In fact, a Texan who commented at a Reuters story about ongoing power loss in West Virginia, said:
"I'm not surprised by this. I worked in WV for over two years. You cannot believe the amount of dead trees that had already fallen into powerlines. The trees were just holding them up waiting for a good wind to finish the job."
After the Ohio post there arose some mild skepticism in comments, voicing the possibility that the real cause for dying trees might perhaps be drought, or insects, rather than ozone generated by human activity. So just for the heck of it I did a search on youtube, which I do from time to time. Often I find something new, especially if there has been some recent environmental disaster, such as the Gulf Oil spill or Fukushima, even if it's completely implausible.It seemed immaterial to me that the videographer from Ohio expressed her conviction that there is a religious source for trees to be dying, because what interests me is that she noticed that they ARE dying - and at a rapidly accelerating rate. This time, the videographer seems convinced that chemtrails are causing trees to die, which is the most frequent assumption I encounter. Of course Ozonists and Ozonistas are firmly of the opinion that the level of ordinary air pollution has become intolerable to vegetation, but leaving that aside, it's simply incredible to me how closely the damage described in this film matches everything I have been writing about and photographing since 2008, from California to Boston, from Seattle to Costa Rica. I haven't been to Florida in recent years but apparently, the symptoms exhibited on leaves, the peeling, cracking bark - even the lichen - are precisely identical. In fact it was enough to make me laugh out loud, not least because she says her friends think she's crazy by constantly pointing it out to them! Enjoy...
The woman's religious comments are only immaterial if you have relegated yourself to the role of Howard Cosell announcing the play by play destruction of the trees. However, if you want to go beyond merely announcing the play by play, the woman's comments are starkly material, and imo, worse than if she didn't notice the tree death at all. The last thing you need for "the cause", if there is a cause at this point, is people noticing the tree death and claiming it's because not enough people have accepted Jesus as their Savior. I'm disheartened by your dismissal of this most important point. It's not that the video wasn't good visual evidence.....it is good evidence, but it's deeply disturbing that she attributes to the wrong root cause. Who gives a damn if everyone wakes up one day and sees the trees are dying yet they will not the root cause and so make up their own pet theory as to why. It would change nothing. We all still perish, except now, by people finally seeing the massive tree destruction and death, more people will be anguished earlier and longer than they would otherwise had they never noticed at all.
ReplyDeleteThe root is as important and material as the seeing. That should be obvious to anyone who would like to see this issue, against all odds, mitigated.
Maybe he and ozonistas are both correct? He receives jet pollution, hear the planes. He's near an airport, the planes are low. Maybe someone needs to analyze commercial jet fuel.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that 'chemtrails' are intentionally killing trees, but I can believe that there is something in the fuel besides kerosene. Please don't tell me ethanol.
The Indians gave us maze. Maybe corn ethanol, that kills plants with its combustion gases, is their revenge for destroying their continent. Then again, kerosene combustion by-products might do the trick by itself.
catman
Ha! I never though of myself as Howard Cosell. But lately, now that I think of it, when I look in the mirror I see a really tragic resemblance.
ReplyDeleteokay, just kidding. But I actually would look kind of like him in a bikini, which is why those days are over for me.
Perhaps I'm more optimistic in that I think, once people DO see that trees are dying, the evidence will bring them to understand it is fixable, not "God's will" or a conspiracy. I'm not pleased when people blame chemtrails or corexit or Fukushima or cell towers, but I do take it as a teachable moment.
It's better than total obliviousness.
Catman, from what I know, the emissions from airplane fuel are particularly terrible. But I can't believe that is a special problem for Florida - think of hubs like Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. I tend to think it's just all wafting around and building the background level everywhere, pretty much.
ReplyDeleteHaha, this made us laugh! She sounds like you, peeling the lichen and bark off the trees, pointing out to her audience and friends just how dreadfully the trees and vegetation are responding to MAN! Maybe you guys could agree that it's anthropogenic! Haha, again!
ReplyDeleteWhat's the white stuff? Snow mold?
The charms of cell towers.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.next-up.org/pdf/DrVolkerSchorppTheThreeTrees.pdf
First, thank you for your ongoing work.
ReplyDeleteSecond, you have got me looking more closely at trees, and here in southern New England I am seeing the same things you are: cracked and peeling bark, burned and spotted leaves, the formerly benign lichen over-running everything, and crowns that are too thin with too many dead branches. Not all trees have all these symptoms, but many trees have some of them, and a few do have all of them.
It is weird, new, and disturbing. Also weird and unsettling was last fall's washed out or non-existent fall colors.
I cannot remember if I mentioned, but after the Halloween slush storm of last fall, I discovered that even the unrotted wood of downed trees was amazingly weak. I could rip apart young green branches with a single bare hand--something I could never do before--(and back when I was a kid I would certainly try). Those trees had already been several years very sick before they came down.
Two weekends ago I visited the nearby land of a friend who inherited a piece of an old family farm that has been left abandoned to reforest these last fifty years. Untouched (neglected) the entire time the woods was as near to a mature forest as you ever see in this part of the country. Yet it had the same problems, with the canopy so thin that in the deepest part of the wood there was partial sunlight streaming through the branches rather than deep shade.
I have never seen anything like that before.
I agree with you that this is not from climate change: For one thing, as hot and miserable as our most recent summers have been, they still have not matched the southern temperatures that oaks withstand routinely in the southern part of their range, and yet our oaks here are showing the same problems.
Your research into ozone seems to show a match to what we observe. So as you say, this is key.
But, thirdly I would not be dismissive of other, perhaps contributing factors. I am thinking about the possible, supplemental effects from chem-trails. Living in a heavy air-corridor where ordinary air traffic to Europe creates considerable high-level cloud cover, there is no "need" for chem-trails in my area, and though having never seen them myself, I have gradually become a believer, and not merely from the weight of all those outside of air-corridors who claim to be eyewitnesses. The new and deciding tidbit for me was coming across a video of a talk from a geo-engineering conference where the speaker was elaborating on just this subject.
A scientific sort, he described how much is already known about the cooling effects of high-level sulfur dioxide from observations of volcanic eruptions, and talked confidently about how easily and cheaply the cooling effects of volcanos could be imitated by injecting SO2 from airplanes.
His confidence was very convincing, yet it could not be real unless this were already being done. This was bad, but not the truly scary part.
As the talk wrapped up he started getting speculative, citing lab research showing that powdered aluminum could be used instead of sulfur dioxide with sixteen-fold greater efficiency and massively lower cost. He then mumbled a throwaway line about how aluminum ought to be tested for unwanted side-effects before fully implemented, but that nonetheless powdered aluminum was the exciting new development in his line of research.
The way he described these things suggested--through tone and manner--that SO2 is already being widely used, and that aluminum powder might already be being tried.
Finally I get to my point: as best I know--and its probably time to start digging into this more seriously--aluminum powder interferes with water uptake in plants (along with other bad side effects) and interferes with breathing (among other bad side effects) in humans. If so, this would imply another major burden is being placed upon trees in addition to the burden from SO2 and the primary burden from ozone pollution.
--Gaianne
Gaianne, thank you so much for your comments and observations.
ReplyDeleteTo be quite honest, it wouldn't surprise me if there were geoengineering experiments or even worse - deliberate chemtrail conspiracies for who knows what.
However, the death of trees is far, far too widespread to be attributed to what would have to be localized spraying. Only the mixing of the ubiquitous atmospheric pollution makes sense.
I guess my feeling is that it is easier and less painful for folks who notice dying trees to blame it on some evil cabal, rather than our overpopulation and individual consumption. We need to look in the mirror.