4 - Wednesday, March 11, 1992 - North Shore News Running from ice and fire WE ARE creatures caught between ice and fire. A week before, I had been out hiking with my son across an open desert just north of Palm Springs. We had been on the alert for snakes and scorpions and were very dependent on a bottle of water to keep us alive. After just four hours, without that water, we would have been in bad shape. Even though it was winter, the sun beat down on us so painfully that we had to tie T-shirts over our heads. Climbing into the foothills, we had come across the spectacle of a forest of slowly revolving high-tech windmills. The only sound was the rasp of the wind and the sifting of sand... And now, not much more than a week later, | was cross-country skiing along the edge of a frozen lake on the southwest corner of Ontario's Algonquin Park, while bare-branched little second- and third-growth trees rotated by, The only sound new was the squeak of snow compacting under my weight and my own harsh breathing. Apart from what this says about mobility in the Golden Era of the Jet Age (just before the end, no doubt), it says something about how it is that we humans survive, or came into existence in the first place. And how quickly we could go out of existence, I'm sure. The previous week, in the des- ert, } had kept myself alive in an environment where | could die in a matter of days from dehydra- tion, whereas now, | could be dead from hypothermia in a mat- ter of hours. Somewhere in that small climatological wavelength between the snow and the sand is where we thrive best. At one extreme, desert nomads. At the other, Eskimos. Apart from astronauts, the range of our existence remains firmly fixed between the Mojave Desert and Tuktoyaktuk. Not much range, when you think about it. Not much manoeuvring room. The environment of planet £arth has a record for turbulence and upheaval! on a vast scale. The entire biological history of our species, going back a mere couple of million years to the end of the Tertiary Period, is to be found in what amounts to less _than a minute of the Earth’s long day of life. . And of that ‘‘minute,"’ at least the first 55 seconds — the Pleistocene epoch — was taken up by an Ice Age, and only the last 10,000 years — the Regent (or Postglacial) epoch — has really been comfortable. Postglacial. It’s a wonderful word. It reminds you that the present is just an aftermath, a ripple extending from major geo- logical displacements. The mountain ranges that we think of as eternal, were in fact thrown together and tortured into their current shapes by the grin- ding of the glaciers that once ex- tended, a mile high, all the way down to Yosemite Valley in the Sierra Nevada. Ten thousand years. Not so long, really. The frozen land I am groping and gliding my way through was inhabited by hardy people who may or may not have migrated from Asia. . (The Hopis, for one, say the footprints on the supposed Alaska-Siberia ‘land bridge’’ were going the other way. But that's a subject for a quiet after- noon chat with Doug Collins, eh?) According to geologists, the ef- fect of the Ice Shield covering the Northern Hemisphere was to in- crease the rainfall in the lower fat- Bob Hunter STRICTLY PERSONAL itudes, stimulating an explosion of plant and animal life that created today’s jungles — although, when the ice melted, sea levels rose at least 100 fect, drowning immense areas of land. Mass extinctions of grazing animals occurred. Giraffes and camels died out in North America. The tush swarnplands of what is now known as the Sahara turned into a land of marching sand dunes. A friend of mine, just back from a sailing trip, recently show- ed me photos of the blowing des- ert sands darkening the skies hun- dreds of miles out in the Adantic. Did this always happen? Perhaps. Certainly it’s happening now, as the planet warms up sud- denly and dramatically. You would hardly notice the warming trend up around Algon- quin Park in February. Everything looks the same. But the local guys talk about water sloshing up between the ice and snow, so that it’s a lot scarier taking a Skidoo across a fake than it used to be, and this ties in with reports that there have been more Skidoo deaths than usual. As far as statistics are concern- ed, there is no debate any longer. No matter how scientists measure it — whether over a period of a century or a decade — global temperature is rising. The ice is therefore in retreat. An illusion, of course, to imag- ine that these kinds of **retreats”’ or ‘tadvances’’ are anything more than stages, like breathing. Right now, a warm sooty breath falls upon us, and the lakes get mushy or the desert gets drier, as the case may be. Nice in some ways, yet we all know that the four major ice ages were triggered by changes in the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s polar regions. And there is no way around the fact that we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the air by 25% in the last century. The air we breath now — that every creature on Earth breathes — is different from the kind of air the planet had back in 1892. It is grittier, dirtier, thinner, and laced with weird chemicals. Above all, it is warmer. ft re- minds me of the bottle of water that kept my son and me alive out on the desert. As we hiked, the water had, of course, gotten warm, : No great surprise. What was disconcerting was, once it started to warm up, how quickly it warmed. ! hurry along the edge of the frozen Ontario lake. It takes longer to get back to the cabin this way than by cutting directly across the ice, but § think of the slush, and I do the prudent thing. Running from ice. Running from fire. 1 9 — =_ GE FOR QUALITY... Y. FRANKS FOR PRICE! GE's full-featured, built-in dishwasher makes life easier in your kitchen. 3-level wash system gets dishes and flatware sparkling clean. Three convenient cycles include light wash, reg. wash and potscrubber. There's even an energy-saver switch at this unbeatable price. $309 Similar great values on all GE dishwashers now at Y. Franks! Y. FRANKS APPLIANCES LTD. EST'D 1896 503 - 15th Street, West Vancouver 926-0124 Open 9:30 to 5:30 daity except Sunday. 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Ladner Trenant Park Square 946-8486. Nanaimo Woodgrovs Centre 390-3301. White Rack 538-3884. 550,000 people work hardto | protect Canada’s endangered species. Ottawa, Oritario K2A 324 (613) 725-2194 You can help too. Vancouve; tsiend Mammo Mamota vancouverensis