Summer World_ A Season of Bounty - Bernd Heinrich [82]
In his book The Fitness of the Environment, Lawrence L. Henderson argued (in 1912) that the properties of matter, especially water and carbon, are requisite for life to evolve, and that possible abodes of life not unlike Earth must be a frequent occurrence in space. George Wald (in the preface to a reissue of this book in 1958) also assumed that life must exist elsewhere and it would be “life as we know it, for no other kind, I believe, is possible.” Henderson agrees, but concludes, “The biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as bio-centric.” Others now extend this to homo-centric. But if Welwitschia could speak it would say, “God has been kind and thoughtful to me above all others. He has given me two leaves, no more, no less, just exactly the right number that I need, and he has made them to last me a lifetime, and he has put me here in this environment that is so hospitable for me that I don’t need to move from the spot and can exist here. He supplies all my needs so that I can live without worries for centuries. The temperature—extreme summer to anything else—is perfect. I never overheat, and food is provided from the ground and the air. Water and carbon dioxide come to me in the foggy air at night. I’m in paradise. He has foreseen every little thing to make my life complete. Therefore, when he created the world, he must have had me, specifically, in mind.” Or the serviceberry tree, the lichens, and the mosses that thrive exactly two feet from my back door.
18
Perpetual Summer Species
12 August 2006. THE STUNTED SWAMP MAPLES ARE starting to turn red and are dropping leaves. The crickets’ monotonous chirping refrain—before they mate, lay their eggs, and die—is constant. In contrast, the birds are almost silent. But they may be more restless and on the move through new territory—two ovenbirds (common warblers living in deep shady woods) just hit the windows and were killed. I am also already switching modes, but downward. I curl up in bed a little earlier, sleep later, and eat more. The farmers have harvested their second crop of hay. I’ve finished the woodpile, and we’re canning tomatoes and string beans. Signals indicating the end of summer are all around.
TWO VERY DIFFERENT GROUPS OF ANIMALS LIVE IN A PERPETUAL summer, or nearly perpetual summer, in the far north and deep into the south. The first are birds that migrate from one summer in the north to the other one at the other end of the globe. They can always live in a summer world, thanks to energy-rich berries and heroic sustained exercise. We have come close to imitating them. We manage the same trick of living in perpetual summer, although not by strenuous biannual migrations but by creating and retreating into “climate bubbles.” Temperatures outside may be minus 50°F and the outdoors can be dark with howling wind and swirling snow, but we can be experiencing a comfortable 65°F and fourteen hours of light per day while we feast on fresh tropical fruit. The trouble is that a population of hundreds of millions living in a virtual summer while eating bananas from Central America and drinking coffee from Africa probably can’t sustain wresting summer from winter indefinitely.
For now and the immediate future, each household that I know of, every single one and for every day throughout six months of winter, consumes vast quantities of fuel imported from thousands of miles away to keep the occupants warm and for cooking, lighting, transportation, and—directly or indirectly—for almost everything we do and own. For six months we can’t grow any food. And we insist on building more homes here all the time; almost weekly there are new patches of monstrous new houses that arise like mushrooms up out of the ground in our neighborhood, and each and every one of them requires more and more of the same fossil fuels. Without them vast stretches of the North American continent would virtually overnight be depopulated.