Back by Popular Demand

Rumaging around the intertubes, I have been able to find more pictures from past years to compare with our current situation. Following is a series of photographs, the earlier ones were taken on Thursday, November 27, 2007 at the Thanksgiving Meet of the Essex Fox Hounds. After each one is a picture I took this morning, on November 12, 2009, about two weeks earlier than the Meet.

The meet has commenced for many years at Ellistan. Above is the entrance driveway, in 2007.

Today, looking to the right, the same trees are bereft of leaves.

Above is the crossing where the hunt leaves Ellistan, onto the other side of Fowler Road, and enters the fields of Spook Hollow Farm. The backdrop along the fence in 2007 was a stunning gold, but the same spot in 2009, two weeks earlier, is already for the most part bare of deciduous color.


And note also, the thinning cedars.

Perhaps the most stunning contrast this fall has been the utter dearth of scarlet.

In the last photos, the trees around the pond on the far right display far different autumn effects.

Above is 2007, and the last, taken this morning in 2009, two weeks earlier in the season, has not a bit of color around the pond

To what should we attribute this unprecedented and dramatically rapid change?

I don't know! I can only guess as to the chemical causes - ozone? ethanol? methane? nitrous oxide?

I do know one thing for sure - something is terribly awry, and if we don't figure out what it is, and soon, we can't possibly fix it before we have lost the opportunity to do so.

And another thing...If other ecosystems are anything near as threatened as this one is, and as underreported, we are in even worse kaka. And why should we be unique? If I've learned anything in my life, it is, that I am not unique (much as American culture tries to convince us each we are "special" and therefore, entitled to consume outsize proportions of everything).

The prospect of wildfires is quite inhibiting.

Soon, I am going to try to focus on what I can do, and each of us can do, to avert this looming catastrophe of the sixth great extinction now underway. What else can one person do?