Here is an article from the LA City Beat, about trees dying in California, and the harassment of a prescient fellow who insisted that acidification from air pollution is the underlying reason that all the fungus, beetles and disease are rampant. Government agencies would rather blame treatable pathogens than regulate fuel emissions, and so would the scientists who get huge amounts of funding to do research for the lucrative pesticide and fertilizer industries.
It's analogous to cancer. There is so much money to be made by oncologists, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies that hardly anyone is looking at which particular pollutant causes which individual cancer. Unless there is a clearly detectable cluster from a well-defined source, it's almost impossible to prove anyway, because the atmosphere everywhere is contaminated, and there are so many different kinds of cancers, and so many other toxins in our food and water, and from plastics and other chemical exposures. The victims and their families are so overwhelmed with the disease that they concentrate on treatment and survival.
The article is a fascinating saga of one man's brave stance and how he was attacked for speaking truth to power - and how entrenched interests refuse to acknowledge the significance of widespread tree decline in all species and the link to poisonous fossil and biofuels.
Are you familiar with the Forest Ecology Network?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.forestecologynetwork.org/tree_death.html
That was one of the first sites I found when I started googling dead trees, I still see the pictures of ice damage in my dreams. The links seem to be mostly circa 1998. It's quite strange that there is so little recent research or activism. Kink of parallels recent polls that show increasing numbers of Americans think climate change is either not happening or no big deal. Maybe the implications are just so horrid more people are deliberately ignoring it. And then too, there is a lot of money and influence being applied to feed the denialsphere.
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