Back from the winter festive season visiting family, and brushes with differing mindsets. One bemoans environmentalism and its -ists, so I ask if he likes to breath. “When we tug on a single thing in nature we find it attached to everything else,” said John Muir. The fact that we, too, are connected, is unfortunately a fact appreciated by too few. Just as these trees connect soil and sky, so do we.
Meanwhile, reading about the stresses and disruptions of the great animal migrations in the Science section of the Times, 12/20/11, I found this quote from ecologist David Wilcove: “I don’t think the notion of biodiversity per se has gained any traction with the public.” Pity. Charismatic megafauna — lions, rhinos, bears, raptors, whales etc. — on the other hand certainly have captured some attention. But this is the animal version of celebrity. And just as celebrity culture distorts us as a society (and as a democracy!), charismatic megafauna distorts our sense of the world. Microscopic life forms are hardly anybody’s idea of charismatic, and yet we depend on them, as the trees depend on mycelia. We can not live without the world — although more than a few people dream of such a sterile, inhuman future — from the chemical and physical foundations of life to the interrelated webs of the environment, ecosystems within systems.
Update: This is from a year ago, but utterly timeless: a utilitarian view of all the species that have saved our lives.
Backyard and Beyond 
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