I was a fan of Rush Limbaugh (RIP), but it killed me every time he brought up global warming. He believed it to be impossible for man to have an effect on the Earth because we were just too small.

Embarrassing!

One man can greatly impact his local environment. Throw in another eight billion and you get a runaway freight train of impact.

For example, it took a while… and a lot of us to finally and severely damage (through pollution) places like the Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and the Gulf of Mexico.

But, pollution not withstanding, I’ve come to the conclusion that the CO2 thing is the proverbial tempest in a teapot. The weather is changing no doubt, except I am thinking this change would be happening anyway because of our massive and managed transformation of the Earth’s land surface.

I took my thermometer outside one summer day and stuck it in the soil of our parched lawn and got a reading of well over 100 degrees (nothing says heat sink like red clay). Then I walked about 30 yards away into the woods and submerged it into the ground under a pulled back, leaf litter blanket. Consequently, I wondered if I should crawl underneath it as I looked at the 70 degree readout (we keep our house at 78 during summertime).

Thus, one look around the ol’ homestead and you begin to understand that heat islands aren’t the exclusive domain of the big city. I’ve got my very own, right here. Besides the bit of brown yard both producing and banking heat, I’ve got an asphalt roof, a gravel driveway (stones are big on heat storage), a concrete sidewalk (ditto on the heat storage), and a chunk of metal, aka an automobile, busy converting sunlight into heat.

All of these civilized things are where plants and layers of ground- shielding organic matter used to be. There can be no denying it. Every time you permanently remove a plant from the land surface and don’t replace it, you are raising the temperature of the planet.

But, it is not just our activities and infrastructure (for the 8 billion) doing this deed.

Thanks to the desire of a caring people to see to it that nobody is starving, we are moving inexorably towards a fully cultivated Earth. In other words, most of the land surface will now have, at the very least, regular periods of sun exposure on soil—an unavoidable result of agronomic practice. Lands that have 24/7, day after day, year after year plant presence (along with the attendant organic matter) shielding the ground from sunlight will become a rare commodity. This new terrestrial paradigm will suffer sun exposure to an extent not having occurred since plants first started to take over millions of years ago.

Even our eastern forests are being transformed.

We’re moving away from cyclic native tree harvesting to replanting those areas with faster growing pines in an effort to reduce the time period between harvest. Unfortunately, all trees are not created equal.

Note to self: In the future, if I find myself feeling the effects of heat stroke, look for refuge in a deciduous forest if I can find one.

No one ever references a pine woods as having cool, deep shade. You can get a nice tan in there. If you reach down and touch the brown pine needles, they will be warm from sun exposure. And if you really want to ramp up your pine forest heat output, you harvest the dead pine needles (like many do) and sell them as mulch for the home landscape. You are then left with more exposed soil converting sunlight into heat during the life of the maturing tree stand.

So, what is there to be done about our capacity to generate heat?

Planners have moved off of talk of population control (the elephant in the room) because it is difficult to convince a world of people not to procreate when most everyone was born to do just that. Instead, the revised goal is accommodation of an endless supply of human beings and still have a functioning planet. Though a worthy goal, it can never be achieved since the Earth is finite.

Inevitabilities aside, it would be wrong of us to not always be thinking how we may tread lightly in all things we do. I am a huge conservative and really believe in individual choice. But, for example, the choice of high end luxury which most times has wastefulness as its companion should not be regarded as part of a blessed life. It is one thing to have progressed to be relatively free of hardship; it is quite another to be extravagant because you can.

As for our piece of the ‘American Dream’, when it comes time, the roof will be replaced with something more reflective. Additionally, we’re increasingly displacing the lawn with plants that provide continuous shade and/or cover over the soil surface. I’m thinking about allowing more plants to come up in the gravel driveway, and, maybe I’ll even pretend I’m living in Bermuda and whitewash the sidewalk.