February 2024

Nature likes to redress an imbalance. If a tree falls over, a dozen or so young ones will compete to replace it. If you cut off the branch of a tree, a new one will grow quite quickly. If a female blue tit loses her mate to a sparrowhawk, a new young floating male will often move in to take his place. If you plough up a meadow, the plants are replaced by opportunist weeds of cultivation unless they are controlled by a weedkiller and a crop is planted instead. Any change generated by humans will generate a natural response. Even the monoculture crop will generate an influx of organisms wanting to consume it. To get the crop, these arrivals will have to be controlled by pesticides, that will also be lethal to other organisms.

Nature is also attempting to redress the imbalance caused by human induced (anthropogenic) climate and other changes in some most extraordinary ways. For example. We are burning more fossil fuel now than ever before, especially due to the global number of vehicles being driven increasing daily. A consequence of this is that the carbon dioxide produced is acting like a greenhouse and heating up the atmosphere and global surface. More ocean is being exposed as the ice caps are melting.

Now, 71% of the global surface is water. The amount of water leaving the oceans and entering the atmosphere as vapour is proportional to the temperature, so global warming is causing much more water to be held within the atmosphere. The more water vapour there is in the sky, the more clouds form which also store energy that can be manifest as lightning and wind. The consequence of this is more powerful storms and heavier rainfall. This rainfall causes erosion of our tarmac roads, often by freeze and thaw of water in cracks and fissures. Also, by simple flow erosion. This in turn causes pot-holes. In turn, the pot-holes cause damage to the tyres and structure of vehicles, and while those are off the road, they are not burning fossil fuels. Nature tries redressing an imbalance. Meanwhile, car owners rush to get their vehicles repaired or replaced and so the cycle goes on. Man has become a geological force of nature. This has caused geologists to suggest renaming the epoch that we are living through as the Anthropocene (human new) epoch. Officially, we are in the Holocene (meaning wholly new) epoch.