 A QUIET
STAND OF ALDERS "The alder, whose fat shadow nourisheth All set neere to him long flourisheth." -- William Browne, c. 1613 |
|
A QUIET
STAND OF ALDERS "The alder, whose fat shadow nourisheth All set neere to him long flourisheth." -- William Browne, c. 1613 |
 200th
anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin  |
| Welcome
to A Quiet Stand of Alders, a
website
that invites you to experience the scientific importance, and the
beauty and peace, of trees and other plants. This is the message
to which I have dedicated my life: plants are essential to the survival
of the world, and they deserve much more appreciation than they receive
from most people, especially from the political and business leaders in
the United States. Plants are much more than a mechanism for the
survival of the planet; they create worlds of beauty and peace.
The world depends not only on plants in general, but on the diversity
of plants—the millions of species that make up the forests, fields, and
deserts of the world. This diversity of plants, as well as of all
other organisms, has been produced over billions of years by the
process of evolution. In the United States, wild plants are being
destroyed, their diversity is being reduced, and teaching the process
of evolution is under religious attack. Watch this website for
links to sources of information about plants and evolution, including
my books and those of other authors, as well as essays about plants,
evolution, and religion. Keep checking for occasional
updates. If Humans Vanished… June 14, 2009
What would happen to the world if humans vanished from it? Such a thing is very unlikely to happen. Humans are so numerous and so adaptable that there will probably be at least a few people on the Earth until the Sun enters its final throes of death. What is more likely to happen is that human civilization could collapse. Our modern economy and system of food production depend entirely upon fossil fuels and advanced technology. Even the availability of food does not guarantee survival, as was evidence during the Irish Potato Famine, when people starved because they could not buy the plentiful food in the marketplace. The human population of nearly seven billion cannot conceivably be supported by hunting and gathering, especially by a mob of hungry people pouring out of cities and towns. Even rural people survive on groceries. The few that are lucky enough to find wild hickory nuts (or to even know what they are) will discover that the shells are too hard to break except with a very large hammer. To survive by cracking hickory nuts uses more calories than the nuts would provide. The few naturalists who know that bramble shoots are edible would find them only in the spring. As soon as the ammunition ran out, few hunters would know what to do, aside from wrestling a few turtles. But even though the extinction of humans is extremely unlikely, such a disappearance is a useful scenario for understanding human impact upon the Earth. Much of what humans have done to the Earth, for example our buildings and highways, would be quickly erased. Nearly all of the plants and animals that humans have bred as crops and livestock would quickly become extinct. They largely depend upon humans for their survival. Tomatoes, for example, cannot produce seeds unless humans keep their fruits from touching the ground and rotting. Ears of corn would sprout into a dense mass of seedlings, all of which would probably die. Poodles would die instantly. Humans have bred crops and livestock for purposes other than survival in the wild. Some livestock, pets, and plants would become feral, as has happened with horses, swine, cats, and kudzu. Pest animals and weeds have adapted to the conditions that humans have created. Some of them, such as rats, would continue to thrive. But as humans are the major source of ecological disturbances, the weeds and pests that live in such conditions would eventually become rare. The weeds that thrive in agricultural fields are generally not the same ones that colonize after disturbances, such as floods and fires, in the natural world. For example, the velvetleaf weed (Abutilon theophrasti), which today thrives in soybean fields and in recently abandoned farmland, would grow only occasionally on the banks of streams and lakes. The human contribution to biological diversity would vanish quickly. The new rulers of the Earth would be species that existed before humankind. Human population collapse has occurred before. When Europeans introduced diseases such as smallpox to North American native populations, the germs spread faster than the Europeans, and annihilated up to 90 percent of the natives. At that time, population explosions of wild animal species occurred. Natives in the middle of North America had hunted bison and passenger pigeons; with the collapse of hunting, the pigeon and bison populations vastly increased. Natives in the southeastern part of North America had fished extensively; with their disappearance, populations of fish—and of alligators that ate them—exploded. This explains the observations of Europeans and Americans, such as botanist William Bartram, who marveled at the hundreds of alligators in every lake and river in Florida; and they assumed North America had always been this way. If humans vanished today, a similar phenomenon would probably not occur, since most sustenance comes from helpless livestock rather than wild game. One human artifact would persist for millennia: the high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, contributing to a greenhouse effect. The Earth would be warmer for thousands of years because humans had been on it. However, this greenhouse effect would not be very devastating, except for tundra species whose habitat would vanish forever. The main reason that the greenhouse effect threatens biodiversity today is that humans have blocked the corridors of movement by which, in previous millennia, plants and animals have adjusted to global climate changes by migrating. With humans out of the way, global warming would probably cause even fewer extinctions than occurred at the end of the most recent Ice Age. Even coral reefs, already dying because carbon dioxide is acidifying ocean waters, would recuperate in a few hundred years after human disappearance. Perhaps the human artifact that would persist the longest, for several million years, would be the toxins that industry manufactures. Heavy metals and persistent organic molecules already recycle through the food web over and over. And then there is plastic. Plastic is forever. No known natural process breaks it down. Save for a little bit of plastic destroyed during incineration, every bit of plastic ever manufactured still exists. Ultraviolet radiation and oxygen in the air can make it brittle, but it simply fractures into smaller and smaller pieces. This makes plastic trash even more dangerous. When the fragments are small, many animals consume it with the plankton that they normally eat. Natural selection has not produced seabirds that can distinguish between a fish and a floating piece of plastic. In some areas, each handful of sand is 20 percent plastic, and plastic fragments are up to six times as abundant as plankton. There are seven major gyres of ocean current that trap even large pieces of plastic into large, and almost permanent, garbage dumps. Long after the lights of the cities cease to be visible on the dark side of the Earth, long after the last reservoirs fill with silt and their rivers rush over the dams like natural waterfalls, and entropy has scrambled the last of the digital data, flakes of plastic will still be swirling through the ecosystems of the Earth. Bibliography
Books: Just published!  Upcoming Books: Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Encyclopedia of Biodiversity Articles Presentations |
 The
year 2009 is a very important year. It is the 200th anniversary
of the birth of Charles Darwin. In celebration of this, the
author of the Encyclopedia of
Evolution will post links, photos, and
fictional stories related to evolution and Charles Darwin.Stanley A. Rice writes books about plants, evolution, and the environment which are informative and authorative, while remaining easy to understand and fun to read. He also writes fiction. He teaches courses in biology and botany at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. [More ...]
Recently
Published
Green Planet New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009 ISBN: 978-0813544533 Events
Archives
January-March 2008 Green Peace Listen to the forest As interesting as watching grass grow April-June 2008 South with the spring Somebody oughta invent a machine... The Quiet Stand of Alders Saving the Environment—For Whom? Survivors July-September 2008 Welcome to the Republican climate! Goodbye, from the world’s biggest polluter! Yes, Virginia... Consider the lilies Small acts America the glutton Looking for a few good conservatives October-December 2008 A Good Time to be a Vulture A State of Embarrassment Just for Money? Shoot Something Furry Conservatives Are Nature-worshippers The Real World On the Brink of Collapse Winter Sleep January-March 2009 The Inspiration of Science February 12, 2009: An Important Date The Sabbath of the Earth Cottonwood Investments Perseverance Witness Trees The Fundamental Problem April-June 2009 The End of Altruism A Lovers’ Embrace? We Can Afford Environmental Protection Dividing Up the World Suggested
Reading & Links
OCAST
USDA research facility at Lane, Oklahoma Citizens for the Protection of the Arbuckle Simpson Aquifer Botanical Society of America Project Kaleidoscope National Association of Biology Teachers Oklahoma Academy of Science Oklahoma Native Plant Society Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Tulsa County Conservation District Blue Thumb Program Up With Trees Lighter Reading
Email: srice@se.edu Represented by Jodie Rhodes Literary Agency Legal info., Disclaimers, etc. |