A Modern Atlantan
Yesterday as I was perusing articles that pop up in my news feeds I saw an article on ghost forests. I didn’t recognize the terminology. I was thinking it would be something in the unlivable Ukraine called by the nuclear meltdown there. But I was wrong. What the article was about were stands of dead trees up and down the eastern coast of the United States drowned by rising ocean salt water that is caused by global warming.
Suddenly it hit me that I had seen some of these down along the coastal routes through the lowlands of the Carolinas. I have seen these copses of dead timber and thought it must be some invasive bug or fungus that the interconnected world had given our continent. I was left feeling deeply saddened by the status of our inaction on global warming. It made me feel that my rant on here a couple of days ago seem less over the top.
Today the body blows keep coming. One of the more recent studies addressing the places that will fell the impact of rising sea levels first and hardest shook me. The towns where I grew up, where I went to high school, where my sister lives and where I spent my summer holidays all have a greater than 80 % chance of being more than 90% submerged by 2060. Soon the water will removed all trace of where I have lived and walked, of the places I have lived and worked, of the people who begat me. Talk about impermanence.
I am profoundly saddened.
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