Words of Wisdom? More like Words of Guilt to me. Somehow I, a "suicidal moron", am personally responsible for the destruction of forests everywhere. We humans are mere insects infesting the planet, we should be squashed and disposed of before we do any more damage. At least, that's the impression I get by reading this. I suggest that the author of this crap kill himself and lead the way, what about you?

From: info@gjamescleaning.com.au
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 13:55:14 +1100
To: info@gjamescleaning.com.au
Subject: Words of Wisdom

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"Imagine a time-lapse film of the earth taken from space. Play back the last 10,000 years sped-up so that a millenilum passes by every minute. For more then seven of the ten minutes, the screen displays what looks like a still photgraph: the blue planet Earth, its lands swathed in a mantle of trees. Forests cover 34 percent of the land. Aside from the occassional flash of a wildfire, none of the natural changes in the forest coat are perceptible. The Agricultural Revolution that transforms human existence in the film's first minute is invisible.

After seven and a half minutes the land around Athens and the tiny islands of the Aegean sea lose thier forest. This is the flowering of classical Greece. Little else changes. At nine minutes - 1000 years ago - the mantle grows threadbare in scattered parts of Europe, Central America, China and India. Then twelve seconds from the end, two centuries ago, the thinning spreads, leaving pars of Europe and China bare. Six seconds from the end, one century ago, eastern North America is deforested. This is the Industrial Revolution. Little else appears to have changed. Forests cover 32 percent of the land.

In the last three seconds - after 1950 - the change accelerates explosively. Vast tracts of forest vanish from Japan, the Philippines and the mainland of Southeast Asia, from most of Central America and the horn of Africa, from western North America and eastern South America, from the Indian sub-continent and sub-Saharan Africa. Fires rage in the Amazon basin where they never did before, set by ranchers and peasants. Central Europe forests die, poisoned by the air and rain. Southeast Asia resembles a dog with mange. Malayasian Borneo appears shaved. In the final fractions of a second, the clearing spreads to Siberia and Canadian north. Forests disappear so suddenly from so many places that it looks like a plague of locusts has descended on the planet.

..... Alan Thein " Saving the Forests: What Will it Take?



The film freezes on the last frame. Trees cover 26% of the land. Three fourths of the original forests still bears some tree cover. But just 12% of the Earth's surface - one third of the initial total - consists of intact forest ecosystems. The rest holds biologocally impoverished stands of commercial timber and fragmented regrowth. This is the present - a globe profoundly altered by the workings - or failings - of the human economy."

Seen this way the planets forests are being irrevocably lost in what amounts to a mere tick of the eological clock. Plotted over a mere ten millenia, the curve of forest devastation leaps straight of the page in our lifetime. And if we add to that graph the generation of pollution, loss of topsoil, increase in human numbers, production of greenhouse gases and so on, the curves all climb vertically in tha last moment. individual disasters such as Chernobyl, large clearouts, the explosion at Bhopal, the construction of megadams or oil spills are merely part of a terrifying spasm of annihilation.


".... it is not Christ who is crucified now; it is the tree itself, and on the bitter gallows of greed and stupidity. Only suicidal morons, in a world already choking to death. would destroy the best natural air-conditioning creation affords..."


John Fowles 'Touch of the Earth'

All of the above words extracted from David Suzuki's 'The Sacred Balance"



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