DEAR EDITOR:
Few on Bowen need to be told that the world around us is changing quite quickly and accelerating.
I am wondering how many are aware how much the ocean water has risen.
There is a telltale sign quite visible from the ferry or even more so, when you walk down the festival meadow toward the marina in Snug Cove.
You see the sun-bleached trunk of a needleless, barkless, lifeless tall hemlock. This is not a leftover ghost of last weekend’s Halloween!
Its truncated roots hang in mid-air without purpose, holding onto nothing anymore. Their horizontal stiffness keeps the trunk upright until they break away, decayed, and this once proud shoreline sentinel comes crashing to its grave.
In the early seventies, this healthy hemlock was shining bright in fresh greens with lots of tiny cones and the shoreline was a distance away. Hemlocks have shallow roots and the tree grew tall over almost one hundred years, feeling safe in its future.
And then the oceans started to rise, even in well-hidden Snug Cove, and the increasing saltwater began to destroy the tree’s diet.
Years before this happened, an apple seed sprouted near the hemlock’s trunk. As that little tree grew, entwining its roots with the hemlock’s, it must have sensed the danger and made a huge effort to send its food supply lines eventually about ten plus meters away into the higher-lying alder forest.
Despite having its roots splashed by high tidal saltwater, that little apple tree still sprouts healthy green leaves, though I have never seen blossoms, nor fruit on it.
This week the world discusses how to avert the catastrophic “point of no return” triggered by humankind. Let us be warned by Nature, and at the same time be offered a glimpse of her resilience, if we give her a chance. It's our choice: IT IS UP TO YOU AND ME.
H.C. Behm
