(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



This Is Not Good. It’s Not Nice to F%@# with Mother Nature [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2023-01-11

This past week I did some maintenance on a 4-mile section of the Appalachian Trail that I adopted 27 years ago. There are a host of interesting plants on my section, such as dwarf iris, fire pink, lady slippers and a plethora of the rare pirate bush, a hemiparasitic plant usually found near hemlock and living only in east TN, western NC and southwestern VA. But one of the most abundant plants, along the entire length of my section, is rhododendron. It sometimes surrounds the trail, forming what some call green tunnels. Occasionally it protrudes into the trail corridor and needs to be trimmed back. When I removed one of those branches on my maintenance hike, I found something quite disturbing, pictured above.

What I found were buds popping out in early January. That should not be happening. My science background is not strong in botany, but I have a rudimentary understanding of what is going on here. I welcome a more detailed explanation from others in the DK community with more expertise. When the weather is unseasonably warm, plants may respond as if spring has arrived. When this is followed by bitter cold, the buds will likely die, and no blossoms will be formed. A certain amount of energy is required for putting out blossoms, and plants may not have the energy to put out another set of blossoms later in the spring. Or they may not be genetically capable of doing so. Either way, the springtime blossoms are lost, for the most part. I believe this happened last year on my trail section, when spring came early, followed by a late spring cold snap.

Plants and animals can adapt to climate changes that span hundreds of years but not those occurring in just a few decades . Evolution is not instantaneous. Erratic weather patterns give the natural world confusing signals, with maladaptive responses. With all of the calamities around the world–drought, flooding hurricanes, forest fires, etc.–the loss of a few rhododendron blossoms may seem trivial, but it certainly can be called a canary-in-the-coal-mine thing. How many red flags do we need to alert us to the disasters that loom ahead?

While we are plunging into the anthropogenic seventh mass extinction (I’m including the great oxygenation event), it is important to remember that Mother Nature has the last word on this, as the title implies. We humans are extremely, extremely late upstarts in the span of life on the planet. As we have proved to be a highly aggressive, life-threatening malignancy, the excision of the tumor will require radical surgery. A lot of healthy tissue will be lost to effect a cure. Mother Nature is neither benign nor malicious. Things just happen as they will, pretty much according to cause-and-effect, with a little uncertainty principle thrown in. The Homo sapiens experiment will turn out to be catastrophic but brief and self-terminating.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/11/2146587/-This-Is-Not-Good-It-s-Not-Nice-to-F-with-Mother-Nature

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/