Loving Nature

Apple slices with caramel sauce is my new favorite thing. A little pleasure. Here’s another. Finding a good book. I just finished The Ecology of Invasion by Animals and Plants by Charles S. Elton. Here’s the distilled lesson I got from reading the book. The boot of mankind treads heavy on the world. Did it give me hope? No. All I need do is drive down highway 71 going into Austin and see the enormous subdivisions cluttering the hillsides to know that we’re perfectly willing to pave paradise.

Of course, people need places to live, and the earth holds resources that make living possible. So, that seems to describe a real rock and a hard place, or as Elton describes it, “...the worm in the heart of the rose.” And where Elton wants to go with this is to find some sort of balance between humanity and nature, although he recognizes the difficulty of the endeavor because, as he describes them, there are elements in society who believe that humanity is “...intended to be an all-conquering and sterilizing power in the world.”

So, in the end it’s probably wrong to say I have no hope. Because I’m old enough to have celebrated the First Earth Day, seen the Environmental Protection Agency get signed into law, and watched Congress ban Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) because there was a hole in the ozone layer. So, I know a balance can be struck. And that’s what Elton had in mind. I guess I just never expected it to be so hard to sell the idea that clean air and water was important or that it was worth taking care of the natural world, because it’s the only world we’ve got.