Like the rest of America, I am woefully short of knowledge of the geography of any nation but my own, but I got a look at Corsica, the French Alps, Aquitaine, and so many other places that captured my wonder and imagination. Heavily-antlered red deer bucks ran through a lovely forest, otters frisked and played in streams, little birds dipped into running streams and nested on sheer cliffs and everywhere, there was clean, natural beauty. For the 50 minutes the show ran, I was entranced. I wanted to be there.
I remember walking through woods without seeing garbage dumped because some worker was too lazy to make it to the landfill. I remember streams so clean you could drink from them. I remember clear skies with no huge columns of smoke rising to blot out the sun. No more...
The supposedly most powerful nation in the world is a cesspool. Oh, there are isolated spots, nationally protected park lands and some protected wilderness and I am glad of it. But what impressed me about France is that the lovely countryside I saw was populated by people as well as wildlife. Somehow, some people have learned to live with nature and it was lovely to see.
I read the bible a lot, when I was younger and being indoctrinated, and there were some stories that stuck with me. In one of them, two brothers, one hungry and the other greedy, fooled their nearly blind father into thinking one was the other and he bestowed his inheritance on the younger son rather than the oldest. The older son agreed to the deal because the younger was cooking porridge and he was hungry. The moral was that the older son "sold his birthright for a mess of pottage." He let his immediate appetite leave him without future security. We have done the same with our natural resources.
Americans have been so busy exploiting our land (yes, I know other countries have as well but I am not talking about them here...just us) that any beauty to be seen where people live is carefully landscaped and structured. I remember waking up in a farm house in Cooperstown, NY, looking out my window and seeing a mountainside meadow for a front yard. I was very small, but I knew I was seeing something special. There is still a little of that natural look left, but there are new houses and a Quonset hut garage on a muddy flat sharing that mountain now.
Humans on this planet have passed the 7 billion mark. We are using the resources at a record rate. We are sucking the earth dry. The fact is that humanity may wipe itself out as it continues to frack and drill and dig and burn and build. When it's all gone and we are gone, what can the greedy do with their money, then? The earth, on the other hand, will recover, other species will take over and thrive. We won't be missed.
We are the only animal on Earth that cannot live with the cycles and rhythms of the seasons and who look at the land and see dollar signs rather than food and room to run. We have lovely woods out back, full of old pines and scrub oaks dripping with Spanish Moss but it is marred by the discarded garbage of lazy people. I used to love to walk through it. But, after our subdivision was built, people started USING the woods...not for pleasure but for the opportunity to dump unwanted garbage, old, undelivered phone books and even broken furniture. Their discarded cats have gone feral and killed the quail and other small wild things that used to be a daily sight from our kitchen window. A Trap, Spay/Neuter, Release program is helping but there are still kittens being born. Stray pets are a common sight.
So I dreamed last night. In this dream, my husband and I were strolling down a country lane in Alsace with our dogs. I knew where we were because there was a quaint little sign on a fence post telling me. We were watching dragonflies hovering over a pond, on the hunt for food and a mate. It was quiet, balmy and wonderful but I woke up and had to let the brats out back. I mean to treasure that dream. It's probably as close as I'll ever get.
American needs to grow up and learn its lesson about a lot of things. I just hope we are not wiped out by our own hubris before that can happen.
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