Planet Death Is Upon Us

The stories, by themselves, are alarming enough. But when you toss them together like a winter salad, they present a grim picture of a planet writhing in its death throes.

My current collection of news clips, tossed in a file named "Dying Earth," was created with an original thought of writing a separate story from each incident. But they have been coming at me so fast now I hardly have time to think of one thing before it is joined by three or four others.

The death of so many varieties of trees has been a major focus, one that should be alarming our national media enough to pay some attention to it. In Alaska the Spruce bark beetle is ravaging trees. The tanoak trees began falling to some strange blight in California that is now spreading to other species of trees, including the giant redwoods. They are calling it Sudden Oak Death Syndrome. The Emerald Ash Borer is destroying the stately ash trees across Michigan. A wild Spanish moss is smothering trees all along the California and southern Atlantic coast. We have already lost the elm trees to Dutch Elm Disease, and the chestnut trees to yet another insect that bores into the tree's bark.

The recent incident in China, where thousands of birds fell dead out of the sky, without any given reason, is but another ominous sign. That, coupled with the stories about a bird flu that is not only ravaging chicken farms and killing people in the far east, but now has cropped up on farms in Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Then there are the weather changes. Winter was so severe all over the North American continent this year that it snowed in Mexico, killing millions of Monarch butterflies that spend their winter there. Scientists now are warning that the effect of world-wide burning of fossil fuels and global warming is on the verge of creating a new and man-induced ice age across North America and Europe.

The massive ecological disaster going on around us does not seem to be causing any great concern. People go about their daily lives, ignoring the strange brown color of the air they are breathing, and not personally alarmed that the water they drink now comes from plastic bottles purchased from the local grocery store.

That the very food they eat every day is constantly causing concern because it is making people sick is making news, but most people think that is somebody else's problem. It won't happen to them.

Look around you folks. The ecological disaster is in everybody's back yard now. Look carefully at the sky the next time we have what appears to be a sunny day. If you are lucky enough to find a rural setting, study the horizon in mid-day. You will notice that there is a brown hue to the air around you. Even the color blue of the sky overhead is more yellow than it used to be.

And if you have a clear night, look at the stars. You might be shocked to realize that you can't see many of them. That isn't how the sky looked when I was a kid. I used to be dazzled by the aerial display every time I looked at it. 

I saw this same smog around us when we lived in the deserts of Northeast Arizona about 10 years ago. It has since gotten worse.

I love the outdoors. I love to take a walk in the woods. I recall the days when it was common to have a deer step out of the trees only a few feet from me and have a staring contest with me. Those were the days when I discovered I could talk to animals by transmitting mental pictures. All animals communicate telepathically.

But they are dying now. The Mad Cow Disease, created by the cannibalistic practices of money-grubbing ranchers, has spread to the deer, the elk, the sheep, the fox and all of the animals of the forest. It has even spread to the men, women and children who would feed upon the carcasses of these animals.

Small wonder that nature is fighting back. Not only has our weather turned against us, the animals are starting to attack us. Look at all of the stories about sharks attacking swimmers, tigers and bears attacking villages, dogs turning on people and even monkeys scratching and biting the people they come in contact with.

This is only the beginning of our troubles. The death throes of the planet have begun and we can only expect them to intensify. Our next disasters will be shortages of food and water. Ironically, we also will experience a shortage of oil, one of the fossil fuels causing all of this trouble. When resources run out, war is inevitable.

That is when humans turn back into animals in a Mad Max quest to beat their neighbors to whatever food and water that can be found.

We have created hell. Expect it to arrive in your neighborhood soon.