It was late March of 2012. The temperature was 80 degrees. The sun was shining and the breeze was light. It may have been the average spring day if it were not for the fact that I was walking my dog in northern Illinois. We should have been tramping through the vestiges of the winter's retreating snows in a brisk 40-degree wind. Since it had been over 80 degrees for more than a week, the grass was green and early-emerging flowers, meant to arrive for Easter, were in full bloom and threatened to expend all their celebratory glory and expire before Easter arrived. An old man and a young boy were busy feeding fish at a pond's edge and ducks lazily paddled toward them for a share of the booty.
Watching the feeding frenzy, I thought of how naturally people recognize and accept the foreign universe of fish in their water world, or the symbiotic relationship of human and animal universes interconnecting, as with my dog and I. We walked together, two alien universes sharing an experience and communicating on some level of a relationship, just like the boy, the man and the fish were.
Easily we encourage and welcome an alien presence to flutter at our bird feeders. We recognize and use our experiences with nature for our poems and songs, our recreation, our fantasy and enjoyment as well as to stimulate our human sense of wonder. We acknowledge that we can learn from our observations of nature. We can be revolted but mostly we are captivated by our sense of understanding and oneness with many other creatures' behaviors. Why then, is it so difficult for humans to recognize the responsibility of our relationship with nature, or as many like to term it these days "the environment"?
Blithely, we toss our trash, laden with chemicals, into landfills that percolate the poisons into the watery habitats of many creatures. Carelessly, we farm using methods and chemicals that destroy ecosystems upon which multitudes of life forms depend, including our own. Animals that give their lives for our subsistence, we unnaturally imprison for convenience, causing them to suffer their short-lived lives under our inhuman and thoughtless care, rather than raising them in natural habitats. We invite the birds to our feeders hung over lawns treated with petro-chemicals that kill them as well our weeds.
Nature's life forms, including humans, exist in environments that are part of and interact with many other environments, often depending on each other to survive. Too often, humans easily dismiss the balance in nature as unimportant, unconscious of how much their own existence is as dependent upon the interaction and balance as any other life form is. Many religions emphasize the importance of nature to the extent of imposing the responsibility of oversight on the human species. How miserably we are failing.
We talk about conservation as an answer to the dwindling species populations, like Polar Bears for example. Yet, are the last Polar Bears in a zoo the answer or just a conscience-wash for those who are semiconscious? Imprisoning specimens will not fulfill our oversight responsibility. We have to do better than that.
