WILL OUR CIVILIZATION BECOME EXTINCT?

Do you care about what happens to your grandkids' grandkids? Most of us never really think that far ahead.  Just getting your children raised and educated is about as far as your worries go during middle age.  All of a sudden, the kids are grown, and now you have grandchildren, and the worry cycle starts all over again. Will they get through childhood illnesses, bullying, bad SAT scores and finally become happy successful adults?

But what about your descendants thousands of years from now? Lately, I've been reading about lost civilizations and wondering if that's what's going to happen to us.  Global Warming, terrorism, oceans full of plastic, for starters.  With most extinct animals and lost civilizations, scientists really can't figure out what happened.  Since I'm not an educated environmentalist, I can only report on the scary things I saw in my own backyard this year.

For thirty years, we've had sun patients (flowers) that grew and blossomed all summer long.  Geraniums were a no-brainer.  Stick them in the ground, water every so often, and there you go. Beautiful, robust flowers until Thanksgiving. This year, in the middle of July, they simply shriveled up and either rotted or burned.  They say farmers are seeing half as much soy bean and corn yields this year.  I hope it's an anomaly, but what if it's not.  What if this earth is going to get so hot that  we can't produce enough food for this overpopulated world?  And what if Earth ends up like Venus, where the temperature on a typical day is 900 degrees?

My thought is that there will be pockets of survival scattered throughout the globe.  Maybe those natives spotted by a drone in Brazil, who've been living millions of years without any contact with the outside world will make it.  There may be some remote islands where natives will survive.  And maybe those people will progress to the point where they discover electricity and invent the internet. And eventually, they may find traces of lost civilizations in Germany and Indiana.  And they will scratch their heads and wonder what happened, and how all of these people became extinct.

For the sake of future generations, let's start getting serious about climate change.

WARNING! CLIMATE CHANGE SCORCHES FLOWERS

Living in the heartland, I've never been too concerned about global warming.  Yes, I know it's melting ice in Antarctica and causing forest fires in California, but it's always seemed like something we don't have to worry so much about in the middle of the country.

Until this year.  Here's what happened to our flowers:  We've had a large bed of impatiens blooming beside our house for over 25 years.  Whether we planted the old fashioned kind or the new fangled "sunpatiens," by the end of the summer we would have a beautiful showing of colorful impatiens that seemed to thrive on nothing more than regular watering.  Then, this year, around the middle of July, I noticed they had stopped blooming, altogether.  A couple of weeks later, they were just little, rotting stems poking out from the dirt.  My lawn person said it happened to a lot of flowers this year:  They simple shriveled up and died because of the extreme heat and humidity.

To compensate, we decided to plant some of those sturdy, pink and yellow  black eyed Susans you see thriving at this time of the year.  Bought the flowers at the nursery;  planted, mulched , watered them.  Within two weeks, they had dried up, leaving nothing but black stems.

On to the roses.  Have had  two red and white, variegated climbing roses out by the garage for over 20 years.  First one of them died, but it looked like the other one was struggling to make it.  And yet, the same week we lost our impatiens, the climbing roses lost their leaves.  Ditto for the rose garden next to the house.  Out of nine rosebushes still alive last fall, only one sturdy soldier is still standing right now.  We bought and planted 9 new ones, only 5 of which are struggling to stay green.

Okay, those are just flowers.  Their loss is aesthetic, but not life changing.  What about the farmers in Indiana and elsewhere? Scientists predict wheat and soybean crops will be reduced by 50% by the end of the century!  Now, I'm really getting worried, because I've seen first hand the effects of global warming, and I hate to think my descendants will be struggling to survive in the next century.

Here in flyover country, it looks like we're going to have to start doing something about Global Warming.