.“I remember the line spoken by actor Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: ‘Life finds a way.’* Some life-forms just don’t give up, he intimated, bacteria for example, which we have found in the harshest of conditions, and those unisex dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and, if I might add, the Ailanthus altissima.”
“Eye—whadja say?”
“Ailanthus altissima, quite common in eastern United States since the eighteenth century, anyway; it’s an invasive tree, proliferates in temperate zones. Lots of them in China, too. Member of the Simaroubaceae family, which, by the way, also includes tropical plants. Ailanthus, it’s a weed, basically, and as with most weeds, it grows wherever it can, an opportunist found along highways, in sidewalk cracks, on really bad soil. Originally, a tree brought into the United States because it was adaptable to an urban environment, Philadelphia’s streets at first, and then other eastern urban centers from where it spread like, well, a weed. As I said, it’s opportunistic. And, by the way, it’s the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it’s popular name is the Tree of Heaven, a supposedly Latinized cognate of an Ambonese Malay word.** You’ve seen the tree. It’s an odd-pinnate tree, its stems or branches are lined with parallel leaves, but they end in a single leaf that moves to the side as the branch grows.”***
“You some kind of botanist?”
“No, it’s just that I find lessons in everything, and that includes in a tree or even in many trees, what we call a forest or the woods. As a kid, I called the Ailanthus the ‘skunk tree’—no idea where that came from, probably other kids, maybe from parents, maybe just from experience with the tree. I didn’t know that far from my neighborhood, the Chinese called it chouchun, ‘foul-smelling tree.’ I didn’t even know it was also called the ‘Tree of Heaven.’ I just knew it was ubiquitous, growing, for example, in the black, oil-saturated soil behind the gas station across the alley from my house, springing up along the train tracks where my cousins and I sometimes played (‘Watch out for the hobos,’ my mother warned, knowing that many rode empty boxcars) and definitely in every un-tended lot. Heck, it seemed to me that Ailanthus was everywhere. Had it hitched rides on trains like those hobos, those wandering people who never planted themselves and altered a landscape ‘for the better’?”
“So, what’s the lesson?”
“Might be silly, but it occurs to me that the Tree of Heaven grows in some of the most abused environments on the planet, that is, where humans have created “Hell on Earth.” It grows where humans have destroyed—altered, if you euphemistically will—the ‘natural’ ecology, places like Manhattan, for example, or Brooklyn. Places where people cut down the native forests and covered them with concrete, asphalt, and buildings. Wherever we continue to make our own versions of Hell on Earth, the Tree of Heaven keeps showing up, keeps invading, keeps reminding us that we aren’t completely in control, keeps telling us that even when things seem to be getting worse, when the product of our actions is destruction, there’s a somewhat oxymoronic malodorous reminder of Heaven. Ailanthus altissima sends the message that the moment we stop tending our artificial forest of buildings and soils of concrete, it’s available to start a new forest, that given the smallest crack in a sidewalk or an untended berm along a roadway, it will ‘find a way.’”
“And?”
“This might disturb you, but I’m going to jump to something that might seem irrelevant: It is odd that we demand others to do what we don’t do, and trees help prove the point. As proud as we are about our mastery of Earth, we find ourselves dependent upon some natural processes to restore what we destroyed. We insist that everyone contribute somehow to the ‘restoration’ of degraded landscapes turned brownfields by industry and urbanization, landscapes denuded of trees. You realize that we’ve cut down billions of them. Who knows? Probably trillions of them over the centuries of mastering the planet. Right now, Brazil is cutting them down fast. Deforestation in the Amazon Basin in May, 2020, stripped an area 14 times larger than Manhattan.**** Big dozers and chainsaws make the process easy. And as the knowledge of this current rate of forest decimation spreads around the planet, people far from Brazil will express their indignation. ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ See what I mean? We demand others do what we don’t do.
“Now, before we get all huffy about cutting down trees, we should see deforestation in historical perspective—which ironically isn’t something that people in their ignorance of history do. We can’t change history, of course. We can’t reforest Manhattan without reducing its urbane nature, and you know people who live there and are concerned about Brazil’s forests won’t allow. ‘What? Remove a building, my building, and replace it with trees? Plant a tree where I have a favorite coffee shop? No way. Can’t you put more trees in the park, in Central Park?’ Anyway, we might consider the history of deforestation just to put things in a larger context.
“North Americans have been at it, it being deforestation, for centuries, as old wooden buildings and denuded landscapes attest. Yeah. The pilgrims cleared off Cape Cod, deforested it enough so that soils eroded and sands blew about in the wind to form dunes. Sure the Cape was a dune field between the time the glaciers melted and the forests grew. But then for at least eight to ten millennia before the Pilgrims landed, Cape Cod was a forest interrupted by wetlands. The Pilgrims sent some of those trees across the ocean to become ships’ masts and used others for local shipbuilding and urban construction. And to the south, Manhattan, once under ice like Cape Cod, also became a forested land when the ice melted, being naturally transformed into an island with happy little bunnies and frolicking deer tromping over wetlands and through streams and stands of trees. (No wonder it sold, as the elementary school story goes, for a mere $23 in baubles, a real bargain before real estate prices soared for multimillion-dollar apartments) The descendants of those Europeans who settled the Northeast in the 17th century cut down forest after forest, working their way westward toward the Mississippi River, not at the Brazilian rate of 14 Manhattans per month, however, but then they didn’t have chain saws. It took three centuries to cut down North America’s trees. The history is this: Over the relatively slow deforestation of eastern North America—relative to the Brazilian May clearing—no one thought to say, ‘I think I’ll abandon my desire to clear and use this land and instead preserve it as a slice of Heaven for all to enjoy.’
“In modern Brazil, which is on track to outstrip its previous record of forest-stripping, the destruction of the rainforest has drawn international attention, even from people who live in urban and suburban areas where landscapes are stripped of their forests. No doubt the outcry is genuine. I mean, who doesn’t love a rainforest at least from a safe distance, where none of those bugs, piranha, or parasites live. But let’s consider the concern. Everyone wants the other person or even the other country to do what is right, that is, to do what is more protective of the environment. At the same time, ‘Everyone,’ allegorically speaking, contributes to the decimation. Go, for example, to Scranton’s nearby mountainsides, to Norfolk’s Mount Trashmore, or to similar ‘mounts’ of trash in New Jersey, or even to Mumbai, India, to see piles of trash discarded by those who accumulate and discard without much concern about making some other place a Hell on Earth.
“Everyone wants the other person to care for the planet and its natural organic resources. Other countries, for example, want Brazil to stop cutting down trees. I get it. All of us can look around to see what others are doing without looking at what we as individuals are doing. Regardless of our concern, how involved can we be in something that is remote, like the burning of forests far from Europe, America, or even from Brazil’s big cities. It’s the rainforest, for goodness sake. It’s a wild area. It’s not suburbia. Who’s going to police and protect the Amazon Basin’s interior?
“Hold on. That’s not completely true. Brazil recently sent thousands of troops into the Amazon Basin to protect the trees. I just read that somewhere.”*****
“Didn’t know that. Thanks, but consider the fate of forests. They’ve always been under attack, and that means long before people slashed and burned. Can you say ‘beaver dam’? Furry critters can gnaw down a tree. And naturally-caused fires. That makes me digress a bit: Speak of a double whammy on a forest! Chernobyl blew up in 1986 and spread radioactive dust over the local forest, and now recent fires in the Ukraine, specifically in forests adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have burned the radioactive trees. Speak of Hell on Earth! A charred radioactive forest! Composed mostly of pine trees, those Chernobyl forests will take a long time to recover. But then, who cares? Isn’t that a Ukrainian problem?******
“I suppose I should say, ‘Fortunately, forests have a way of re-establishing or replacing themselves. Forests have a way of returning.’ ‘Life finds a way,’ as Jeff says. Heck. According to a study by John Marshall et al., Devonian forests, arguably the first forests on the planet, suffered widespread devastation from UV light under a naturally depleted ozone layer some 359 million years ago.*******You know what I’m interested in seeing?”
“No, what?”
“If the Tree of Heaven begins to grow there, I mean in the burned Ukrainian forests. You know, on its own, without human help. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be a blow to our egos? Or maybe to our devilish Ids? In our hubris we built a supposed wonder of artificiality, a nuclear power plant. And now it lies beneath a giant tomb we had to build to shield the environment from the Hell we made in the midst of what was once a forested land. It took a bunch of money to build the machine that destroyed the environment and then a bunch more money to cover and entomb it. It cost the Ukrainians an urban area and a nearby forest. Worried about that forest? It was already off limits because of the radiation.
“Seems that the news about our destruction of the planet is all bad and unending. One might think that all that is human is bad. (Some do consider humans a blight—except for themselves, of course) Some think the planet is doomed because we are here. But wait! As the guy says in infomercials before offering a two-for-one product (except for shipping and handling). Maybe humans haven’t decimated the entire planet. Maybe there are as yet largely untouched landscapes. And so, in fact, say researchers from the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis. According to their tally of relatively untouched lands, ‘Roughly half of Earth’s ice-free land remains without significant human influence.’******** So, Heaven on Earth still exists for half the planet in spite of our centuries of trying to convert the entire surface into Hell.
“Of course, we have altered the other 50% of landscapes, and we can’t deny that. Just look around. Blame you. Are you some hermit living in the woods? Probably not if you’re reading this online. And if you are sitting and reading this, are you saying, ‘I’m concerned about the planet, about those rainforests’? But, are you doing anything other than saying, ‘Someone should do something about that’? Well, not to worry. Heaven, it seems, has a plan. There’s always the Tree of Heaven. Sure, it comes with a foul smell, maybe a hint of Hell’s sulfur and brimstone that reminds us that even a fully ‘natural world’ isn’t some perfect Garden of Eden. But look at what the Tree of Heaven can do: It transforms industrial brownfields into the green fields of summer and, before losing its leaves in the fall, turns the landscape into splotches of anthocyanin’s brilliant scarlet. Just as the decimated Devonian forests were replaced hundreds of millions of years ago by the widespread Carboniferous forests of the Pennsylvanian and Mississippian Periods, today’s life, at least represented by Ailanthus, ‘finds a way.’ You don’t have to do much; just walk away from your highly artificial setting. Within a relatively brief time—that is, in a count of decades, centuries, millennia, and tens-to-hundreds-to-thousands of millennia—Heaven’s tree, or some other tree will, either in your presence or in your absence, do what life always does: It will ‘find a way.’”
*https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=jeff+goldblum+life+finds+a+way#id=1&vid=53f2f9a9a9e3271c5b448173e1475a4f&action=click
**Why Ambonese Malay? Well, it was, until it was introduced elsewhere, an Asiatic tree.
***Here are pics.: https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/ailanthus-altissima.html
Note that the tree turns scarlet in autumn.
****Several reports: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-12/brazil-sends-military-to-protect-amazon-as-deforestation-surges/12237232 ; https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazil-worldwide-forest-loss.html; and the one that gives the areal extent of deforestation in May, 2020: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazilian-amazon-deforestation.html Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020.
*****https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-rainforest-fires-brazil-soldiers-deforestation-jair-bolsonaro-a9510421.html
HOLY COW! HOW MANY REFERENCES DOES THIS GUY NEED? IT’S LIKE READING SOME RESEARCH PAPER FOR A COLLEGE COMP CLASS OR A JOURNAL ARTICLE.
****** https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ukraine-scientists-huge-chernobyl.html
Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020.
*******https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/no-asteroids-or-volcanoes-needed-ancient-mass-extinction-tied-ozone-loss-warming
********Kerlin, Kat. U.C. Davis. Half the earth relatively intact from global human influence. 12 Jun 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-earth-intact-global-human.html Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020. It's possible, however, that in a relatively short time, much of that "untouched" half of Earth's non-ice land surface will be affected. For example, see the article on the deforestation in British Columbia: Lynda V. Mapes. Seattle Times. 1 Jun 2020: Scientists say the last of British Columbia's old growth trees will soon be gone, if policies don't change. Online at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-last-of-british-columbias-old-growth-trees-will-soon-be-gone-if-policies-dont-change/ Accessed June 16, 2020
“Eye—whadja say?”
“Ailanthus altissima, quite common in eastern United States since the eighteenth century, anyway; it’s an invasive tree, proliferates in temperate zones. Lots of them in China, too. Member of the Simaroubaceae family, which, by the way, also includes tropical plants. Ailanthus, it’s a weed, basically, and as with most weeds, it grows wherever it can, an opportunist found along highways, in sidewalk cracks, on really bad soil. Originally, a tree brought into the United States because it was adaptable to an urban environment, Philadelphia’s streets at first, and then other eastern urban centers from where it spread like, well, a weed. As I said, it’s opportunistic. And, by the way, it’s the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it’s popular name is the Tree of Heaven, a supposedly Latinized cognate of an Ambonese Malay word.** You’ve seen the tree. It’s an odd-pinnate tree, its stems or branches are lined with parallel leaves, but they end in a single leaf that moves to the side as the branch grows.”***
“You some kind of botanist?”
“No, it’s just that I find lessons in everything, and that includes in a tree or even in many trees, what we call a forest or the woods. As a kid, I called the Ailanthus the ‘skunk tree’—no idea where that came from, probably other kids, maybe from parents, maybe just from experience with the tree. I didn’t know that far from my neighborhood, the Chinese called it chouchun, ‘foul-smelling tree.’ I didn’t even know it was also called the ‘Tree of Heaven.’ I just knew it was ubiquitous, growing, for example, in the black, oil-saturated soil behind the gas station across the alley from my house, springing up along the train tracks where my cousins and I sometimes played (‘Watch out for the hobos,’ my mother warned, knowing that many rode empty boxcars) and definitely in every un-tended lot. Heck, it seemed to me that Ailanthus was everywhere. Had it hitched rides on trains like those hobos, those wandering people who never planted themselves and altered a landscape ‘for the better’?”
“So, what’s the lesson?”
“Might be silly, but it occurs to me that the Tree of Heaven grows in some of the most abused environments on the planet, that is, where humans have created “Hell on Earth.” It grows where humans have destroyed—altered, if you euphemistically will—the ‘natural’ ecology, places like Manhattan, for example, or Brooklyn. Places where people cut down the native forests and covered them with concrete, asphalt, and buildings. Wherever we continue to make our own versions of Hell on Earth, the Tree of Heaven keeps showing up, keeps invading, keeps reminding us that we aren’t completely in control, keeps telling us that even when things seem to be getting worse, when the product of our actions is destruction, there’s a somewhat oxymoronic malodorous reminder of Heaven. Ailanthus altissima sends the message that the moment we stop tending our artificial forest of buildings and soils of concrete, it’s available to start a new forest, that given the smallest crack in a sidewalk or an untended berm along a roadway, it will ‘find a way.’”
“And?”
“This might disturb you, but I’m going to jump to something that might seem irrelevant: It is odd that we demand others to do what we don’t do, and trees help prove the point. As proud as we are about our mastery of Earth, we find ourselves dependent upon some natural processes to restore what we destroyed. We insist that everyone contribute somehow to the ‘restoration’ of degraded landscapes turned brownfields by industry and urbanization, landscapes denuded of trees. You realize that we’ve cut down billions of them. Who knows? Probably trillions of them over the centuries of mastering the planet. Right now, Brazil is cutting them down fast. Deforestation in the Amazon Basin in May, 2020, stripped an area 14 times larger than Manhattan.**** Big dozers and chainsaws make the process easy. And as the knowledge of this current rate of forest decimation spreads around the planet, people far from Brazil will express their indignation. ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ See what I mean? We demand others do what we don’t do.
“Now, before we get all huffy about cutting down trees, we should see deforestation in historical perspective—which ironically isn’t something that people in their ignorance of history do. We can’t change history, of course. We can’t reforest Manhattan without reducing its urbane nature, and you know people who live there and are concerned about Brazil’s forests won’t allow. ‘What? Remove a building, my building, and replace it with trees? Plant a tree where I have a favorite coffee shop? No way. Can’t you put more trees in the park, in Central Park?’ Anyway, we might consider the history of deforestation just to put things in a larger context.
“North Americans have been at it, it being deforestation, for centuries, as old wooden buildings and denuded landscapes attest. Yeah. The pilgrims cleared off Cape Cod, deforested it enough so that soils eroded and sands blew about in the wind to form dunes. Sure the Cape was a dune field between the time the glaciers melted and the forests grew. But then for at least eight to ten millennia before the Pilgrims landed, Cape Cod was a forest interrupted by wetlands. The Pilgrims sent some of those trees across the ocean to become ships’ masts and used others for local shipbuilding and urban construction. And to the south, Manhattan, once under ice like Cape Cod, also became a forested land when the ice melted, being naturally transformed into an island with happy little bunnies and frolicking deer tromping over wetlands and through streams and stands of trees. (No wonder it sold, as the elementary school story goes, for a mere $23 in baubles, a real bargain before real estate prices soared for multimillion-dollar apartments) The descendants of those Europeans who settled the Northeast in the 17th century cut down forest after forest, working their way westward toward the Mississippi River, not at the Brazilian rate of 14 Manhattans per month, however, but then they didn’t have chain saws. It took three centuries to cut down North America’s trees. The history is this: Over the relatively slow deforestation of eastern North America—relative to the Brazilian May clearing—no one thought to say, ‘I think I’ll abandon my desire to clear and use this land and instead preserve it as a slice of Heaven for all to enjoy.’
“In modern Brazil, which is on track to outstrip its previous record of forest-stripping, the destruction of the rainforest has drawn international attention, even from people who live in urban and suburban areas where landscapes are stripped of their forests. No doubt the outcry is genuine. I mean, who doesn’t love a rainforest at least from a safe distance, where none of those bugs, piranha, or parasites live. But let’s consider the concern. Everyone wants the other person or even the other country to do what is right, that is, to do what is more protective of the environment. At the same time, ‘Everyone,’ allegorically speaking, contributes to the decimation. Go, for example, to Scranton’s nearby mountainsides, to Norfolk’s Mount Trashmore, or to similar ‘mounts’ of trash in New Jersey, or even to Mumbai, India, to see piles of trash discarded by those who accumulate and discard without much concern about making some other place a Hell on Earth.
“Everyone wants the other person to care for the planet and its natural organic resources. Other countries, for example, want Brazil to stop cutting down trees. I get it. All of us can look around to see what others are doing without looking at what we as individuals are doing. Regardless of our concern, how involved can we be in something that is remote, like the burning of forests far from Europe, America, or even from Brazil’s big cities. It’s the rainforest, for goodness sake. It’s a wild area. It’s not suburbia. Who’s going to police and protect the Amazon Basin’s interior?
“Hold on. That’s not completely true. Brazil recently sent thousands of troops into the Amazon Basin to protect the trees. I just read that somewhere.”*****
“Didn’t know that. Thanks, but consider the fate of forests. They’ve always been under attack, and that means long before people slashed and burned. Can you say ‘beaver dam’? Furry critters can gnaw down a tree. And naturally-caused fires. That makes me digress a bit: Speak of a double whammy on a forest! Chernobyl blew up in 1986 and spread radioactive dust over the local forest, and now recent fires in the Ukraine, specifically in forests adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have burned the radioactive trees. Speak of Hell on Earth! A charred radioactive forest! Composed mostly of pine trees, those Chernobyl forests will take a long time to recover. But then, who cares? Isn’t that a Ukrainian problem?******
“I suppose I should say, ‘Fortunately, forests have a way of re-establishing or replacing themselves. Forests have a way of returning.’ ‘Life finds a way,’ as Jeff says. Heck. According to a study by John Marshall et al., Devonian forests, arguably the first forests on the planet, suffered widespread devastation from UV light under a naturally depleted ozone layer some 359 million years ago.*******You know what I’m interested in seeing?”
“No, what?”
“If the Tree of Heaven begins to grow there, I mean in the burned Ukrainian forests. You know, on its own, without human help. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t that be a blow to our egos? Or maybe to our devilish Ids? In our hubris we built a supposed wonder of artificiality, a nuclear power plant. And now it lies beneath a giant tomb we had to build to shield the environment from the Hell we made in the midst of what was once a forested land. It took a bunch of money to build the machine that destroyed the environment and then a bunch more money to cover and entomb it. It cost the Ukrainians an urban area and a nearby forest. Worried about that forest? It was already off limits because of the radiation.
“Seems that the news about our destruction of the planet is all bad and unending. One might think that all that is human is bad. (Some do consider humans a blight—except for themselves, of course) Some think the planet is doomed because we are here. But wait! As the guy says in infomercials before offering a two-for-one product (except for shipping and handling). Maybe humans haven’t decimated the entire planet. Maybe there are as yet largely untouched landscapes. And so, in fact, say researchers from the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis. According to their tally of relatively untouched lands, ‘Roughly half of Earth’s ice-free land remains without significant human influence.’******** So, Heaven on Earth still exists for half the planet in spite of our centuries of trying to convert the entire surface into Hell.
“Of course, we have altered the other 50% of landscapes, and we can’t deny that. Just look around. Blame you. Are you some hermit living in the woods? Probably not if you’re reading this online. And if you are sitting and reading this, are you saying, ‘I’m concerned about the planet, about those rainforests’? But, are you doing anything other than saying, ‘Someone should do something about that’? Well, not to worry. Heaven, it seems, has a plan. There’s always the Tree of Heaven. Sure, it comes with a foul smell, maybe a hint of Hell’s sulfur and brimstone that reminds us that even a fully ‘natural world’ isn’t some perfect Garden of Eden. But look at what the Tree of Heaven can do: It transforms industrial brownfields into the green fields of summer and, before losing its leaves in the fall, turns the landscape into splotches of anthocyanin’s brilliant scarlet. Just as the decimated Devonian forests were replaced hundreds of millions of years ago by the widespread Carboniferous forests of the Pennsylvanian and Mississippian Periods, today’s life, at least represented by Ailanthus, ‘finds a way.’ You don’t have to do much; just walk away from your highly artificial setting. Within a relatively brief time—that is, in a count of decades, centuries, millennia, and tens-to-hundreds-to-thousands of millennia—Heaven’s tree, or some other tree will, either in your presence or in your absence, do what life always does: It will ‘find a way.’”
*https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-sz-001&hsimp=yhs-001&hspart=sz&p=jeff+goldblum+life+finds+a+way#id=1&vid=53f2f9a9a9e3271c5b448173e1475a4f&action=click
**Why Ambonese Malay? Well, it was, until it was introduced elsewhere, an Asiatic tree.
***Here are pics.: https://www.dreamstime.com/photos-images/ailanthus-altissima.html
Note that the tree turns scarlet in autumn.
****Several reports: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-12/brazil-sends-military-to-protect-amazon-as-deforestation-surges/12237232 ; https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazil-worldwide-forest-loss.html; and the one that gives the areal extent of deforestation in May, 2020: https://phys.org/news/2020-06-brazilian-amazon-deforestation.html Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020.
*****https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/amazon-rainforest-fires-brazil-soldiers-deforestation-jair-bolsonaro-a9510421.html
HOLY COW! HOW MANY REFERENCES DOES THIS GUY NEED? IT’S LIKE READING SOME RESEARCH PAPER FOR A COLLEGE COMP CLASS OR A JOURNAL ARTICLE.
****** https://phys.org/news/2020-06-ukraine-scientists-huge-chernobyl.html
Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020.
*******https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/no-asteroids-or-volcanoes-needed-ancient-mass-extinction-tied-ozone-loss-warming
********Kerlin, Kat. U.C. Davis. Half the earth relatively intact from global human influence. 12 Jun 2020. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-earth-intact-global-human.html Story in Phys.org. Accessed June 12, 2020. It's possible, however, that in a relatively short time, much of that "untouched" half of Earth's non-ice land surface will be affected. For example, see the article on the deforestation in British Columbia: Lynda V. Mapes. Seattle Times. 1 Jun 2020: Scientists say the last of British Columbia's old growth trees will soon be gone, if policies don't change. Online at: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/the-last-of-british-columbias-old-growth-trees-will-soon-be-gone-if-policies-dont-change/ Accessed June 16, 2020
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