Guest Column
Borden Applegate
Connection with nature is important

When I was growing up in Jackson Mills, deer and rabbits outnumbered the human inhabitants. Ours was a world of fun which only was occasionally interrupted by having to pick peppers or corn at one of the local farms.

Behind our house was a lake. It was the social gathering place for us kids and adults back then, and what great times we had there, whiling away the long, hot summer days. We grew up with a sense of stability of the land and of our environment.

With little or no TV, Nintendo or malls to distract us, we were able to spend our spare time playing outdoors and undertake important projects like building tree huts, underground forts with stove-pipe periscopes (our specialty), keeping wood trails cleared and making slingshots.

We learned (even if unwitting at times), the basic laws of ecology by simply observing the interrelationships among living things. It was a laboratory for the study of life; there were frogs to be caught, pond-skaters to be observed and tadpoles to be brought home (much to the consternation of our mothers).

The lake is gone now. The next generation of kids will never see a living thing there again. Next to go will be the remaining open fields and woods behind my house. I would like to buy it as an investment in the mental health and stability of my daughters and future generations, leaving it undisturbed to grow grasshoppers and lightning bugs, but I can’t afford to buy the land. What goes up is not value, but cost.

Wayne Davis recently wrote that, "Although we sing our praises to the amber waves of grain, we consider the land upon which it grows no more than dirt, to be subdivided and covered with asphalt as soon as the profit margin becomes satisfactory. It is a sad commentary that the poorest investment one can make is to buy a farm and farm it, while the best investment is to buy a farm and subdivide it into a real estate development."

Now we employ technology that can cut down a forest in a matter of days. This technological "progress" has merely provided us with a more efficient means of going backward. We do not possess the respect for nature this continent’s first inhabitants did. Our response to the Red Man was the same as it is to our forests — removal! And we called them the savages.

Voltaire was prophetic when he observed, "Men must have corrupted nature a little, for they were not born wolves, but they have become wolves."

In visiting a zoo many years ago, I still remember a sign that was hung on one of the animal houses. It was a question and it read: "What is the only creature that has ever killed off entire species of other animals?" Below it hung a mirror.

To some extent, part of our propensity to exploit our environment can be traced back to the biblical injunction found in Genesis, where supposedly man was given special dominion over his surroundings. A century after Charles Darwin, many still think of themselves as separate and apart from nature, with a divine destiny to conquer nature and exploit the other creatures for their own use.

As science, human history and common sense tell us, we humans are not special; not set apart, but are a part of, and interdependent on, nature’s balance. The fact is that the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth. Thoreau once insightfully observed, "Sometimes the quality of life depends upon the number of things man leaves alone."

Another concern is the lack of understanding about nature itself. Under the government of nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments — simply consequen-ces. Man suffers and enjoys according to conditions. The sun shines without love, and lightning strikes without hate. Tornadoes cannot be stopped by counting beads, just as lava pauses not for bended knees. She produces without joy and obliterates without regret.

Trees are the lungs of the earth, yet we are destroying them in ever-increasing numbers — just drive through Jackson Township. When the water is no longer fit to drink, when we can’t breathe the air, when we have overpopulated the land and stripped it bare, it will be too late and Seneca’s dictum will ring true, "The time will come when our posterity will wonder at our ignorance of things that were so plain, had we only taken the time to look at them."

I have no confidence in anything pretending to be outside, or independent of, or in any manner above nature. We live in a natural world — we know no other. Robert Ingersoll was right when he said: "Above nature we cannot rise — below nature we cannot fall." Nature gave us two ends — one to sit on and the other to think with. Our very survival as a species may very well depend on which one we use the most.

Borden Applegate is a resident of Jackson Township.