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Where will the ocean go next?
There's a lot of concern being voiced these days about climate change,
so-called "global warming." Guilt's being laid on with a trowel. We're all
guilty, it's said, because we're using fossil fuels, doing things to the
ozone layer, building up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and setting up a
planetary greenhouse, all presumably to our detriment.
All this may be trueS or not. It may be our faultSor not. We may be able to
do something about itS or not.
I do know one thing. Climates have changed for millions of years, mostly
without much human intervention. Right here on the Pacific coast of
California the ocean beaches have headed east at an average rate of three
inches a week for the past 12,000 years. What you think of as permanence is
probably little more than a lull. Ocean invasion is much slower today than
it was several thousand years ago. There must have been times when the
ancestors of the local Ohlone would see differences in the shoreline every
few months. As the polar icecaps melted, as the ocean rose, it must have
been hard to avoid noticing local geology and geography changing rapidly.
The Ohlone, or their predecessor native Americans, certainly lived along
the shorelines as they existed in those early days. It's likely most early
villages were repeatedly and completely obliterated as the water rose. Far
to the north great glaciers had covered the land, and lowered the shoreline
by hundreds of feet. What's now Rockaway Point and Mori's Point and San
Pedro Point were merely fingers in the hills, extending westward.
As glaciers melted, the low valleys surrounding the hills we know as the
Farallone Islands began to be invaded by ocean waves as the Pacific headed
east. No one alive today knows exactly how long it took, or what those
waves washed away.
In all likelihood the same kind of animals whose bones are found in the La
Brea tar pits lived along that coastal margin that would soon disappear
forever under the Pacific. Sabre Tooth Cats, Mammoths and Mastodons,
Grizzly Bears and other animals we've never seen preyed and were preyed on.
We don't know when human beings arrived here. We don't know if they were
able to kill the mega-mammals who lived here then. We can be sure only that
the brains they used were as sharp as ours, perhaps sharper. What they
lacked in computers, alphabets and mathematics, they made up by learning
all about the local plants, animals and landscape. They had names for every
useful herb and shrub. They knew how to process a deer once they had killed
it to gain every benefit they could from that carcass. Like Ishi the last
Yahi, they were experts with the bow and arrow. Like Ishi they could have
taught us better ways to use those valuable tools, just as Ishi in San
Francisco taught Saxton Pope that ancient art. (Ishi's, and Pope's,
knowledge can be ours, if we read Pope's book on hunting with the bow.)
Just as the Ohlone learned to live with advancing shorelines and the demise
of the giant fauna (we don't know why California's bison and other large
mammals died off. We can only guess) we will learn to compensate for the
kind of problems we will be facing. Some of those problems will be
man-made. Some would have happened regardless of what we did. Just as human
beings brought in Pampas Grass and Ice Plant to combat erosion, only to
regret their poor judgment, it is likely that those who today identify
themselves as environmentalists will also make serious mistakes they will
live to regret.
Paul Azevedo's e mail address is Paul@thereactor.net
Check The Reactor's website at www.thereactor.net.
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