As the planet burns, we bulldoze nature

The space probe InSight landed safely on Mars last Tuesday. NASA is working on plans to send humans to Mars. When it happens, I hope NASA will include some real estate developers.

I’m sure they would love Mars. It looks exactly like what they do to the earth when they’re building new projects.

Mars has no vegetation. No treehugging residents to protest about the destruction of their natural habitat. No cuddly animals to arouse the sympathies of sentimental do-gooders.

For over 20 years, I have taken my dog for walks on the ridge that rises to the east of my home. Although it doesn’t have palm trees and sandy beaches, it’s about as close to paradise as I can imagine. Knee-high grass grows wild among the pines. Sunlight filters through the branches, illuminating the local sunflowers. From a rock bluff, I have a view up and down the 160km lake that fills the Okanagan valley.

But a developer -- I could name the company, but any other developer would do the same -bought that ridge.

So my trail now must cross a wasteland. Our feet sink into mud still bearing bulldozer tracks. The rest of the land looks like Syria after a bomb blast. Between dynamite and bulldozers, not a green twig visible anywhere. Native bedrock has been blasted into sharp-edged chunks that hurt my dog’s paws. Rainfall can now land on exposed rock surfaces that have been safely sealed underground for eons; the water dissolves exposed minerals to form a toxic trickle.

My hiking boots clatter on a paved access road, a concrete sidewalk.

Above the road, on what’s left of the old trail, my boots fall softly on pine needles lying thick upon earth that can still soak up rain.

Dog and I climb to the highest point of the ridge. Below us spreads a Mars-scape waiting to hatch a thousand new houses, with three-car garages. Yes, I’m bitter. Yes, I’m angry. Even the viewpoint I stand on won’t survive untouched. Someday, a restaurant will perch there. With a magnificent patio, and a menu limited only by your credit rating.

It will happen. Because land that doesn’t produce tax revenues has no value for a municipality.

And everyone knows, the only thing that matters is money.

So we humans will continue destroying our planet, and everything that lives on it, as we grovel before the gods of wealth and endless growth.

We destroy natural habitat for roads, houses, and big-box stores with bigger parking lots. Then we demand that someone cull the deer, racoons, and coyotes forced to move into our yards.

We bulldoze the trees that can help to absorb the carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuels -- solar energy trapped and buried over millions of years. We pollute our streams and oceans. We have wiped out 60 per cent of all wildlife already, on land, in the oceans, in the air.

There may, or may not, have been a massive flood that wiped out everything except Noah’s boatload of favoured species. If it happened, it was a mass extinction far surpassing the demise of the dinosaurs 70 million years ago.

The Bible says that God caused Noah’s flood. We have no one to blame but ourselves for the “flood” that’s happening today.

The science gets more and more exact. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), having consulted over 6,000 studies -far wider than the scientists who gave us that other threat, nuclear weapons -- conclude that climate change has anthropogenic causes. That is, we humans are doing it to ourselves.

We have just twelve years to reverse the trend, says the IPCC. Or we’re cooked. Literally.

Past a certain point, if temperatures continue to rise, the climate itself will take matters out of our hands. The melting of polar ice will let open oceans absorb more heat. As mountain glaciers shrink, so will lakes, rivers, and water supplies. As arctic permafrost thaws, it will release methane -- a greenhouse gas 40 times more potent than carbon-dioxide.

Exposed to daytime temperatures above 55 C, we humans can no longer cool our metabolism enough by sweating. We will die. So, eventually, will anything that has cells containing water -- plants, insects, reptiles… If rising temperature should reach 100 C, the fluids in cells will boil.

The only survivors will probably be bacteria and viruses.

Who might make another attempt to combine into living cells, to start the evolutionary process once again. Or maybe they’ll be smart enough not to try. Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca