Читать книгу Like a Tree - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 23

Mother Earth is a giving tree that has brought forth life of all kinds, including humanity, Homo sapiens sapiens, a relative latecomer. Once established and dominant, humanity has treated the Earth like the little boy in the children's book. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the mid-twentieth century, human beings have treated the planet, especially trees, like an inexhaustible resource. Individuals and corporations look at trees and see only their monetary value. With current machinery and technology, trees that took from years to millennia to grow can be cut down in very little time, carted to mills, and made into lumber, or brought to factories to become pulp and turned into paper products. A tree is then merely raw material.

Deforestation combined with population growth results in global warming, the effects of which are not immediately obvious. Human beings and institutions have heard the experts, seen the graphs and statistics, and respond in much the same way that individuals who are addicted to cigarettes hear but do not heed the necessity to stop smoking. The beginning effects of global warming are insidious and even disputable. The attitude is that there is nothing to get excited about even if the experts are right.

Once before, an alarm went off that wasn't initially heeded. This was the crisis over the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 1960s. Some people then were like those that warn against global warming now, who think that people are reasonable and will respond to information. Numbers, statistics of those affected depending on how close or how far from ground zero, were given. There were photographs of mushroom clouds caused by nuclear bombs. Experts as well as activists in the beginnings of an anti–nuclear proliferation movement were speaking out. Children were taught to duck under their desks in school and people were building bomb shelters in their backyards.

In photographs of the Earth from space, our atmosphere can be seen as a very thin translucent blue layer covering the planet. These photographs move us by their beauty and the knowledge that this is our home planet. The photographs of Earth are in the shape of a mandala, the Sanskrit word for “circle” that has come to refer to Tibetan sacred paintings, and the geometric symbol as C. G. Jung described, for the archetype of the Self, the meaning-giving center of the psyche and a shorthand designation for the many names of divinity. All of which may have subliminally or subconsciously contributed to the effect of scientist and author Carl Sagan's words. He described how in even a very limited nuclear war, so much pollution would be sent into the atmosphere from the destruction that this lovely halo would become a dirty pall, preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth. The beautiful blue and white sphere that is our Mother the Earth would cease to be an abundant, life-giving and life-sustaining planet.

If any country initiated a nuclear war and the other retaliated, radioactive dust and debris from the destruction would be sent into the atmosphere, and wind patterns would distribute this over the entire Earth. “Nuclear winter” would result. There can be no photosynthesis without sunlight, so all green vegetation and life that depends on vegetation for food would starve. Trees would die. Temperatures would drop. Earth would become a wasteland.

On top of the experts and activists that had sounded the warning, I think it likely that the beautiful photographs of the Earth as it is, contrasted to how it could be if the nuclear arms race continued, contributed to bringing that race to an end.

Now there are many other countries that have nuclear capability or are intent on acquiring it (Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Iran). The situation is analogous to having stopped the growth of a potentially fatal cancer, which temporarily went into remission, and now finding that it has metastasized.