Treehuggers are mysterious beings; they love trees, and want to preserve them. But why? We get so many useful things from trees, like paper. Do they know something we don’t? Something, perhaps, about another planet with no trees that is now a hellish world?
Imagine you are in a paradise world, with temperate beaches and a shimmering sun. The waves crash and melt between your toes with rhythmic repetition, spreading that gentle, comfortable coolness throughout your body, in perfect contrast with the cozy warm air flowing gently over your skin. Now imagine a steady increase in heat, while more and more of the gorgeous expanse of sky is covered with thick clouds. The temperature becomes unbearable, and you notice your Nalgene water bottle beginning to melt while the water within boils as ferociously as the ocean before you. A volcano erupts somewhere hidden underneath the water, but its effects are all too apparent as the water steams away, replaced by seething hot magma. This was the fate of Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. The surface of Venus boils at up to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt lead. Yet when the solar system was young, Venus was not so unlike Earth.
Venus is so hot, even hotter than Mercury, because of its atmosphere. The atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide, a gas that humans exhale. However, Venus’ atmosphere used to be strikingly similar to Earth’s. How did Venus become an oven while Earth remained the paradise world? Plants and algae. On Earth, massive amounts of the carbon-breathing organisms trap most of the carbon dioxide and keep it from the atmosphere. In fact it’s interesting to note that, as Neil Degrasse Tyson puts it, the Earth “breathes”, once every year. In the spring, as vast quantities of beautiful plants are in full bloom, carbon dioxide is pulled from the atmosphere and used in processes such as photosynthesis. In the fall, when deciduous plants are dying and leaves fall to the ground, some of that carbon dioxide is released back to the atmosphere, and the delicately perfect cycle repeats. Carbon dioxide is also stored under ocean water, in reefs like the Great Barrier Reef off of the coast of Australia, as well as in the ground in fossil fuel deposits. Venus took a different path. Venus had no magnetic field around it for protection from the solar wind (charged particles that the sun gives off, these particles cause the aurora borealis, or the northern lights when they collide with Earth.) With no atmosphere, the oceans boiled away, leaving the planet dry. No known life can flourish without water, and so there was no way for the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be drawn by plant life and algae. In essence, Venus “choked”. The exponential rise in carbon dioxide created a greenhouse effect (the trapping of the sun’s heat via greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) on a massive scale. Today, barely any sunlight penetrates Venus’ barrier of clouds. The light that does get through is trapped along with its energy, and scalding hot temperatures are what follow, desolating the landscape that many scientists compare to Hell itself.
Carbon dioxide levels have been on a steady rise in Earth’s atmosphere due to fossil fuels and the destruction of forests and underwater reefs. The greenhouse effect is real, and we have to stop it any way we can. Imagine your favorite beach being trapped inside a grill set for 900 degrees. If that doesn’t make you want to want to be a treehugger, just think that all of our textbooks come from trees.
