Life Changing Trees: Save a Tree and Change Your Life

Deforestation also damages soil, because just as trees absorb pollutants from the air, they filter harmful pollutants and chemicals from the soil, through the phytoremediation process. The trees will either store the pollutants in their wood or change the pollutants into less harmful matter. Trees can also absorb sewerage overflow, contaminated run off and roadside spills.

In Enkoping, Sweden, willow trees are being harnessed to purposefully recycle this type of waste. The town spreads its waste (sewage sludge, recycle liquids from landfills and reuse wastewater) around the trees and the trees decompose and recycle it. This recycling usage of trees could benefit many towns and countries, who would do well to take a leaf out of Enkoping's book.

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Trees also protect the world from soil erosion, as their network of roots both improve soil quality by providing much needed nutrients and stabilising huge amounts of soil.

Tree roots are responsible for holding entire ecosystems together and protecting them against erosion by wind or water. Of course, deforestation causes soil erosion, but this soil erosion can cause more life threatening circumstances, like dust storms and landslides. Also, no trees would eventually, due to soil erosion, mean that the soil would lose its arability causing agriculture to fail and us humans could face starvation.

In fact, recently there has seen a spate of dust storms all over the world – China, Belarus and United Kingdom to name a few of the more unusual places. The dust storms have blocked out the sunlight and caused chaos on the roads and in the air and on peoples' lungs no doubt.

Experts cannot seem to pinpoint a reason for this increase in apocalyptic like dust storms (or what the Arabians would call haboobs), although I am inclined to agree with NASA's point of view as quoted in the Daily Mail:

“Approximately half of dust in today's atmosphere may be the result of changes to the environment caused by human activity, including agriculture, over grazing and the cutting down of forests.”

Can you imagine going through something like this on a frequent basis?

Light cut in from the blinds and cascaded little lines across the floor. He watched them ripple as they came over his body—the shapes of his legs and wrinkles in his clothes causing little, sharp cuts in the light.

What annoyed him, though, was some of the light caught the screen of the television and completely eclipsed his ability to watch. He fussed with the blinds, squinting in pain from the jagged sun, hastily tiring, trying to do damage control on what was supposed to be a lazy Sunday afternoon.

He flapped the blinds and kicked up dust, which plumed into the air and snuck into his lungs. The coughing fit nearly killed him, and he contemplated the pitiful fact that mankind was now so complacent that he had become vulnerable to detriments of a poor television viewing experience.

He flipped through channels wanting something in space; something completely different than the drab churn and burn of his day-to-day—something cosmic and metallic.

He finally found something—a knockoff of sorts, but it would do: two men on a space station having casual conversation. Atmosphere check; sustainable. Climate; habitable. As the program cut to deep space, he lay back and relaxed…

…Why was it so dark? The program cut back to inside the space station and the colors blared. He turned the TV off; he could hardly see his hands in front of him. He opened the blinds to see a gray, grimy mess smearing across the sky, but there wasn’t supposed to be a storm. In the distance, he could see a blackness looming. What was causing this? He shut the blinds and walked over to a little lamp next to his chair. He pulled the string: nothing. He pulled it again—flickering, then nothing.

The TV was the same—turned on to a spattering of colors splashing in and out, and then nothing. Should he call his family? With nothing left to pay attention to, he returned to the window and opened the blinds.

Pitch Black.

He tried fussing with the blinds again—pitch black. It was like the building had sunk to the bottom of the ocean. He could barely make out shapes in the distance. This was something out of nightmares—or biblical text. He didn’t know the half of it.

The window was a stubborn piece of work to begin with, so at first he didn’t think twice about how much force he needed to thrust upwards to get the thing to move an inch.

Then he managed to crack it a bit. The sounds of a thousand snakes filled the room—an incessant hissing that sent chills down his spine. He got down on one knee and pushed the window open the rest of the way. The shapes in the distance were slowly subsiding. What in the world was going on? He stuck his head out.

Terrible mistake. Immediately it was like he was smacked with sandpaper. He recoiled, writhing in annoyed pain—rubbing his eyes and nose—and spitting all over his floor. It was as if he had pressed he face down into the shoreline and snorted as hard as he could.

A loud crash finally diverted his attention. He wiped away enough grime from his eyes to concentrate, and without daring to put his face back outside, stared out the window—straight down to the ground.

Car lights began to congest and pile, as their horns screamed into the darkness like crying horses. What caused this? How long was it going to last?

This was a Haboob, and they were only getting worse and worse.