Environmental roots need nurturing
NATURAL PERSPECTIVES
Vic and I developed environmental leanings during childhood. Every
summer while he was growing up, Vic went to the woods with his
grandparents to stay in the isolated one-room cabin that his
grandfather Brian had built.
His grandparents lived in Portland, Ore., but owned 160 acres of
prime Douglas-fir forest east of town. There was no electricity and
no plumbing at the cabin, so Vic’s job was to fetch a bucket of
drinking water from the “crick” every morning.
Vic helped his grandfather trim branches from the Christmas trees
that they grew for sale. He chopped down alder trees to make room for
the young Douglas firs and chopped firewood for the wood stove his
grandmother used to cook the meals.
When the chores were done, he and his brothers delighted in
running wild through the ferns that grew taller than their heads.
They would get lost in the towering ferns, finding their way back to
the cabin using a guidance system known only to lucky little boys. .
.
These things might have bothered a rational adult concerned about
the safety of small boys. But the only thing that really frightened
Vic occurred one day during the long drive to the cabin in the woods.
As they left town, his grandmother commented how awful it would be
if the city just grew and grew until there weren’t any woods left,
just houses as far as the eye could see. To Vic, that was a horrible
thought. No wild places. No woods. No ferns to get lost in. Just
houses. His grandmother’s comment set him on a course that continues
to this day.
My father was an Indiana farm boy who never got the farm out of
his soul even after he moved to Indianapolis. He frequently took me
hunting and fishing on his cousin’s farm, where he had been raised. I
loved gathering eggs in the henhouse, going to the barn to see the
sows with their litters of plump piglets and seeing how high the corn
had grown. Farms were the source of life. And they were being gobbled
up by the sprawl of Indianapolis at a rate that alarmed me.
My father’s mother lived a simple and frugal life. She had no
bathtub or shower but bathed in a galvanized tub set in the middle of
the kitchen floor. She had a coal-burning stove in the dining room
that was the sole heat source for her tiny two-bedroom house. She
grew vegetables in the backyard and canned them for later use. Waste
not, want not were the watchwords of her household.
Summers in Indiana were unbearably hot and humid. My parents
offered to get my Grandma Wilson an air conditioner, but she refused
because it would waste electricity. She said that by the time I was
old, I’d be freezing in the dark because all the electricity had been
“used up.” Conservation was important to her.
In my formative years, I read a magazine article that warned of
impending disaster with the nation’s water supply. There were too
many people and only a finite supply of water, especially in dry
desert areas. The problem was too many people, the article said. I
was only 15, but I decided that I would have only two children.
By the mid 1970s, I was a divorced mom with two children and no
plans to have more. Then I met Vic. As the oldest of nine children,
he didn’t want to contribute to the growing population that was
devouring farms and forests with housing developments. Vic and I
shared a love of nature and a sense of stewardship of the land. As
biologists, we recognized the need for preservation of natural
habitat and species diversity. We were perfectly matched.
We fear for today’s young people. They’re growing up in a world
with toxic air that damages their lungs and causes many of them to
develop asthma. They’re growing up in a world with a finite water
supply and ever-increasing demands upon it. They’re growing up in a
world with far fewer wild areas, much more heavily impacted parklands
and lowered species diversity. The oceans are being fished out and in
many parts of the country the land languishes through severe droughts
brought on by global warming.
And yet in this bleak atmosphere of apparent disregard for the
land that sustains us, there is hope. Here in Huntington Beach, there
are hundreds, no, thousands of people who have dedicated decades to
saving the last remnants of coastal wetlands. The city is filled with
people who have poured their lives and resources into saving and
restoring our local wild areas for the benefit and enjoyment of
future generations.
We hope that somewhere in this town, seeds are being sown that
will sprout into the environmentalists of the future. We hope that
today’s parents and grandparents are talking to their children and
grandchildren. We hope they are helping to mold the people we will
need to carry the environmental banner into the future and save this
planet from human ignorance, indifference and selfishness.
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