Victory gardens

During both of the World Wars of the last century, everyday Americans were asked to raise gardens to help the war effort. These became known as "Victory Gardens." The world is in another war now, and I think one of our greatest weapons just might be a return of these same types of home grown plots.

In the past few days, one news item has caught my attention more than the other stories. It is the increasing news of the drought that our western states are experiencing. There is nothing that may affect our collective futures more than this weather pattern.

If one spends a bit more time reading news articles from around the world, you will also find that this drought is affecting many other locations. Currently there is a drought, perhaps even more severe, affecting Brazil, but there are no continents that are not experiencing similar conditions.

For quite a few years now, there has been a difference of opinion, as to whether the earth is experiencing a noticeable change in climate. I am no scientist, so I have gone to the experts to see what the latest data indicates.

Both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agree, that 2014 was the warmest year ever recorded (these records have only been kept since 1880). Further statistics include the following: The 10 warmest years ever recorded have happened since 1997, and the three hottest years were 2005, 2010, and 2014. Finally, the temperatures have been above average for the past 38 years.

Some blame fossil fuels, and man's other practices for these changes. When I was in a physics class in college (some 38 years ago), the professor in my class was a former NASA scientist.

He said that our planet does not revolve around the sun in a perfect orbit. It actually has more of an elliptical or egg shaped circuit. Over long periods of time, this creates a wobble, like the tops we used to spin as kids. The wobble causes the earth to move closer to and further away from the sun, over tremendous periods of time.

I can still remember him saying, that we were in a protracted period, when the earth was very slowly moving closer to the sun. It was his estimate that this pattern would take thousands of years or longer to complete the cycle, and begin a retreating pattern away from the sun. For now, we're all along for a ride closer to the sun each year.

The consensus of whether the earth is warming, and whether we are going to experience more types of climate changes, should never have become a political issue. Every living organism on the planet is in the same political party on this issue.

We have already begun the process of trying to alter human contributions that may be assisting this warming trend. By the time most of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren are the inhabitants of this planet, I think they and science will have come up with many types of conservation practices that will aid in the slowing of warming.

Having said that, if my college professor was right, the warming orbit of the earth cannot be changed. We are stuck with our world, and its relationship to our sun.

For several decades now, Brazil has been cutting down huge tracts of their Amazon rainforest. They are logging the trees, and then converting the land to other uses such as soybean farming.

The Amazon rainforest was the largest forest on our planet. It had an ecosystem that provided much that helped the entire planets temperature and air quality.

The relationship between animals and plants is a symbiotic one. The simplest of these involves the gases that both organisms use to survive. Humans and animals need oxygen to breathe. We exhale carbon dioxide as a by-product. Plants need carbon dioxide to combine with water, sunlight, and chlorophyll, to grow. During this process, they release oxygen back into the atmosphere.

Plants and animals have existed in this life sustaining relationship since the beginning of time, but there are so many other benefits derived from this process.

We don't know all of the causes of the warming trends of our planet, but we know what some of the results will be. We already see what's happening in places like California and Brazil. If the world keeps warming at this rate, a place like Florida will eventually disappear beneath the ocean, due to the further melting of the ice caps.

We will have to depend on science and technology to help humans survive in that new world, but there are some obvious things we can do to make the quality of our life better, and perhaps slow the warming trends.

I am not going to discuss the many fossil fuel issues. Those will have to be dealt with for sure, but for now I want to offer a practice, in which all of us could participate.

Phase one would be to bring the rainforests back. That could happen naturally in that area of the world. They simply need to be allowed to grow back, and making them like our national parks and forests.

Phase two would be to educate all the world's population, to learn to plant victory gardens once more. Just imagine how much oxygen alone this would provide to the air quality. Plants tend to help cool the earth as well with their shade.

About the only thing many of our citizens raise these days is grass in their yards. It takes lots of water, and provides us with little but a green look.

Plants are our friends in the complex relationship we share. They provide so much that makes our world a better and safer place to live, and like the victory gardens of old, they also give us much of the food we eat!