Forest on Fire, painting in acrylic, by AV Rotor 2015
Summer is the time of forest fire when the trees lose their leaves piling up into thick and dry litter that spontaneously burns, made more vulnerable by global warming.
Everything goes to flame - branches, twigs, annuals plants, epiphytes, lianas, shrubs and bushes; even compost and organic matter in the soil are not spared.
Heat builds into inferno, the forest becomes a ball of fire, burning both the living and the dead, smoke bellowing far and wide, releasing gases and carbon into the air.
Birds swoop in gay and abandon on fleeing insects, daring to go at the source of fire, and tracking those that escape, even far out into the sky or over horizon.
Whole trees fall, branches crack, screeches and cries of the dying are heard, residents of the forest scamper, so with the transients, as the fire moves in and spreads,
Call it a natural process, a cycle of life and death of eliminating the unfit and saving the fittest; call it regeneration that renews the forest's composition and structure.
Now, the forest, like any ecosystem, can no longer follow the path of dynamic change, a phenomenon called homeostasis to adjust to the conditions of the environment.
Quite often the environment is influenced by the activities of man more than by nature alone, and homeostasis may fail to preserve the ecosystem.
The ecosystem declines and ultimately breaks up; the food web is broken, the flow of energy is cut, and the life cycles of living things come to a stop.
It is dreary and sad to see a forest in skeleton, nature gone to waste, beauty lost in
ignorance and lust, the future destroyed - the forest is forever gone. ~
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