When you had to do with human ignorance towards living beings

[Sedgehead]

As one who has seen the transition from Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to today’s climate change debate, I don’t see a lot of general hope. However, as a teacher (at times) I still teach, sometimes by example. For most of us, one person can’t change the world. I’ve heard the bible quoted as saying somewhere that god will “destroy those who destroy the earth” so the “dominion over” aspect has been over emphasized by some perhaps. The best slave owners treat their slaves well, so the best stewards of earth would also treat earth well. However, the only one I can change is me and I even find that difficult. We just have to do the best we can. The land here is forested but in 1812 it was prairie; the understory needs to be burned. While teaching English to a small group of students in China, I did my best teaching without realizing it. That is, after a bus trip one student mentioned, “I was really impressed. You were eating peanuts but you didn’t just throw the shells on the floor of the bus like we do.” I put them in a bag. I’ll end on a positive note. As for snakes, I leave debris in my yard to give them a place to live; we have abundant non-poisonous garter and other snakes despite the neighbors killing all they can catch. In the last 50 years, I find the roadsides in the US have less litter, the town of Yellville has a sewage treatment plant instead of using the Town Branch creek for sewer, the town no longer operates a dump that is constantly burning because people always burned their trash, and the Buffalo River became a national park instead of ending up being dammed like the other two rivers nearby. I had no role in those improvements, so perhaps there is hope for society as a whole. Here in Baxter County (Arkansas, USA) we put a land fill upstream from our water source and accepted trash from several Arkansas counties nearby until the company went bankrupt. People whose trash was hauled are now whining and complaining about paying $18 a year to pay for landfill management that was not written in stone in the original landfill permit. Such is life. Sometimes we learn the hard way.