Thursday, April 22, 2010

Remembering Arbor Day

Does anyone ever wonder whatever happened to Arbor Day?

You may remember that was how the 22nd of April was commemorated before we all decided to get desperately hip. Meghan Cox Gurdon remembers:

Arbor Day, inaugurated in flat, treeless Kansas in 1872 (until paling into insignificance under the Earthy onslaught), involved the lovely, human-scale practice of planting saplings.

Actual people dug real dirt and planted genuine trees that would grow to give shade and color and to hold the soil together in heavy rain. The observance of Arbor Day yielded something beautiful and tangible, and the first time it happened participants planted nearly a million new trees ...

ABC News reports tonight that, while the USA was using 50 percent of the earth's natural resources in 1970, we're down to only 25 percent in 2010. That's not too shabby when you think about it. But think about the dire predictions made forty years ago ...

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” -- Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

... and you cannot possibly look at the warnings about "climate change" the same way again.

Science marches on.
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