I sit looking out my upstairs window at four trees poking through mostly lawn. Last year, we planted a 4×16-foot wildflower plot on a piece of that lawn. This year the strip will be 4×100, roughly — a divider between our suburban lot and the one next to ours and, we hope, a larger magnet for butterflies.
It might seem as though I’m bragging, but …
A friend recently commented that “as good of environmentalists we aspire to be, we all have skeletons in our environmental closet.”
For instance: I drive nearly everywhere, then think how great I am because I didn’t drive 17 times around the Walmart parking lot to anchor the vehicle one space closer to the door.
A few years ago, I lusted after — and eventually bought — a full-size Ford Bronco. It was a time of my life when I told a friend, “If I can see over the roof, it’s not big enough.” It had a V-8 motor capable of doing more work than I imagined needing done and burned gas as though it was doing all that work.
The car I now drive gets half again as many miles from a gallon of gasoline as the Bronco. I have a perfectly serviceable bicycle with a saddlebag that I do not pedal for minor shopping trips one mile to the store.
I was raised outside a mill town, three miles to school. Upwind. Uphill. Both ways. The town and its two-room schoolhouse were in a narrow north-south valley lined on both sides by mountains, not unlike those I now spend much of my time exploring a few miles west of my current home. Almost immediately out of school, I turned right and headed uphill, due west over three hills, then around the south side of a 500-acre lake. Winter winds gained force down the lake and then funneled into the blast against which I pushed toward home.
I did not know about the environment, though one year, Mrs. McCluskey had us place a mushroom in a quart Mason Jar. The jar sat on a bookshelf next to the door. Flies got in and laid eggs that became larvae that devoured the mushroom. End of science lesson. At least my memory of it.
I remember a woman named Rachel Carson being cussed by many local adults for writing a book about killing birds someplace; her efforts would make life difficult for farmers around where I lived. End of another science lesson.
There were no computers in those days, at least for school kids. A half-decade into a U.S. Navy career, I bought my first calculator, a four-function device — add, subtract, multiply and divide — about the size of four packs of cigarettes. Later, the Navy introduced me to more sophisticated, huger machines. I was hooked on what eventually became euphemized as “technology.”
The world in which I live relies on that technology. I could write with a pencil, but it takes too long and no one would read it. Most folks, including me, read words on a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer and check email and message friends on a cellphone — all of them powered by electricity generated largely by burning the remains of long-dead carbon-based life forms.
Paradoxically, the technology is revealing the damage it is doing to our environment. I wonder how it will react when our grandkids take it on.
John Messeder is a freelance reporter and photographer who resides in Cumberland Township. He may be contacted at john@johnmesseder.com