The Ecology of Yardwork

"Defoliating a victory garden sure can work up an appetite." - George Leroy Tirebiter

This morning, as I tried to make my coffee, I discovered that one of the kitchen outlets with a circuit interrupter had shut down, and I could not restart it. I pushed the Reset button over and over until it finally broke, exposing the metal springs (metal being one of those things you really don't want to see coming out of an electric outlet). So instead of brewing my own coffee, I hopped in the car, bought a Starbucks, and went over to Ace Hardware and bought a replacement GFCI.

Replacing the unit seemed easy enough, but even the replacement didn't want to reset. And when I started the microwave later that day, the circuit blew, and all of the lights in the kitchen went out. I gave up and called an electrician.

Not feeling very macho, I went out back to clean the patio of the leaves, branches, seeds and twigs left behind by Hurricane Ivan. As I started up the leafblower, I realized that there's nothing like pulling the cord on a gasoline engine to restore your masculinity. If only there were something to chainsaw . . .

I really got into the cleanup, and decided to trim back some of the ivy that had been covering the corners of the patio, snagging some of the leaves that were being blown. But once I snipped back a few strands, I saw more that needed pruning, then more and more and more, until there was soon more trimmed ivy on the patio than leaves, branches, seeds and twigs. I needed a push broom to move the pile around - it got far too heavy for the leafblower.

I was satisfied with the job, and had a few blisters on my hands to show for it. But as I looked at all the ivy on the ground, I got to wondering how many spiders and other bugs now no longer had a home, thanks to my aesthetic judgments on what looked "right." And as I bagged the trimmings, I wondered if it were really necessary to add this waste to the City's solid waste load. I inhaled the gasoline exhaust in the air from running the leafblower. What damage had I done to the atmosphere, depleting an admittedly small, but otherwise avoidable, amount of the Earth's fossil fuel reserves and adding to Atlanta's smog problem?

Worldwide, non-renewable resources are being gobbled up at obscene rates and, for the most part, being burned for energy recovery and converted into carbon dioxide, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. Toxic waste dumps, Superfund sites, defy cost effective cleanup technologies. Nuclear waste problems are off the scale in terms of both horror and cost. Even if we learn to store nuclear waste safely, what language should we use for safety instructions for people 20,000 years from now? No language on Earth is that old, none has survived that long - and plutonium is a 500,000 year problem.

Acid rain is killing whole forests in Central Europe and, along with industrial, agricultural and municipal pollution, poisoning lakes everywhere. Atmospheric ozone drifts from our cities to rural areas, adversely affecting crop yields and adding to the forests' distress - a major factor in determining whether China will be able to feed itself while industrializing. A China that cannot feed itself will be everybody's problem.

Grain production is in decline; on a per capita basis, it has been in decline since 1984. The worldwide per capita fish catch is also in decline. The collapse of the New England fish industry, in decline since 1987, is an up-close, immediate example. The fish catch in the Caspian Sea is down by 99 percent as it chokes to death from industrial pollution. Is this a microcosm of Earth's oceans in the centuries ahead? The decades?

One billion people are looking for work, but can't find jobs. Another billion people are already living in starving conditions. Another billion are on the fringe, hanging on by their fingernails. In all, half of Earth's people are distressed.

We cannot escape the consequences of such inequity. So many interrelated factors - population, food, jobs, industrial production, standards of living, toxic waste, pollution, global warming, habitat loss, species extinction - all interrelated in ways that, with present trends, point toward collapse of the human species.

The rainforests are disappearing at the rate of a football field every two seconds. Even while the Brazilian government says it's not so, the loss is documented by satellite photos. Millions of acres of Sumatra and Borneo's rainforests are being lost to fires. Of all of Earth's species, an estimated half lives in the rain forest, just seven percent of Earth's surface. Wetlands, the cradle of speciation, which provide nutrients for the beginning of the food chain, are also disappearing.

Greenhouse gases, global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion (increasing UV radiation, increasing incidents of skin cancer) and rising global temperatures are melting the polar ice caps. Temperatures around the ice cap are rising five times as fast as the global average, and grass has been seen growing along the edges of Antarctica. Sea levels will certainly rise in the 21st Century. The most likely amount, 20 inches, will be enough to put much of Florida under water. It is probably already too late to save parts of Florida and other low lying coastal plains. Some 9,000 square miles of the United States appear to be destined to be lost in just the next 100 years, absent massive dike construction. We would fight World War III before allowing a foreign aggressor to take 9,000 square miles of the United States. What will the 22nd Century bring, when atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide exceed two times pre-industrial revolution levels?

At night, I watched "American Splendor" on HBO.