Stage Coach North.
The drawing
Lempster meetinghouse and
New London Inn sort of go with the
painting High Water 96. The first two are about the Stagecoach north that
connected Concorde and points south of Concord with Canada.
During the colonial days, the vast old-growth forests of New England supplied
the masts of fleets and massive numbers of
oceangoing vessels, all wind powered
in that era.
The forests existent in much of New England, such as New Hampshire, are, by and
large, new growth. In the early times of about mid 20th century, vast swatches of
the Northeast landscape were virtually denuded.
The colonial days served also as the "China" and "Vietnam" of the textile
industry when England outsourced its labor of textile work to the colonial mills
along the New England river ways. So you see this outsourcing is nothing new.
Here we see a characteristic of the dark side of the thought pattern of human
nature. Factors at play that undertake to cause the collective human psyche to
resort to the easiest conclusions being pressed to as a sort of a routine of
"business as usual".
But of course, you have to cut those guys some slack. Back in those days, they
had horrendously frightening survival situations that they had to face. In most
instances, the only difference between them and the Native Americans in their
proximity that were still using Stone Age techniques, was the patterns of
manufacture they brought with them. Aside from that it was make everything from
scratch, just as the Native Americans were doing, but of course, the settlers
had the knowledge of
metals and smithing and tool making and so on.
In fact, if the two managed to blend a little better in those days, we might've
come up with a stunning new sort of adaptation of European post Bronze Age
mechanization easing into the advent of steam power and iron, in conjunction
with the Native American's post Stone Age concepts of being able to use stones for tools.
Which
by the way, was quite an accomplishment, in many ways far more sophisticated
than the stamped out, smithed type tools that the colonists were wont to
produce. So, if the two had blended and found common ground, we might have come up with a mélange between the European in the
Native, which, in speculation, would perhaps be a much more aesthetic, intrinsic and
artissanned type of productivity, with an uncanny ability to use the things
immediately available in one's environment at any given time.
But, you see, from the days of the early history of what we may tend to think of
as civilization, we see a dark side of humanity that tends to take shortcuts and
loses the extreme prosperity and productivity that could have rather been
enjoyed in any given period of time. It is a case of misplaced priorities, in
which those persons who lack the creativity and foresight to take on positions
of responsibility, because of certain psychological limitations and dementia,
for a variety of reasons such as a need to compensate for lack of self-esteem,
used an impressive and extraordinary degree of skill to, as I have said before,
"worm" their way into positions of responsibility, thus attaining the
satisfaction of imagining themselves to be something, or persons of esteem,
which in stark reality, and this is all throughout history, they were completely the opposite.
So what we're confronting here, aside from the color and the interest of what
really came to pass in history as a general study, is a stunning lackluster
detail in history of
underachievement and disappointment in the fields of any accomplishment in human
endeavor on the part of the industrialists and their predecessors. In
fact, strides must be taken quickly to interview the survivors of those bygone
eras, the descendents of the Native Americans of colonial days, who still have
fresh in their knowledge the remnants of the know-how their ancestors passed on
to them of these skills: To be able to make from scratch a middle-class-type
existence out of nothing at all except the stones and natural material found
around you in the environment.
So, in those days of the 1700s, as in the entire colonial era starting in the
sixteen hundreds and extending to the early 19th-century, or the 1800s as we are
speaking of it now, the Stagecoach was mostly associated in the memory of most
people, as that conveyance of transportation glamorized by the cowboy movies of
the mid 20th century, which was a more comfortable way to transport oneself
across the United States, during the times of the wild West when the country's
territory first extended from coast-to-coast. However, it is forgotten that this
lovely, romantic, and oftimes rather elegant form of transport had been going on
for quite some time. Not only in the Americas, but also elsewhere including the
old country, back in Europe.
Here, in this instance, as I referred to in this article, the stage ran from
Boston through New England diagonally until it reached the colonies in Canada.
Personages of all descriptions would ride the Stagecoach through the colonial
city of Concorde, now the capital of New Hampshire, eventually wending their way
up through Lempster and New London, continuing on through the Territories which
now constitute the State of Vermont, and on up to Canada.
Of course , there were all sorts of other conveyances, including horseback, that
used the same public road as the Stagecoach. But it was the Stagecoach with its
comfort and elegance, with springs to absorb the shock of the bumps along the
way, that really made this route and others throughout the colonial territories
and other places of the world -- even the old country of Europe -- that made each of
these routes into the renowned roads they once were, making them extremely
important. Of course, many of these routes, like this famous Stagecoach route
through New England, and most others, for example the Kings Highway through
the forests of Rennes outside of Paris in Europe, are now nothing more than
secondary or tertiary roads.
When I was a child, I had the opportunity to actually ride in a Stagecoach,
quite an enjoyable and thrilling ride, especially for a little six-year-old kid.
It was in New Mexico, and although the trip was a short one, intended only for
the interest of the attraction for tourists, it was so momentous for me that
it's remained fairly prominent in my memory to this day.
Now, here is a wry point to this article, and one that might seem a bit
unpleasant to you if you, like me, have ancestors, like mine, the Halls and the
Walkers, who helped colonize New England from the early colonial days in the
sixteen hundreds, when they eventually used these roads to get from the original
settlements up toward Canada. In the case of the Halls and Walkers, southern New
Hampshire, with some Canadians mixed in who made the trip down from up North.
You see, a lot of people are blaming global warming on greenhouse gases. And
while it's true that man's industrialization has produced a preponderance of
such gases as the famous carbon dioxide, humankind, in its usual classic
underachieving way, falls far short of being able to ascertain the true essence
of the dilemma. It's the trees, stupid.
I have made my way, in detailed travels, twice around this planet. What I have
seen, in essence, is a denuded landscape. Since mankind perfected the axe, and
I'm not talking about the stone axe, but rather the iron and later the steel axe
to the modern day chainsaw, it has been in the process of giving our old planet Earth a
"crew cut". The landscape has been denuded of trees. Humankind has reached out,
taken hold with their hands, and stripped the landscape of all of its sylvan
nobility and quality.
But we're not just talking aesthetics here. As a child in the German city of Bad
Homburg, I had the opportunity to take Sunday jaunts with my family, joining
scores of Germanic families, down ancient pathways through glorious old pine
forests. Somehow these peoples, the Germanic peoples of Bad Homburg, had stepped
back and exercised the deeper insight into the dilemma of humankind (the tendency
to denude the land of all forests), and had hung on to much of theirs -- at least
then. Of course, even they lost a lot of forest to the dilemma of acid
rain coming from industrial areas elsewhere.
I could remember later in England, in
Oxfordshire, enjoying wonderful times, hiking through the forest of St. James
south of Oxford along the Thames. Those pleasant jaunts came to an abrupt end as
at least half the forest was clear-cut, for what reason I know not.
But, since tree fellers began to catch up with growth space and ultimately
surpass it, the process of global warming had taken its toll and was on the
increase, unnoticed until
now. And even now, the cheap-shot politicians are taking their shortcuts to the
easiest thing to blame.
But if you set up the tests,
the instrumentation, and run the experiments, and do the science, I believe you
will find that even with industrialization out of the picture, the deforestation
alone would have more slowly caused, but nevertheless caused anyway, the
phenomena of global warming we now see. Even without man lighting so much as a campfire, just from the
emissions alone of all animal life producing methane gas as a part of their
digestive process, as they, more delicately put, "break wind", that alone would
have been sufficient to cause your three-alarm global warming scenario you now
at last have finally started to scream about, simply because of the lack of trees.
It's the trees stupid -- or rather, the lack of them. The trees are what process
the carbon dioxide. You have stripped the landscape of its trees, but even now
existing forests have enough trees concentrated within them that if you thinned
out the trees in those forests, it would not only help the forest to grow much
better, but if you transplanted those trees using the powerful mechanization you
now have at your disposal, and horticultural advancement that promotes the
planting of full-growth trees, you would find that you would be able to
reestablish more than three quarters of the lost forests of the Earth that had
vanished in the last 300 years, and global warming would be almost completely
brought under control.
Now how about that? That wasn't
so hard was it? So get to it. It's going to create a lot of jobs and the pruning
alone
of hardwood trees, after the reforestation, would provide the lumber industry, the furniture
industry, and the subsistence civilizations of the world and everyone who uses
hardwood for fire, all the wood, lumber,
and fuel they would need to live happily ever after. Unless, of course, a bunch
more smalltime politicians and weasels managed to worm their way into positions
of importance on your watch and start to lean on clear-cut lumber for a cash
crop.
And now we see the Kyoto-accord weasels running around with boxes full of
band-aid quick fixes and feel-good solutions for the folks back home, so they
can return, conquering heroes, with a what-a-good-boy-am-I expression on
their smirk faces, with the exception of a select few, who, in spite of genuine
concerns, understandably have not had sufficient time, nor adequate counsel, to
seriously reflect on the actual problem itself. I probably would've come to
similar conclusions myself, since I also am an ordinary person like all the rest
of them.
However, I had a bit of space to reflect on the matter and experienced also my
set of shocks over the conclusion that just a little bit of reflection can give,
especially on a situation like this. I have said it to myself and I say it to
all: It's the trees, stupid.
We are about to face a more horrendous, atrocious, unbelievably disastrous
situation then we would have ever faced had we done nothing more than continue
business as usual. The ramifications of the Kyoto accord, and others like it
produced by rash politicians and quick fixers and the like, is to begin to
sequester the carbon dioxide (as I
have said in other articles, and repeat it here because of the
disastrous consequences we face) burying it underground to become cave acid,
carbonic acid, producing a planet Earth in which its wealthy few who can afford
to survive all else, suffocate from
lack of oxygen, by then a part of that carbon dioxide "sequestered" underground.
The ancestors who took that stagecoach north enjoyed a more abundant
oxygenation in their lungs than we have ever known in our present situation. But
even that pales in comparison to the stifling, suffocating atmosphere, where
those who cannot afford to buy oxygen or run out of their supply in some
isolated area where they can't get a "refill", will risk death should they get the slightest
bit winded or out of breath. Now that's a shock that will literally take your
breath away. Better bone up on the state-of-the-art in producing oxygen, because
it won't be long, Jack, before you won't have enough to breathe for free. End
of story. Sorry about the happily ever after bit; not enough band-aids for that
one.
--Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology, the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges, all by yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are feedback, a website search engine, and exhaustive contents pages. Plus my weblogs are on site, an art school and classes.
The oxygen you
breathe will
no longer be free.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved.
The true cause of global warming will shock you.
02 June, 2005