Last week marked the anniversary of the founding of "Earth Day" (one assumes since the politically-correct lexicon has changed, it's soon to become "Planet Day"), and since the whole thing started right here in Nebraska, a bunch of the hug-the-trees-save-the-whales-kill-the-infants activists came here from the northeastern states to help us celebrate.
"Earth Day" is based upon Nebraska's "Arbor Day," although one suspects that's just the superficial reason, and that the real reason is because it's Vladimir Lenin's birthday. Arbor Day was founded during the 1880s by the most famous Democrat ever to come out of Nebraska, J. Sterling Morton, who was U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Grover Cleveland.
J. Sterling, who lived in Nebraska City alongside the Missouri River, was a hardcore racist who made even southern Democrats of the time seem as if tolerant indulgent civil-rights advocates.
Living along the Missouri River, J. Sterling might as well have been in Sherwood Forest, but whenever he looked out his back door at the rest of Nebraska, all he saw was vast fruited plains. He decided Nebraska needed trees, despite that nature millions of years before had decided no, Nebraska didn't need trees.
Actually, Nebraska has plenty of trees, almost too many trees to count. It's reasonable, I suppose, to assume that Nebraska has slightly fewer trees than New Jersey, but at the same time slightly more trees than Ohio, yet nobody complains about Ohio's lack of wooded foliage.
But the incorrigible old racist started this myth that Nebraska needed trees.
And so these hug-the-trees-save-the-whales-kill-the-infants northeasterners came to Nebraska to tell us to plant "a million" more trees in Nebraska.
Not that they were here to help us plant some trees; oh, no.
That's for us to do, while they just sit around talking about it.
Anyway, there's a good and valid reason that while Nebraska has millions of trees, there are stretches of land devoid of wooded foliage--nature in its wisdom millions of years ago having decreed that Nebraska was a good place to raise wheat, corn, and cattle. It's sort of difficult to raise these things if the terrain is cluttered with trees.
It's folly for man to go against nature, to try to change nature. In any one-on-one encounter with nature, man inevitably loses, and in fact damned near kills himself.
I suppose if one lives in, for example, New Jersey, crowded and congested with all these man-made things, it's easy to get the impression that man is the strongest thing in the world, and in fact even capable of destroying the "planet."
Such a person has never seen nature.
To an ant, of course, a toothpick is something of an Enormous Size.
In case someone does not know this, Nebraska has the largest man-made forest in the entire world, out in the west-central part of the Sandhills. This forest was created in the early 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, by a rabid left-wing college professor who assumed man is God, and can freely tamper with nature with no consequences.
I spent my adolescence near this man-made forest.
The whole thing has burned down, completely, three times the past 90 years.
The last time it happened, I hoped people would just leave it alone, leave it alone to revert back to the terrain it had been created to be, where deer and antelope could play all day without hearing a discouraging word or encountering a single wooded obstacle.
But Washington, D.C. (and the national taxpayers) have always rebuilt it.
Rebuilding a forest is an expensive undertaking, and as an American and a Nebraskan and a taxpayer, I'd just as soon that money be used for toppling genocidal homocidal tyrants who kill their own people, rather than on tampering with the planet.
To add insult to injury, the type of tree planted in this massive forest is injurious to the soil of the Sandhills; franksolich is no scientist, but franksolich suspects the wastes from the trees is highly, lethally, acidic, and so can't be doing the soil any good.
Now, way over on the western slope of the Sandhills, on dutch508's childhood grounds, there are two similar forests (but much larger), magnificent, wonderful, breath-taking expanses of trees--I'd tell the truth about these places, but I'm afraid it would encourage "nature-loving" primitives and sub-primitives to come here, and we don't want that--clean, unspoiled, uncrowded vast forests.
The difference, though, is that nature put those forests there, and so those forests have always flourished and prospered, being forests where forests should be. (Also, they are located at the far edge, and beyond, of the Sandhills; different terrain, different soil, than the Sandhills.)
Nature has its own way of getting back at man who plants trees where trees don't belong. The cities of Omaha and Lincoln, and the smaller places, for about a hundred years, say, 1870-1970, were renown and world-famous for their trees, all of them imported so as to improve the aesthetics of the place.
But beginning about 1970--I'm not sure exactly when--some sort of tree-disease came to Nebraska, and in a short time (it could not have been more than three or four years) utterly decimated those trees.
When one examines photographs of cities and towns in Nebraska circa, say, 1890-1970, one is struck by all the trees in the pictures; trees so numerous, so large, in residential neighborhoods that they formed archways over the streets and roads.
When one examines photographs of cities and towns in Nebraska today, the same streets and roads, one might as well be examining photographs of Nevada. The trees are gone; vanished, evaporated, wiped out.
The devastation was utter, total.
Nature, quite obviously, did not intend for Nebraska to be treed, and this is the consequence.
The summer of 2006, the north-central and north-western portions of Nebraska were devastated by large prairie fires, in one case causing the evacuation of all humans and most animals in an area the size of Connecticut (about 700 people, uncounted livestock).
I have never seen a prairie fire, a tornado, or a hurricane, but among those who have, they'd just as soon be in the middle of a tornado or a hurricane, than near a prairie fire; modern communication has made fighting prairies fires easier and more effective, but during the 1800s (before telephones came into common use), Nebraska was swept by prairie fires whose magnitudes were beyond scientific measurement.
Anyway, after all was said-and-done, and the fires put out, with the help of thousands of firefighters coming here from Ohio to Idaho, the origin of the fires in every single instance was determined to be natural, and occurring only in places where man had planted trees. In every single case (I think there were seven). No fires had started from any place where nature had planted trees (although of course the fires spread there).
There is a reason nature naturally put trees in Nebraska in some places, and nature naturally omitted trees in other places in Nebraska, and it's best to not tamper. When man goes against nature rather than with nature, man inevitably loses.
