Lakes Full of Water
Thoreau wrote about his trips down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Twain wrote about the Mississippi, John Graves said goodbye to the Brazos. It seems we’re always saying goodbye to our rivers as they ran in their natural states before industrialization and civilization swallows them whole. I feel fortunate to have canoed the Guadalupe in an almost natural state in the 1970s before it became a lazy river with wall-to-wall tubers.
It seems, however, that’s the way of the world as our population continues to grow. We need places to live. We need food. We need energy. One has to wonder how long this can continue. My guess is it will continue as long as human ingenuity can keep up, which it has managed to do over the centuries. We adapt. We get used to living in smaller places. We get used to the noise. We accept the overrunning of nature as being in the natural course of events. As for me, this is the second time I’ve moved to the country only to watch others follow and have the country disappear.
Is a different approach possible? Without really thinking about it, we seem to think so. The birthrate in the US reached an historic low in 2024. Which means we think we have too many people and not enough resources. But we’re being told it’s a crisis because industry needs people to work and buy things. I wonder what would happen if we decided as a society that we should work to live rather than live to work. Maybe we’d still have rivers and lakes full of water. Maybe.