{"id":25674,"date":"2017-09-15T05:45:07","date_gmt":"2017-09-15T10:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25674"},"modified":"2017-09-15T05:45:07","modified_gmt":"2017-09-15T10:45:07","slug":"on-the-road-to-extinction-maybe-its-not-all-about-us-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25674","title":{"rendered":"On the Road to Extinction: Maybe it\u2019s Not All About Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the Road to Extinction: Maybe it\u2019s Not All About Us<\/a><\/h3>\n

\"\"Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

It is crystal clear\u2014unlike the smoky skies where I live\u2013to most of us who are willing to consider the facts: this summer\u2019s \u2018natural\u2019 disasters have been seeded anthropogenically.\u00a0 Wildfires in the northwestern United States and Canada, in Greenland, and in Europe are often referred to in the media as \u2018unprecedented\u2019 in size and fury. Hurricanes and monsoons, with their attendant floods and destruction, are routinely described as having a multitude of \u2018record-breaking\u2019 attributes. No one reading this is likely to need convincing that humans \u2013our sheer numbers as well as our habits\u2014have contributed significantly to rising planetary temperatures and thus, the plethora of somehow unexpected and catastrophic events in the natural world. I\u2019d like to include earthquakes, particularly those in Turkey (endless) and Mexico (massive), in this discussion, and while intuition tells me that there is a connection between them and climate change, research to support this supposition is just emerging, so for the nonce I will leave the earthquakes out of it.<\/p>\n

Our proclivity for advancing our own short-term interests has made a mess of things from the beginnings of this current iteration of civilization. Irrigating the Fertile Crescent, which was not very fertile prior to the ingenious innovation of bringing water from the mountains down into the dusty plains, opened the way for a massive increase in food production and a concomitant population rise. Cities grew and became kingdoms. After a reasonably good run, though, irrigation led to salination of the soil and ultimately left it sterile and useless (for agriculture) once again. Many people and their livestock starved or were forced to migrate in large numbers. Great idea, irrigation.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Road to Extinction: Maybe it\u2019s Not All About Us Photo by Nathaniel St. Clair It is crystal clear\u2014unlike the smoky skies where I live\u2013to most of us who are willing to consider the facts: this summer\u2019s \u2018natural\u2019 disasters have been seeded anthropogenically.\u00a0 Wildfires in the northwestern United States and Canada, in Greenland, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2648,141,5493,15981],"class_list":["post-25674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-anthropogenic-climate-change","tag-climate-change","tag-counterpunch","tag-elizabeth-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25674"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25675,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25674\/revisions\/25675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}