The Lemming’s Solution

All through the history of the earth, (and I am talking about tens of thousands of years back) there has been ‘climate change’ on earth. If you want to call it that… I don’t.

There was a time when the temperature of the Ozarks never got above 32 degrees. That was when there was a glacier pushing down over us from the north. In what we now call the Middle East, biblical lands, there are now deserts where there were once lakes. It is just the way the earth is, constantly affected by change of some sort.

There are those who want to deny ‘climate change’, but it is obvious that it is a fact. But it is a far cry from what the politicians say it is! I call it, ‘earth change’ because having lived as long as I have, I see things happening that have nothing to do with climate. Lowering water tables across the Midwest has nothing to do with temperatures or carbon emissions. The more of us there is, the more we take the lower it gets.

The fact that rivers in the Ozarks now flow about 40 percent less water than they did 80 years ago has nothing to do with modern climate change. Springs that gushed water in the 1950’s, which I drank from as a boy, dried up years ago and have never flowed since. I swam in small Ozark creeks each summer that will never hold a foot of water through the spring season ever again, and none in the summer. Such things are permanent until the population of the earth declines, no matter what politicians blame or try to change. More people, greater problems.

There is an old farm well on my place that held water for the family that lived beside it in the 30’s and 40’s. Why is it dry? It is not because of carbon emissions. It is earth change, which comes about because where once in a whole county there were five hundred people with 500 cows and a 500 hogs and a thousand chickens. In the same county now there are five hundred thousand people, and giant hog farms with tens of thousands of hogs, tens of thousands of cattle, and as for chickens… there may be one poultry farm with 25,000 chickens and one a few miles away with 25,000 turkeys.

I am not lamenting how things are. It is what it is. Who amongst us will NOT acknowledge what we have today living in the Ozarks. But remember this… we will have ten percent or more added cement and pavement in the nation and in the Ozarks this coming year and each year thereafter. Could that cause greater heat from the sun than before? So what shall we expect to happen? Cooler temperatures, fewer storms, tornadoes, hurricanes? But what the heck, we have to have more concrete and pavement and new homes.

You can vote for whatever leadership you want, but there is no answer in politics, because the problem lies in one thing…Populations of men and their animals. There is o answer… what is coming is coming. In 1950, my grandfather was overtaken by the knowledge that there were 150 million people in our nation. Today we are getting close to 400 million. In a hundred years this nation will likely have a billion people. The diversity we applaud will create wars amongst the diverse, in huge cities. Maybe the Ozarks will be a refuge!

On a gravel bar in the mid 50’s Grandpa told me some things he thought would happen. I couldn’t get his prophesies printed in today’s newspapers but he was fascinated what he had read about some little animals on islands that would swim out into the ocean when they became overpopulated. Lemmings, he called them, telling me of what he had read… looking for a better place to live, all about to drown.

He was as happy as anyone I have ever known, in his handmade cabin with no running water or electricity. He said, “Live your life depending on no man, needing nothing or no one but yourself and God.”

I am sure that oil and vehicles are not this country’s greatest problem. If they are replaced with electricity, the problems that will create are catastrophic too, but the politicians cannot foresee that. Our survival depends on one thing and nothing else… population declines here and all over the world! It will not happen until something comes that is like what happened to the dinosaurs, and there isn’t a darn thing mankind can do about it. I just wish we didn’t deserve it. If there is a population adjustment in the near future I hope it isn’t me, or you, or us.

My grandfather, making 3-dollar sassafras boat paddles outside the cabin which he built himself, in 1965. A happier man… there were none. I thought his predictions were goofy back then. Not now.

You have to see the photo I got last week. Unbelievable! That and other columns I have written can be seen on my website, larrydablemontoutdoors. Contact information can be found there. I am spending this week in the woods hunting with my muzzle-loader. Read about that next week.