Praying For Rain

IN CHURCH last Sunday we prayed for rain. Why not? You never know, it might work. However, it didn't. Our long late summer drought in the lower midwest continues unabated, my frustration turning to sadness and fear as I fear for the future of my beautiful yard full of mature trees. I knew twenty one years ago when I built my house and planted saplings all over the yard that they would eventually grow big and fill the yard with shade and make it difficult for grass to compete, and that has come to pass. No complaints on that account. I got what I bargained for. But the grass may have the last laugh. If this trend continues, and if our annual rainfall continues to decline slowly but steadily year after year, I will no longer live in what used to be a heavily forested area, but rather will have become sparse, barren prairie land, like western Kansas or eastern Colorado. "Eutrofication" I believe it is called, when a geographical area evolves from, say, wetland to dry, barren prairie, when a formerly forested region losesits treesdue to declining annual rainfall, when the landscape, overthe course of a surprisingly short period of time, changes from one type of bioregion to another. The more than twenty trees or so that I planted when i built the house are now thirty and forty feet tall, beautiful, mature oaks and maples. I am retired now, and at this time in my life, my main goal is to experience and enjoy the "fruits of my labor", a yard full of lovely, deciduous trees, whose annual autumnal leaf shedding bothers me not a bit, as I regard leaf raking and bagging to be a fine form of exercise. Anybody with the audacity and temerity to regularly read the essays o this website might possiblly be getting a bit jaded of reading my complaints about rainlessness and climate change, so I understand the expediency of letting up a bit on it. This, notwithstanding the clear and present dangerous dire fact that climate change is the great challenge of our time, the greatest challenge to its survival, including warfare and atomic bombs, ever encountered by the self inflicted human species. If memory serves, it hasn't rained in northwest Arkansas in more than two weeks,and it seems to me that I have been complaining about it and boring my readers with it for at least that long. I think I am corrrect in saying that the average annual rainfall in the lower midwest is or has historically been approximately forty six inches per year. Like much of the United States near and east of the Mississippi river, a steady year round supply of rainwater feeds vast, lush forested areas. The Mark Twain National Forest, which runs along the Missouri-Arkansas border, is among the most beautiful parts of lower middle America, favoring us with an abundance of blooming dogwood trees in early spring, lush, verdant greenery all summer, and an anual autumnal explosion of colored leaves in october and November, somewhat comparable to the New England states. I honestly don't know whether other parts of the U.S. are similarly currently afflicted with drought; such is my bio-regional self absorption. I am given to believe that they are, that the rainfall problem is not limited to where I live. Our global, planetary climate crisis, entirely of human manufacture, is everyone's problem. True, there would be doubtless be environmental difficulties even if humanity were not engaged in any form of industrial activity whatever, but its too late to find out. What we already know is that climate change, whether of human manufacture or not, does not seem to be going away, indeed sems to be intensifying. we have created for ourselves a death trap, and we will most certainly not extricate ourselves from it merely by talking about it. But our survival, and the survival of all life on Earth depends on our doing something about it, and talking about it and praying about it, if nothing else, is at least a place to start, if only a poor one.