Tag: Amazon

Africa Comes to America

On By robstroudIn C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Modern Life, My Writing Projects, Narnia, Nature12 Comments

saharaYes, you read the title correctly; it’s no typo. Africa itself arrived in America this summer—and it’s an event that apparently takes place every year!

In a recent post by one of Mere Inkling’s earliest subscribers, I learned about the annual Saharan Air Layer. It is an enormous dust cloud that transits the entire Atlantic Ocean and is vital to the western hemisphere, especially the Amazonian rain forests. More about the SAL below.

I find this phenomenon fascinating. It reveals how intricately balanced and interconnected God has created this amazing ecosystem we call earth.

I appreciate this fact, even though I don’t consider myself an environmentalist. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t recycle. What’s more, I would actually like to see brazen polluters incarcerated and tasked with personally cleaning toxic waste dumps . . . but that’s not the theme of this reflection.

It seems to me that part of being truly human, is possessing an appreciation—or even a love—for the world in which our Creator has allowed us to dwell. By love, I mean a deep affection for the flora and fauna, and even the mountains and valleys themselves.

I am not proposing idolatry.

I am in good company in valuing nature. C.S. Lewis found time spent walking in the countryside to be invigorating. It was renewing, for body, mind and soul.

Several years back a book was published with the peculiar subtitle, The Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis.

The authors of Narnia and the Fields of Arbol explores the way Lewis displays his “ecological” concerns, particularly in his fiction. They also consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s similar attitude.

It is no coincidence that these two men, as soldiers during the Great War, had seen the worst violence humanity could do to nature. The ravages wrought by the orcs surrounding Isengard were echoes of the lifeless terrain of shell-shattered Western Front.

Writing this now, I recall a poem I wrote for Curtana: Sword of Mercy.

“A Foreshadowing of Epics” begins:

Filthy trenches greeted the novice soldiers’ eyes,

their two imaginations envisioned greener lands.

Crimson combat splashed red their vision,

and colored portraits one day painted with their words.

The frontlines were barren,

scarred earth stripped of all life.

Fallen trees mimicked casualties,

not even the smallest of creatures escaped death.

It may seem ironic to some that those very fields now are green, and teeming with life. It is the mercy of God that restores the scarred and heals the broken. And, as impressive as those miracles are evident in nature, they are far more wondrous when it is human lives that are transformed and resurrected.

So it is that I find the wonder of the barren and seemingly lifeless Saharan dust bringing nutrients to hungry forests on the other side of the earth amazing. No mere accident that.

If Jesus delays his return and this globe continues to spin for more centuries still, I would not be surprised to see the Americas returning to Africa a similar gift of life.

_____

Weather.com has a short video about the Saharan Air Layer here.

Fit to Print?

On By robstroudIn C.S. Lewis, Literature, Publishing, Reading4 Comments

amazonIt’s challenging enough to conduct painstaking research. But, only to have it become immediately obsolete by virtue of it’s own publication—that is simply too much.

Flying home from a whirlwind trip from the Pacific to the Atlantic, I came across an interesting analysis of how many sheets of paper would be required to print out the entire contents of the internet.

One hundred and thirty-six billion.

Didn’t sound like all that many when I read it. Why, that’s not even a fraction of the annual deficit here in the United States.

Still, it’s quite a few sheets of paper. As the article said, stacked on one another, the pile would tower 8,300 miles high. That sounds a bit more impressive.

The researchers determined eight million Amazonian trees would have to be sacrificed to provide sufficient pulp. Impressive. But then they turn about and make that very number far less remarkable by declaring that this total would constitute only 0.002% of the rainforest.

The Flaw in the Research

Sadly, as diligent and mathematical as the researchers were, there was a weakness in their model. You see, they did not factor in their own research. Immediately upon it’s publication, their numbers were obsolete.

In fact, because they meddled with the internet equilibrium, there were at least 36,000,000,002 pages. (And, although I am not a scientific researcher, I suspect there were even more.) And, despite my mediocre numerical skills, even I know that when I hit post with this column, the internet page counter will advance another digit.

More ominously, especially in light of our recent reflections about the dark web, is the following:

Also, it is thought the non-explicit web is only a mere 0.2% of the total internet, the rest encompassing the Dark Web. This would mean that printing the entire internet including the Dark web would use 2% of the rainforest.

This relates to the question that entered my mind when I read the original statistic. (And I was not even thinking about the garbage that oozes throughout the internet.)

A More Important Question

As entertaining as it might be to ponder how many pages of data exist on the web, there is a far more valuable question. How many pages of the material on the internet are worth printing out?

C.S. Lewis has a delightful passage about wasted newsprint in Surprised by Joy. Although he is specifically talking about how students should not squander time or attention on newspapers, his point extends beyond that to people of all ages, and to all media including the internet.

I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance.

Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

If Lewis were alive today, I have no doubt he would share my opinion that most of what is written both on- and offline, is not worth printing.

Perhaps someone should undertake a study of how many trees would need to be cut to print everything worthy of being printed? If they did so, I am fairly confident we would need not worry about the future of the Amazonian rain forest.