Nature/Nostalgia Redux

I grew up in the middle of 200+ acres of pristine family-owned forest, with a perfect, natural mix of hardwoods & evergreens. I wandered in the woods enough that even Thoreau would have been jealous. Deer, snakes, red-tailed hawks, and plenty of bugs were our neighbors. Each summer, we would pick wild blackberries, blueberries, and muscadines (imperative pronunciation: "musky-dines")  to make  jar after jar of jams & jellies (I came thisclose to being bitten by a copperhead while picking "muskydines" when I was 10). We ate venison that came from our land. I was thrilled when we finally had someone besides our own family build a house 1/4 mile away. (They first built a three-room log cabin in which we whiled away many a summer week with cookouts, a portable radio & sleeping bags.)

Now, after that enticing portrait of nirvana, it's hard to believe that there are plenty of things I remember doing back then that, environmentally speaking, make me cringe today. We burned our garbage (even plastic!), spewing who-knows-how-many toxic fumes into the air. My dad had some of the trees on our land "culled." I think that's the nice Republican's way of saying "clear cut." I think it was only pine that he cut out, and there are more trees there now, but I can't help but think how big the sacrificed ones would be today. We didn't recycle (except aluminum cans, when they still paid you for them).

All of the major environmental offenses are at least a decade or two in the past. However, I wonder today whether my family realizes that we should really be thinking of the rest of our planet as our own backyard. I wonder what they would say if Dubya called them up on the telephone & told them that he was going to inflict upon our little piece of paradise the same environmental hell he's inflicted upon the rest of our nation.  I wonder what they would think of mercury and lead leaching into our well-water & acid rain killing our trees, of our deer and red-tailed hawks dying from habitat destruction. I wonder if they'd re-think their previous voting choices & finally tell Ol' Dubya to go to hell.

Comments

[Bluelikethesky]

Oh my do I love this post! After I graduated from HS, and my parents moved "out in the country" to be "closer to nature," they became barrel-trash-burning eco-goofusses. And, yes, despite all the awful ways the R's have impacted her life, my sister still waddles down to the polls and votes for Dubya. Whatcha gonna do?