Fredericksburg (4//14/2015)

A strange subject today, but yes I'm on the road for work again And in Fredericksburg.   I really like downtown,  it is older and has some wonderful restaurants.  But yes, I stay on the outskirts of town in one of the chain motels.

I had not arrived yet, or my wife texts me a photograph of our back yard.  The dogwood is about in full bloom with the red bud also in full bloom behind it.  One of my favorite sights, those two trees blooming next to each other in spring.  So what dother I do?  I text her a picture of the view of my motel room.

She replies with: "That place needs some trees."  And in a way she is correct.  We are creating a human desert.   This idea came home even more tonight when I was reading my book while waiting for my food in the restaurant and later in the coffee shop.

I am reading about extinction (The sixth extinction : an unnaturally history by Elizabeth Colbert) and was just reading about what the cause or causes were for the 6 or so extinctions were.  Speculations are that at least one was caused by a meteor impact, but the others might have been caused by some organism or by an ice age.  For example, it is thought that the explosion of mosses might have brought on this ice age, by taking all the carbon dioxide out of the air (the opposite of what is happening right now).  Another extinction might have been caused by a mass generation of carbon dioxide and a massive green house effect that killed nearly everything.   Only a few adapted species survived.  The scary part is that this is what could be happening to earth again and I am not sure if my child or her children will be adapted enough to survive it.

One of the potential causes of increasing carbon dioxide levels is deforestation and urbanization.   So my wife's comments hit home, we need more trees.   Mature trees are so much more efficient in sequestering carbon dioxide than other plants.