Woodlands key

The global warming gasses already in our air (”Study: Warming baked in will blow past climate goals,” 1/5/21) will not go away until we start doing something to filter it out. Reducing emissions will only slow down the inevitable. The technology doesn’t yet exist that can do as good a job as a simple woodland.

The trees and brush of woodlands work for free to filter our air 24/7, taking no vacations or holidays and using no manmade power sources — not even windmills or solar panels. An article in Time magazine recently stated that more than 75 percent of the Earth’s land has been developed. Is it any wonder that pollutants are being released faster than the Earth can filter them out?

We need to concentrate more on preserving and expanding our wooded areas. Plant trees anywhere and everywhere we can. Reduce taxes on wooded areas. Impose huge surcharges on developers proposing to develop woodlands. Require them to trap and humanely release the wildlife elsewhere. In other words, make is so unprofitable to develop woodlands that developers turn their attention to blighted areas. Reuse abandoned, unused buildings, or demolish them and return the land to its natural state.

Simply reducing or eliminating emissions is only a small effort to control global warming. It will slow it down, but it’s not going to reduce what’s already out there. It’s not going to repair the damage that has already been done. Scientists and environmentalists have been saying this for decades. Isn’t anybody listening? Shirley B. Backus Stratford