By the
Pond Hidden, fragile, life stirs near pond
By ARTHUR JONES
I live 11 miles from the White House. And so do my neighboring
foxes, rabbits, raccoons, snapping turtles, chipmunks, yard-invading deer and
squirrels galore. Around our yard and especially where the land dips to a
rainy-day creek bed, there are occasional snakes and constant insects, the
latter in such diversity as to dazzle a minor tropical rain forest. Some months
of the year a tropical rain forest is what damp Virginia does its
temperate-zone best to imitate.
We have birds. To me, the prettiest -- and I know few of them by
name -- are the darting ruby-throated hummingbird and the nervous tufted
titmouse. The noisiest, the starlings, jays and crows. Most enjoyable: the
self-conscious northern flicker, a ground-feeding red-splotched woodpecker
forever looking around to see if it's being followed.
The neighborhood also has, where the rainy-day stream joins the
real live Indian Run Creek, us and creation in microcosm: the pond.
Truly, for a half dozen reasons, the pond is the global
environment today writ small. It exists, for example, in the shadow of one of
the busiest interstate highways in the United States. Interstate 395 is a short
parallel companion to I-95, the main East Coast north-south artery.
The pond is bounded on its north side by an office block where the
corporate owners keep a nicely mowed lawn, bordering its edge with picnic
tables for employees. Only recently closed was a nearby research center whose
toxic products tainted surrounding ground water and wells.
The microcosm of ecological tension between humans is also played
out in the pond's garbage -- empty soda cans, plastic containers, Clorox bleach
and WD-40 disposables, an entire medical kit including scissors, a laceless
left-foot sneaker, the wreck of a lawn chair. These are not necessarily left by
the picnicking employees.
The pond is a catchment area for the upper reaches of Indian Run
Creek and the detritus of the residences abutting it. Torrential rains rush the
waters downstream to the pond. The creek runs along the pond's south side and,
during these downpours, pond water spills over the pond's eastern lip to add to
the swollen creek's waters.
Yet wildlife, for the most part, doesn't notice. The ducks swim
past the empty 7-Up cans. A kingbird perches on the corner of a milk crate
jutting out of the mud. In and around this pond, wildlife, even more numerous
than that in the sizable bush- and tree-filled backyards of the houses to the
immediate north and west, truly abounds. It may show itself if you stay still.
Beavers possibly, if the tooth marks on the gnawed-down saplings
are a clue. The last beaver family was humanely trapped and moved to another
area, but it looks as though they're back. Freshwater crawdads here are big
enough to cook --if you can see them to catch them where they blend skillfully
into the muddy banks.
What we do to the pond -- no nostalgic Walden this with the
18-wheelers thundering by all day long and all night long -- is what we are
doing, and will increasingly do, to creation. Another 360 houses are soon to be
built to the pond's immediate south. The pond, like Ma Earth, will have to
contend with another 700 cars, another 600-plus children.
The all-pervading odor of Bounce will blow in from yet another
direction. Worst of all, what liquids humanity leaks will make their way into
the pond's and the creek's water in greater quantity.
There is awesome significance in that last statement. Every storm
drain and creek, every rain-created stream and all the parking lot runoff in
this region makes its way into the finest body of water on the U.S. East Coast
-- the Chesapeake Bay. An accidentally spilled yellow plastic jug of antifreeze
is only days away from adding to the Bay's mix. "Save the Bay," proclaim the
license plates and bumper stickers. "Love your Mother," warn T-shirts with a
Mother Earth emblem. But will we? Do we? Can we -- enough to keep a balance
between human needs and creation's needs?
A quarter-century ago in Stockholm I interviewed the famed Swedish
sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote the classic study of racism in the United
States, An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
(1962). I asked him what over the subsequent decades had further surprised him
about the United States.
And he remarked that decades ago in the United States there was a
great deal of high-level conversation about land use and resource stewardship.
Yet on later trips, as the strip malls went up and the land was
used for whatever its owner decided, he could see that "green zones" and
"natural boundary areas" had all just been talk.
Mother Nature herself has dubious designs on the pond, too, and
what are we to do about those? The dreaded kudzu vine aloft and voracious
growth-killing bramble vines below threaten the native trees and bushes. Kudzu
forms a light-defying canopy that, with the other vines, can strangle even
mighty beeches, killing flora, altering fauna and thereby changing the
landscape.
Does God want the landscape changed?
Do humans come first?
Have we too pretty a view of creation -- as a sort of Laura Ashley
dress -- when in fact much of Nature wears a tough hide?
For sure, as Christians, in our desire to preserve what we
like as well as to help creation at large, we're the ones who have to lead the
argument for balance. We have to keep people in the ecological equation.
And in some circles that is not the popular path.
Environmentalism is becoming highly politicized and highly
emotional. In the United States, the political right sees environmentalism as
the new Marxism. The politically correct left's ideal is a depopulated
wilderness.
The Christian has to make sense of God's having given Mr. and Mrs.
Genesis dominion; and Mr. and Mrs. Genesis' descendants have to make sense of
the natural disorder and correct what needs correcting. And not do what ought
not to be done. Today's talk and tensions, and tomorrow's environmental woes
and disasters, plus our stewardship now will be this occasional column's
continuing themes. Often, the pond will be the starting point.
Meanwhile, the rain is falling on and around the pond in such a
way that it's like sitting in with a celestial orchestra during rehearsal. The
raindrops that hit the water are the violins. Those hitting the leaves are the
woodwinds. Those drops banging against the plastic containers are the
percussion section.
The ducks seem indifferent.
Does only the human wonder at it all?
Arthur Jones is NCR's editor at large.
National Catholic Reporter, October 3,
1997
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