Make no mistake,
this pie in the sky,
real as it is,
still has that great caveat...
death.
Making fossils for the future.
To what do we owe the fossils of the future.
There is so much we can learn about ourselves and our world from a survey of the Carboniferous Period. We humans owe much to this age. If it was not for its great forest swamps grabbing carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere and spitting it back out as oxygen, we would have no air to breathe...no breath of life would be ours.
This process of converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen is call carbon fixation.
What else did the Carboniferous give us?As those huge muggy swamps and subsequent forests of the Carboniferous went on and on with their own lives and deaths (for 50 million years a least) they did more than make the air suitable for us to breath. They created massive beds of coal, great deposits of petroleum that would fuel the fires of our industrial age...as well as result in what is likely the greatest irony in life's history.In all the millions of years it took to form those fossil fuels, we will have consumed them in about 300 years. And in doing so we reverse the process that makes our lives possible, consuming more oxygen and creating more carbon dioxide. This is a different sort of carbon fixation, a fixation that does not serve the best interests of our species or most other species on the planet.By all definition, this runaway fixation we humans are now caught-up in fits the bill of addiction, complete with junkies (some reluctant and some in denial) and pushers (mostly greedy and power hungry, their particular addictions unacknowledged/unaddressed by leadership and establishment).
