Out in the yard the flowers have turned to sticks, and in the woods the leaves have fallen to reveal rivers, creeks, barns, and new housing developments.
Give it four months, and the world will green up again. I can hardly wait.
A new sign has appeared at the edge of one of my farms -- the future site of four new homes.
Such things can be seen everywhere, and there is an entire industry around here devoted to grinding up old forest and putting it into big plastic bags to be used to top off new suburban flower beds.
Near one of my farms, at the bend in the road where a plant nursery went in 13 years ago, things are now quiet. This particular location has been shuttered for two years. Did the bottom fall out due to Covid or due to poor location? Perhaps a bit of both. Will the greenhouse and flower racks be torn down in the Spring? Time will tell. Though a great deal of land in this area is protected by conservation easement, I watch all signs of growth and failure with equal levels of trepidation.
I suppose I am not alone. Like most environmentalists I am most comfortable with stasis: trees should probably not be cut down, dams should probably not be built, introduced non-native species should probably be extirpated, climate should not shift, and genetically-modified crops should be treated with some degree of skepticism.
I worry when I see any animal or plant species decline in numbers, but by the same token I am also a little alarmed if they dramatically increase in numbers.
If a mountain appears to be "naturally' bald (as in the Smokies) I think it should probably not be allowed to reforest. I wonder out loud of two animals from widely different locations, such as two species of falcon or parrot, should be allowed to hybridize. I am not a fan of mining and I worry about aquaculture.
I realize I am stupid, unrealistic and silly. The world is not static and never has been. This planet has been terra-formed by the plants and animals on it since the very beginning, from the oil sands of Alberta to the White Cliffs of Dover, from the stinking mess of the Sudd to the twisting corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
Yet I fear the current speed of change and the awesome power of modern technology.
But what is there to fear? The planet is littered with the remains of ancient civilizations that have disappeared, from Tikal to Stonehenge, and from Zimbabwe to Angkor Watt. Humans overshoot carrying capacity and common sense all the time, and when that happens God plays clean up and the world moves on. If New York and London sink into the morass, the same as ancient Rome and Athens, I will not be there to care. Get over it. Things change.
Besides, things may not get worse -- they might get better. While the ancients of Easter Island were captive to their own narrow set of experiences, the modern residents of Easter Island have access to three internet cafes and can glean information from other locations and other times. Not only can they download satellite maps of their own island, they can also import food and materials, to say nothing of ordering a few dozen copies of Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse" to tell them how it all ends.
One result of having so much information on hand is that we in the Modern World are much more careful than the ancients. Before Columbus reached out shores, stone age man, unaware and uninformed, pushed the giant mammoth, camel and sloth over the edge of extinction with nothing more than Clovis points and a few flint rocks.
In the 500 years since Columbus arrived, however, not a single North American mammal has been pushed into extinction and only a few birds -- the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Eskimo Curlew, the Great Auk, and the Labrador Duck -- have gone over the edge.
And while, by all rights, things should be getting worse, they actually seem to be getting better, at least by some common measures.
Today we have more forests in North America than we did 100 years ago. We also have more black bear, more deer, more elk, more wolves, more grizzlies, more turkey, more red fox, more Canada geese, more alligators, more raccoons, more groundhogs, more cougars, more coyotes, more bald eagles, more osprey, and more whales.
More land is under protection as wilderness than every before, and more land is protected as National Parks and National Forests as well. Millions of additional acres are protected as State Forests, Pittman-Robertson land or under conservation easements, to say nothing of the scores of millions of semi-protected acres under the Conservation Reserve Program.
So perhaps my anxiety about the fate of the world is irrational. Maybe it's a medical condition that needs to be treated by something made by Pfizer or Glaxo.
All that is absolutely guaranteed in this world is that everything will change. Nothing we know today will be the same for our grandchildren, anymore than it is the same now as it was when our great grandparents were alive.
Things change. Get over it it. Easier said than done.
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