A Halloween Watershed Story, conclusion
Starting from Monday of this week, this concludes Beth Clawson’s story as told at the Watershed Short Course in Lawrence, Michigan on October 31, 2006:
“It poured into the storm drain with bits of paper and plastic and a floating pop cap. Further down, a dead frog coated in black slime floated in an increasing trickle of black rainbows, mixing with the soil and paper becoming a glob of goop. Soon it would be unrecognizable as it mixed with paint and pesticides. Increasing in strength and volume as the rain continued to pound the ground and accumulate in the gutters and flow to the drain the first gush hit Elm Creek. Brown sediment choking off the oxygen, the creek shuddered. Water mixed with black oil coating everything and clogging air-tube, gill and stomata, pesticides, herbicides killing insects and plants alike finishing up with a dose of fertilizer to feed the algae. The creek swelled as if gasing its last breath, and spewed brown/green water into the big lake.
It was a horror! Birds fled, fish, turtles, and frogs died. The bodies of the dead too numerous to count, except for no one did because they floated to the big lake and sank to the bottom where they were covered with more soil and chemicals to be seen no more.
…and that my friend is the nightmare of Elm Creek. Where normal people live normal lives doing the same things every summer as the summer before, except this time, little Timmy Egard was heard to say, “Daddy, why can’t I hear the frogs anymore?”
***End***
We thank Beth Clawson for sharing her story with us. It gives pause to think. What we do and how we think affects every form of life around us. To be indifferent to it all is perhaps the worst evil we can imagine. To think everyone has a right to do as they please on their property, is to understand that unavoidable consequences do evolve because with the flow of waters, there are no boundaries and all becomes one, in a great symbolic parable.
We can create efforts to sustain life or we can create conditions to deaden it, without even being conscious of if. It’s time we begin to wake up: Nature is being stripped down and taken away from us if we support our acquisition-mode thinking. We can’t possibly believe that new ecosystems will simply appear again to give the balance and beauty that eons of time have given. As a community, we must step forward with progressive ideas that seek to sustain and preserve lands and waterways, otherwise we will have to live through a story of imbalanced excesses of our actions which will meet us in the future.
