Selasa, 23 April 2013

Seeing the Earth’s perspective


Seeing the Earth’s perspective
Wiryono  A Lecturer in The Faculty of Forestry at Bengkulu University
JAKARTA POST, 22 April 2013



To mark Earth Day, which fell on April 22, it is time for us to look at our environment from the Earth’s perspective.

We should start by using a geological time scale, where natural phenomena are not measured in days, weeks, months or even centuries, but in millions of years.

Using the Earth’s temporal perspective, we will perceive things differently from our human time frame.

The land on which we live is not static as we feel, but is actually moving. The shapes of our continents are continuously changing, but these geological changes are too slow for us to notice because we only live for a very short time.

The Earth is approximately 4.6 billion-year-old, while the first hominid, Australopithecines, appeared 3-4 million years ago. The genus Homo, to which the term human refers, evolved from Autralopithecines about 2.4 million years ago.  Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago, very long in terms of human time but very short from the Earth’s perspective. 

Suppose the history of the earth was compressed into a single year, with midnight Jan. 1 representing the origin of the earth and midnight Dec. 31 the present. Early humans would have appeared in the afternoon of Dec. 31, while modern humans would have appeared at 11:45 p.m.  All recorded history would have occurred in the last minute of the year. Columbus would have discovered America three seconds before midnight.

 As inhabitants of the Earth, early and modern humans have affected and have been affected by the Earth. But the impact of humans on the Earth has not been spread evenly throughout human history.  Our ancestor, Homo Erectus, was probably the first hominid to control fire. Using fire, our ancestors could change the vegetation cover of land in order to manage hunting. 

The most dramatic changes we have made to the Earth have happened in the last two hundred years, after the industrial revolution. The invention of engines powered by coal, oil and gas, have drastically improved our ability to modify the surface of the earth. Using human and animal power, it would take more than a week to clear a hectare of forest, but using chainsaws and tractors, it takes a day to do the same job.

With our technology we have altered a large portion of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. Agriculture has converted forest and grassland into crop fields, turning biologically diverse ecosystems into monoculture. Open mining has changed the land even more drastically, turning forested land into degraded land. Transportation, industries and other human activities pollute the Earth’s atmosphere.

One of our biggest forms of pollution is the emission of carbon into the atmosphere. Our high consumption of fossil fuels has resulted in the excavating and burning of carbon buried deep in the earth for millions of years. 

For decades, scientists have warned of the danger of global warming due to the increase of carbon concentration in the atmosphere, but many economic and political leaders remain unconvinced.

Apart from economic and political interests, their doubts about global warming are due to the human insensitivity to gradual change. The increase in the atmosphere’s temperature is too slow to be noticed by our senses. In addition, the weather is naturally fluctuating. Despite global warming, we may soon experience the coldest winter on record. 

Unless we seriously curb our carbon emissions, our descendants will experience the devastating effects of global warming in the next century, but political leaders are less concerned with centuries than they are decades. Scientists find it difficult to persuade them to make decisions that may compromise their economic and political benefits based on a long term prediction. But from the Earth’s perspective, a century is insignificant. It is just a point in a long line of history.

What will be the impacts of global warming on Earth? The rise of sea levels of up to two meters and extreme weather due to global warming will be catastrophic to the human population, but the Earth will likely survive the impact of global warming. As an ecosystem, the earth has self regulating mechanisms to adjust to such changes and set the equilibrium. In 4.6 billion years, the planet has undergone larger changes in its atmospheric gas composition.

Will the Earth suffer if the human race becomes extinct? No, it will not. Humans existence on Earth is just a flash in the planet’s long history.  The Earth existed for several billion years before humans appeared and will last long after humans disappear, but if we take care of Mother Earth, we will take care of ourselves and our future generations. The Earth does not need us to survive, but we need a healthy environment on Earth to survive. 

Happy Earth Day!

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