Plants - Animals - Mankind 2

Looking at this from an evolutionist point of view, they tell us that the animal kingdom started about four hundred million years ago with the appearance of fish on the scene. Invertebrates had preceded them by a couple of million years. Mammals did not show up until about one hundred million years ago, making them the new kid on the block. While nowadays it is chic to blame mankind for causing any species or even sub-species to go extinct, how many species went extinct prior to mans arrival on earth? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? I do not know and I do not believe that anyone else KNOWS either. I do not believe anyone is qualified to give an exact number. I do know that there are a lot of animals that no longer exist. There are no mastodons, sabre toothed tigers, dinosaurs or a long list of other animals. I do not believe that we even have a clue of all of the animal kingdom that went extinct, only to be replaced by another species. We have a good knowledge of the larger species, but what about all of the insects, birds, fish, reptiles and smaller mammals? We find that the animals alive on earth at the present time look a lot different that the ones of pre-history. Are there any of the animals on earth that were here in the early stage of the animal kingdom? We have a few holdovers, such as the sturgeon, the platypus, the crocodile/alligator family and a couple of others, but how much the same or different are they than their ancestors were? Why did all of these ancient species become extinct? Was it the weather? Was it caused by a giant meteor hitting the earth? What was it? In the evolutionist's mind, these extinctions cannot be blamed on mankind. We had not yet even arrived on the scene. 

Now let us take an entirely different look at things. Let us look at it from my viewpoint, from the viewpoint of a creationist. God created all of the animals at one time, meaning that they were all on earth at the same time. He also created man while all of these animals were on the earth. When the flood came, Noah was told to build an ark and gather all of the animals into the ark. There is a good possibility that God, at that time, decided not only to rid the earth of virtually all of mankind but to eliminate some of the animals at the same time. Noah had to rely on God to send the animals that were to be saved to him. If God chose not to send the dinosaurs or any other animal to Noah, they did not get saved. I believe this is why human bones and dinosaur bones have been found in the same layers of ancient earth. The evolutionists cannot explain that to us so they just ignore the fact that it has happened. Either way, whether you are and evolutionist or a creationist, mankind did not cause the extinction of any species at that time. If that is true, why do we get the blame for the extinction of species? The earth is ever changing whether it was created by God or evolved. The ever changing of the earth is what is causing the extinction of species. 

There are a couple of examples of how mankind has interfered with the natural progression of things. First, there is (or was) the passenger pigeon. When Europeans first came to America, there were literally millions of these birds. They soon became the prime target of market hunters. I did not take too many years (in the life of the planet) before these birds became completely extinct. What had looked like a never ending supply of birds was gone.

Now let us take a look at the American Bison. When Europeans arrived in America, there were, like the passenger pigeon, millions of these animals. They roamed over the western half of the country in great herds. Probably, when the American Indians arrived the bison was already here too. I have no way of know for sure, but there were probably less at that time than when the Europeans came. When the Europeans came there were herds of bison even east of the Mississippi. How large would these herds have grown had it not been for man's interference? Would the herds have continued to grow, spreading ever eastward, even to the Atlantic coast? These are large beasts and it takes a lot of food to keep them going. How long would it have been before they consumed all available food in the country? When that happens, starvation sets in along with diseases that the weak bodies of the animals can no longer overcome. Would a scenario like that have caused the bison to become extinct? I have no way of knowing, but the possibility exists. As it was, Mankind became the reason for the near extinction of this great animal. The American Indian had hunted the bison for many years. They used the meat for food, the hides for clothing and shelter and most other parts of the animal for various other things. They hunted the bison with bow and with spear an sometimes by running an entire herd over the edge of a cliff. Now come the settlers with guns and able to0 kill many more bison that the average American Indian ever thought of. Add to this that they were also providing the American Indian with guns and you can see where it is going. Many more people, armed with better weapons and the bison did not stand a chance. My biggest problem with the killing off of the bison is the amount of waste. Many (if not most) of the bison killed at this time were killed strictly for their hides. Most of the meat was left to rot. This, to me, is unconscionable. 

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Plants, Animals, Mankind

After taking a lay persons look at the earth, we find that we have a big ball with oil, coal and many other minerals inside. It has soil, rocks and water covering most of it and it has air and more water surrounding it. So far we are looking at a pretty bleak picture. We need to add some things to make the earth the vibrant and wonderful place that it is. According to some scientists, seaweed and other water plants were the first plants to show up on earth. This supposedly took place about five hundred million years ago. A couple of hundred million years later, land plants showed up. I do not think anyone really knows what the plants of that era looked like. With the constant heating, cooling and changing of the earth, with the glaicers, advancing and retreating oceans, plants probably did a lot of evolving. They had to change to adapt to the temperature difference the differences in moisture content in the soil, etc. I feel also, that many plants have become extinct over the eons. Land plants that were eventually covered by an ocean probably would not survive. This would also hold true of water plants that were in an ocean that eventually dried up. Plants would have been constantly changing, going extinct and other plants evolving to take their place. This is looking at it from an evolutionist's view. In reality there was no rain prior to the flood of Noah. Then the rains came and the entire earth was covered with water. So when an evolutionist says this or that continent was once under water, they are correct. The entire earth was covered with water. The pre flood plants may have been different from the post flood plants. Much of the water from the flood may have frozen and caused the glaciers. That makes the most sense to me.

Plants are probably the most important life form on earth. Plants can, and did exist without animals, until animals were put onto this earth. Animals, on the other hand, could not exist without plants. Plants grow, reproduce, (produce seeds), and die. upon dying they decay, thus providing nutrients to the soil for the next generation. The decayed plant life also helps produce more soil. Thus, plants need no help from animals, birds or even insects to continue to thrive. While many plants now need bees or other insects for pollination purposes, it may not have always been that way. There are still many plants that have both male and female parts and therefore are self-pollinating. We also have plants that reproduce by sending new roots from the old or by the means of runners which create new roots. Another method of pollination is the spores are carried by the wind, just as seeds are carried by the wind to different locations.

Plants help the earth and those living on it in other ways as well. The roots of trees and other plants get into small cracks in stone, spreading and cracking them more. This allows more water to get in and possibly freeze making a larger crack. The water washes, through eroding, small particles. These particles, when added to decaying plants create the new soil. Trees also remove carbon dioxide from the air and give off oxygen, without which animals could not live. This is one of the fallicies of the psuedo-environmentalists trying to convince us that carbon dioxide is bad for the environment. Without carbon dioxide you would have no trees and without trees you would have no oxygen. Without oxygen, you would have no human race or other air breathing creatures. Most plants do help purify the air, however, not every plant does. President Ronald Reagan once made a statement that some trees cause pollution. What many people do no know is that there is a species of pine trees that actually gives off noxious gasses. However, we do not need to get rid of the carbon dioxide, we need to plant more trees. More trees mean cleaner air, so it makes sense to plant trees. However, the save the environment at any cost groups run on money. Anything they can do to scare people into giving more money is good and they do not let facts get in the way. When people find out the real truth they may not give the contributions to these groups, meaning that some of these people would have to get a real job rather than running around crying "WOLF". The major media thrives on these types of overblown theories and would not think about questioning these Marxists for facts to back up their claims. Real scientists do not have a chance because their science is not exciting enough.

While we know that plants can live without animals, animals on the other hand could not live without plants. We have basically three types of animals: herbivorous, carnivorous and omnivorous. The herbivores live entirely on plants, the carnivores live entirely on the flesh of other animals and the omnivores (this includes mankind) live on a combination of plant and animal life. Thus, without plants, there would be no food chain, thus no animal life.  So while we really need to take care of the plants on earth, I do not see any real crisis. While the antis are crying that we are cutting down our forest at too rapid a rate, there is more forrested land in this country than there was one hundred years ago. The purists want to protect every plant and keep it in the environment that it was first discovered in. This is virtually impossible and not ever really practical. Even nature does not do this when left alone. When lightning starts a fire and an entire section of forest burns down, the plants that re-grow are not always the same species in the same mix as the ones tha burned. Thus, nature itself is an ever changing, ever evolving circle. 

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Mother Earth - 4

Soil is the final thing that I am going to discuss in this chapter on Mother Earth. Soil is present in some form in just about every location that is not covered by water. It is also present under the water, just not visible or available for use by mankind. While many consider soil as non-renewable, I disagree. Soil is always being formed by nature. Wind and water working over rocks are always breaking away little bits of it. Anything organic that dies, eventually decays and becomes humus. This mixed with the minuscule pieces of stone become soil. Granted, this takes quite a bit of time, but not nearly as long as non-renewables such as coal or oil. For those of you who may have doubts about this, make yourself some compost. You can find a recipe for it tin the chapter on agriculture. Take that compost and add some sand or other inorganic material and you have produced soil. You can grow crops in the soil you just made. The problem with soil is it is always moving. Wind moves it, water moves it, glaciers move it and man moves it or causes it to be moved. How much of this is helped along by mankind and how much would happen anyway always presents an argument. The glaciers moved many millions of tons of soil without any help from mankind. Here in Wisconsin you can till where the glacier ended by looking at the type and the depth of the soil. Northern Wisconsin has a thinner layer of soil and more stones close to the surface. This is due to the fact that the glacier pushed the topsoil south. The southern portion of the state has deeper richer soil and few stones near the surface. Wind and water are helped by mankind when it comes to them moving soil. Drive by a plowed field or a construction site on a windy day and you will see soil being moved by the wind. Water also has an easier time moving soil at these locations, especially when rivers and streams are at flood stage. Where these types of locations are on a hillside, any amount of rainfall will speed up the movement of the soil. Without soil plants cannot grow. Without plants animals cannot live. Without plants and animals, humans cannot exist. The problems of soil need to be addressed and I will try to do a little bit of that in several upcoming chapters. 

I hope that this rather simplistic chapter has been of some help in understanding the earth and some of its problems. I could have gone much deeper and included much scientific information, but that is not the purpose of this book. I am trying to bring environmental issues down to a common sense level. All of the scientific information that one could want can be obtained at the library or on the Internet. This information is written by real scientists, which I am not. Used correctly this information can be of great value to a true environmentalist. Misused, it becomes fodder for the knee-jerk pseudo-environmentalists. So be careful to get the real science when on line or at the library. Low let us move on to some more thought from an average citizen.

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Mother Earth - 3

Let us get out from the center of the earth and look at the part of Mother earth that we live in: air, water and soil. We will start with water. While water is non-renewable, I feel that there is about the same amount of water on and around earth as there always has been. It may be in different forms and in different locations, but it is all still here. For instance, We are told that at one time most of what is the USA was the floor of some long forgotten ocean. You may want to believe the scientists in this respect nut you may want instead to go with Noah's flood. Although my grandkids seem to sometimes think that I have first hand memories of such events, I am not quite that old. You can see how the scientist's theory overlaps the bible. Either way, this country was once under water. The flood receded or the ocean went away, but that covering of water is no longer with us. Many of the lakes and rivers of the upper part of North America were carved out by the glacier; another form of water. Water changes from solid to liquid to gas but it is always there in one of its forms. I may be wrong, but this is why I believe that the volume of water on earth is the same as it has always been. There are a couple of things that humans can do to water that are not good. They can use up fresh water faster than it can re-purify itself and they can pollute it. Using the water up too fast is partly due to more people being on earth to use it. It is also partly due to some of the uses being a waste of water. Many times when watering lawns, washing cars or even doing laundry, much water is wasted. This water then needs time to purify itself, with the ever increasing population and coinciding need for more water, this waste could present a problem.

Pollution of the water is the second problem. once again, water will purify itself from pollution, but it takes time. The process of purification can be helped along by mankind. I remember back in the nineteen seventies when Lake Erie was declared a dead lake. The pseudo-scientists and pseudo-environmentalists had themselves a field day with this. I remember reading articles that fish would never again live in Lake Erie and that the rest of the Great Lakes would be dead in a few years and nothing could be done about it. Well, Lake Erie is now cleaner than it has been in many years and has an excellent fish population. Record size walleyes are now being caught from "dead" Lake Erie. It took some changes, some new laws, some work and some time, but it got done. The doomsayers once again exaggerated the problem and under-estimated American ingenuity.

Another problem which relates to water is the loss of wetlands. Are we losing wetlands? Yes. There is no doubt that we are losing wetlands, we always have. There are many natural causes for some of the loss. Rivers change course, springs dry up, sever droughts occur and many other natural thing things. remember, if the entire USA was covered by water, we lost a lot of wetland. However, in this case I believe that mankind has as much or more than nature to do with the loss. This has to do with population, manufacturing, farming and a number of other reasons. I will cover more on wetlands on chapters on those various subjects. Wetlands play a vital role in the lives of certain birds and animals. They are also a part of the water purification that I mentioned earlier. While something needs to be done to correct this problem, I do not believe we nee a knee jerk response. There are those who would probably go around after every downpour of rain and fence off and make off limits any puddle they could find. Because a puddle formed after a deluge or the melting of a foot of snow, they would call it a wetland. This makes even less sense than doing nothing at all. All this type of thinking does is irritate landowners and make them harder to deal with. This problem needs to be looked at in a sane and logical manner. Later in the book I will describe how wetlands are being brought back on National Wildlife Refuges.

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