The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Our fellow primates in Texas are not adapting well to climate change. Note to Texas: Sweden’s wind turbines work.
Before pointing fingers at our thawing neighbors, we anthropoids of Arizona, about to broil for months in our heat islands, must examine our own adaptation to climate change.
After flowing for 6 million years, the Colorado River, the magnificent force that carved the Grand Canyon 5 million years ago is, in the last one hundred years of its existence, a nano-second in time, drying up, thanks to our civilization’s exhaust and our insatiable thirst.
I love the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, which wisely canceled this year. I am a sucker for fossils, for the clues they reveal and the stories they tell.
Here’s ours:
If you were standing where the Whetstone Mountains are in Cochise County 125 million years ago you’d meet sonorosaurus, a 30-foot-tall, 50-foot-long dinosaur. Teeth marks on the fossilized remains suggest it was a snack for a larger beast.
Stand where Gates Pass is today, about an astonishing 65 million years before the Grand Canyon existed, you’ll see a large hadrosaur wandering a tropical swamp gobbling grub with its duck bill.
Jump ahead to the Miocene Period, around at least 20 million years ago and you’ll find ancestors of gila monsters lumbering about. Tortoises, too; living fossils millions of years older than the fairly recent Grand Canyon.
In my garden I have a tennis-ball-sized chunk of cooled lava from the Tucson Mountains that’s probably older than the Grand Canyon. Ten to 20 million years ago Tucson was hellzappoppin’ with volcanoes. The Tucson Mountains came to mark the edge of a large volcanic crater, a lava lake that stretched across our valley some 10-15 miles in diameter.
Doesn’t seem possible. Tucson seems timeless. Our lush desert feels as though it’s been here since the beginning of time. Some say it’s hard to tell when the seasons change save for the heat.
Here, beneath your feet, my dear bipedal life form, there’s been lava, swamps, oceans teeming with trilobites, primeval forests, flying reptiles, savannah grasslands, coral reefs, sharks, tropical jungles, coniferous forests, warmer climes and multiple ice ages.
And across this vast span of time there have been five mass extinctions of nearly all life. Across the eons, five complete living worlds teeming with life’s experiments, utterly alien and unknown to each other, save for messages in the rocks, have risen and fallen on this third rock from the sun.
“Change is constant,” say the Buddhists. And every climatologist, paleontologist and geologist worth their basalt.
Eighty million years ago the Rocky Mountains begin rocking into existence. Fifty-eight million years ago cacti show up. The Catalinas were smushed into existence 26 million years ago. I can’t comprehend it. Waiting for a vaccine feels like forever.
We are lucky to be in a 300,000-year-long interglacial period, a warm valley. A rare long stellar sweet spot. Every 145 million years or so we get an ice age. Wouldn’t a good name for an ice age be the Zambonian Period?
A few icicles after our most recent ice age, 12,000 years ago, a giant sloth might be reading this over your shoulder. Or a bison, a camel, or a North American lion or a mammoth like those found at the San Pedro River where early paleo-Flintstones set up a butcher shop.
Fast-forward 11,000 years to the 10th century and you could have watched, alongside Anasazi cliff dwellers, the plumes from Arizona’s last volcanic eruption giving birth to Sunset Crater, part of a volcanic field that’s been active for 6 million years.
If our planet’s 4 billion years of existence were a day, we chimps dropped from the trees, at less than a second to midnight, and set about fueling our “civilization” by unleashing carbon, heating the planet at a heretofore unseen rate, melting the ice, freeing more carbon, raising the seas and setting our heavenly body on a path to hell that will be irreversible if we chimps do not change our ways.
Responsible for our planet’s sixth mass extinction since life began 4.5 billion years ago, our allegedly intelligent species appears likely to broil and flood our planet into hot sauna-like forests and vast barren deserts unfit for human life.
At the time Romans were crucifying Judeans, the Hohokam began farming along the verdant Santa Cruz river here. They vanished in the 14th century leaving behind the question, “What happened?”
In a million years an alien rover may rove our world. Perhaps it will beam stunning images of our hot-box planet across the stars back home to a civilization that will ask the same question, “What happened?”
Our fossil records will tell them most of us were much like our fellow simians in Texas. Culturally ill-equipped to reverse our self-inflicted fate. Broken into warring tribes, earthlings rejected the collective action essential to saving this beautiful world from mass extinction, this magnificent sixth attempt at life on this planet.
