This week we heard about the depleted aquifers in the US. It will take hundreds or even thousands of years of rain to replenish the aguifers.
In the US of reality shows, quarterly profits and wars, time scales like hundreds of years are totally off the radar screen.
We all depend on the bio sphere
Mother nature is the ultimate whistle blower that cannot be silenced by intimidation
An article today reports a study about declining populations of amphibians
They have been around and adapted for 350 million years. Climate change is killing some of them off.
Study: Alarming Loss of Amphibian Populations Across US
http://www.commondreams.org/...
"Amphibians have been a constant presence in our planet's ponds, streams, lakes and rivers for 350 million years or so, surviving countless changes that caused many other groups of animals to go extinct," said USGS Director Suzette Kimball. "This is why the findings of this study are so noteworthy; they demonstrate that the pressures amphibians now face exceed the ability of many of these survivors to cope."
“It’s a loss of biodiversity. You lose them and you can’t get them back. That seems like a problem,” Adams told the Washington Post.
It is not just the frogs, but the entire earth facing human changes. When the rock guys, the geologists, say that there is a new geologic era caused by humans that is a force like plate tectonics, you know that humans have gone too far.
Geologists press for recognition of Earth-changing 'human epoch'
Experts want the human imprint in the geological record to be acknowledged as a new epoch, the Anthropocene
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
These are epoch-making times. Literally. There is now "compelling evidence", according to an influential group of geologists, that humans have had such an impact on the planet that we are entering a new phase of geological time: the Anthropocene.
Millions of years from now, they say, alien geologists would be able to make out a human-influenced stripe in the accumulated layers of rock, in the same way that we can see the imprint of dinosaurs in the Jurassic, or the explosion of life that marks the Cambrian. Now the scientists are pushing for the new epoch to be officially recognised.
The cultural historian Morris Berman who wrote "Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline" has a web page named for the second book in the trilogy "Dark Ages America." He traces the roots of the failure to a hustler culture which right from the beginning rushed to exploit thing after thing. Now that that doesn't work any more, we don't know how to cope.
On the web page they refer to Americans as "dumb as sticks."
But even a stick will compost in less than a century if there is water and the right conditions.
It is getting harder to hide from the ultimate whistle blower, the earth.