“KILL ‘EM ALL! IT’S GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT!”

It was Joseph Stalin who offered the cynicism that “one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.” What he didn’t add was that 40 million deaths could be an ecological bonanza. Our pal Wendy sent us this story but with the caveat that it comes from the UK Daily Mail.

“Genghis Khan has been branded the greenest invader in history - after his murderous conquests killed so many people that huge swathes of cultivated land returned to forest. The Mongol leader, who established a vast empire between the 13th and 14th centuries, helped remove nearly 700million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, claims a new study. The deaths of 40million people meant that large areas of cultivated land grew thick once again with trees, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And, although his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to accept, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling. ‘It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,’ said Julia Pongratz, who headed the research by the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology. ‘Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth's landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture,’ she told Mongabay.com. The 700million tons of carbon absorbed as a result of the Mongol empire is about the same produced in a year from the global use of petrol.” (Click here for more.)

The secret word is Warts