a half acre of land, and built a new house on it. On my lot there were no trees, and nothing but crabgrass and rocks. I nearly gave up as hopeless the idea of ever landscaping my virgin yard, so barren it was. Instead, I planed twenty five trees, all saplings less than six feet tall. Now, fourteen years later, my yard is a beautiful shady oasis of tree lined bucolicity (I like to invent words, so shoot me) with towering majestic hardwood deciduous forty foot beauties all around, greatly reducing my air conditioning bill. Each fall I have an abundance of fallen leaves. I don't care. I just let them blow into my neighbor's yards. If I can do it, we all can do it. With regard to plastic pollution, we are by now all too well aware of this horrible problem, with billions of tons of plastic floating in the oceans, littered all across the fruited plain, and micro plastic gathering together in the sexy bodies of each and every one of us. No matter who you are, you have micro plastic embedded in your body, ubiquitously, due to, you guessed it, our all too human industrial and consumer lifestyle. To confirm all this, consult a scientist, your local high school biology teacher, or any intelligent teenager. But despair not. Even now, "we" are beginning to clean up the world's oceans, partly by using a rather bizarre but crudely efficient gizmo invented by, you guessed it, a Dutch teenager. It appears we oldsters must swallow our pride and permit today's teenagers to save ourselves from ourselves. But so be it. After all, they will have to either live with the mess we made, or clean it up. We the senior generation sure as hell aint gonna do it, that much is obvious. The good news is, it can and perhaps will be done, by today's teenagers.