23.08.2005 - 12:33 p.m.

---this turns into a bit of a long-winded rant but it was the momentum that carried me, it's not aimed at anyone ( or anyone's comments ) in particular rather than a general spleen venting, which happens quite a lot with me. If you love me you'll read it, if you don't, go to the next entry ( you're not missing much ), it should be a little lighter---

I've been drawing some comments since my last entree ( and before also ) about how trees look nicer standing up than lying down and if they were forced to lie down before their time then that's a crime against nature, haaaaaaate criiiiiiiiime.

So to all you a) self-confessed tree huggers, b) sunday afternoon nature wandering type people, c) bloody hippies, d) old people who don't know any better

Here's some facts

I love trees, ever since we left london and moved to the cotswolds all those decades ago i've loved trees, we spent a large part of our youth hanging around in trees, i'm more at home in woods and forests ( even at night, when they're a bit scary ) than i am in the city ( which tends to make me aggressive and confrontational ) with a minimal amount of kit i could happily live in the woods. I made a brave move having turned thirtyish to abandon previous careers and training and start again from scratch as a Forester with all the financial stress that comes with it, that's how much i love trees, and since doing that, in the last year i have actually physically hugged more trees than a proverbial tree hugger ( it comes with the job )

We have also drawn some flak from mostly old, dog-walker type people who upon seeing two men felling trees immediately start muttering and saying things like,

"I hope you're planting five for every one you cut down"

Words like this from people who obviously know nothing about the task or industry we are part of is guaranteed to annoy, upon disembarking from a plane and walking through the terminal, you spy the pilot, have you ( or anyone you know ) run up to the pilot and said,

"that landing was a little ropey, have you considered using more leading-edge flap and throttling back a bit earlier next time ?"

....of course not. Now many people think that deforesting huge tracts of land is all a forester does ( do not call us lumberjacks, even big hairy canadian lumberjacks don't like to be called lumberjacks, they prefer 'loggers', calling them lumberjacks is likely to start a bar fight ) what they don't see is the best part of fifteen grand (twenty thousand dollars) and two or three years of our lives that we have spent gaining this qualification and all the knowledge that has been forced into our heads regarding every aspect of tree care and silviculture that is pertinent and also ecology, geology, geography, meteorology, as well as all the unpaid work experience we've done to shape this new knowledge into something useful.

Now it's also true that the world is full of lazy pikeys who will hack their way through a tree and charge you triple what they originally said, as well as seemingly legit tree-care-people who to the untrained eye look ok but are actually riddled with bad practices and dangerous moves, and then there's the rest of us, those who adhere to good and updated silvicultural practices and modern safety precautions and actually care about the trees we're working on, it's not just about the money......

The other thing that really bugs anyone who knows the actual truth is this -

Planting trees will not cure global warming - lots of well meaning hippies and people-who-always-believe-what-they're-told think that replanting an area the size of belguim every week will bring down global temperatures and save us from a watery fate.

"heretic" they cry "burn him" they wail "how dare he say such a thing" - and now here's the science, so shut up.

We are releasing CO2 from fossil fuels on a human ( or tree ) timescale ( 100 - 500 years ). This same CO2 was bound up into the earth on a geological timescale ( 70 million - 400 million years ). There is absolutely no way that planting trees will reduce global CO2 on a geological timescale all it will do is delay the effect over a human / tree timescale. The only way to make a difference is to really densely replant a huge ( no, i mean really huge ) area of land then have the sea levels rise so that the forest is on the bottom of the sea and then have it get buried before it can decompose under a half mile of silt and dead animals and then have the sea levels fall and have new trees grow on the newly reemerged land, that original forest is now on it's way to being coal / oil / gas and is securely locked away ( until someone digs it up and burns it )

That is assuming that we don't enter another period of intense volcanism which can throw out billions of tonnes of CO2 and SO2 and all sorts of poisons in a couple of weeks.

We can moan about how we're breaking this planet and upsetting it's natural balance and oh my god aren't we evil ( man IS naturally evil ) but because as a species we're so self-centered and assume that everything's about us we think that we are the one's who are causing the planet to warm and on a human timescale we are probably are causing it to warm, but since we have absolutely no idea about this planets larger natural cycles of warming and cooling and what causes ice ages and what ends ice ages we're mostly fishing in the dark with an unbaited argument hook.

Now it is also true that human emissions ( bullshit mostly ) are contributing to depletion of the ozone layer and our deforestation and rape of the land is killing off species of animals faster than any other time in history but in the end none of it matters. We'll be lucky if our species lasts longer than a few million years, i'm sure that the next ice age ( when it finally arrives ) will completely decimate the human population back to a sustainable number ( probably all the wrong people but there's nothing i can do about that ) and then new animal species will start to evolve in response to the new conditions as well as the existing species that survive and in the absence of billions of humans will probably thrive.

There's another 4 billion ( 4 000 000 000 ) years of productive time left that can be spent on this planet before the sun starts to die, humans have been here for for about 3 hundred thousand ( 300 000 ) which amounts to an insignificant percentage, by the time it's all over the continents will be in a completely different order ( the pacific will be a narrow, shallow sea, the atlantic will be huge, europe will be swallowed up by africa which will have split into two, india will be tiny etc etc ). Any damage we think we can do is nothing to the changes that the earth can hand out, but the earth will always find a natural balance which mainly consists of liquid water, average temperatures over most of the globe, blue skies, lots of sea-creatures, some land above sea-level with plants and aminals.

So for now we can all get back to fighting over the petty stuff, let the rich get richer and let the poor try to rise up against them, we can keep making token gestures at preserving gaia, while stripping all the minerals from her to combine into various poisons to pour back into the environment, abuses of human rights will continue as will the many many pointless wars over insignificant differences, human nature isn't going to change and until aliens come down and slap us into sensibility ( provided they don't exterminate us completely ) nothing's gonna change.

So i'll have fries with that please, and here's a deposit on a handgun.