Summer 2004
Call of the Wild
CLA scholars and alumni featured in this issue are doing their part to help protect the earth's precious resources and to preserve and create habitable spaces:
Bruce Braun: A Natural Question
Colin Kahl: Political Erosion
Katherine Klink: Gust of Confidence
Judith Martin: Her Kind of Town
Bryan Shuman: Yesterday's Forecast
Valerie Tiberius: Living Well: Ethics and the Good Life
"Perhaps the most critical global challenge for the 21st century is maintaining a healthy, productive environment that will continue to support life in the face of increasing world population, energy shortages, shrinking freshwater supplies, destruction of natural habitats, and declining genetic diversity. Integrating all we know—from scientific, economic, social, and spiritual perspectives—is key to understanding and resolving these issues."
Every time I reach for a paper towel, click "print" on my computer, run water, flip a light switch, or eat a pork chop or a peach, I'm making a decision about my relationship to the natural world. Many of the decisions we make each day are so routine, even banal, that it barely occurs to us that such small, seemingly trivial local acts, taken collectively, have global environmental consequences.
In the urban ecosystem of my yard, I face life-and-death choices every day: What to do about those dandelions that march across my yard in the spring brandishing their bright yellow pompoms? Or those industrious slugs that munch their way through hosta beds, leaving behind lacy banners of wasted foliage? As the provisional sovereign of this parcel of land to which I hold the deed, I am legally entitled to arm myself with an arsenal of chemicals and repel or kill just about any living thing that I determine is a weed and not a flower, or a pest and not a pet. After all, I "own" this property and everything on it. It's mine to do with as I please.
Or is it? Like most of my neighbors, I try to be a responsible and humane steward of the land I inhabit. I recycle and use earth-friendly products. I dig dandelions and their weedy cousins out by their roots. I fertilize with organic nutrients. I grant clemency to all but the most pesky critters.
Alas, the weeds reproduce with abandon. Slugs, aphids, and their ilk chomp on, undaunted. This is the cost of my principles. And it's all part of the messy business of living in this world with other creatures—the human and the non-human, the icky and the beautiful, the friendly and the cranky, annoying, or hostile—and balancing our "rights" against theirs.
It's all part of what geographer Bruce Braun, who is profiled in this issue, calls the "ecology of everyday life."
The big picture
In the end, what's at stake is the survival of the ecosystems that sustain untold millions of species throughout the planet. But for most of us, daily life at least sometimes eclipses the big picture. It's just easier to toss a plastic container than to clean it, to turn up the thermostat than to run upstairs and get a sweater, or to drive than to bicycle to campus each day.
For people struggling to get by, convenience is not the issue. In their world, financial concerns trump most everything else, and thinking big is perhaps a luxury only people far better off can afford. On the other hand, for businesses focused on the bottom line, efficiency and profitability often are the big picture.
And so preservationists and conservationists often find themselves at odds with the economic interests of industries and of the people who depend on those industries for their livelihood, not to mention for satisfaction of their consumer needs and desires.
Long time passing
Imagine Thoreau's shock if he stopped by the 21st century for a visit. He would find much of the natural world he treasured decimated by development, despoiled by chemical pollutants, clear-cut and strip-mined for human consumption.
He would find thriving, populous cities on industry-lined rivers whose waters are breeding grounds for invasive species and toxic to all but the hardiest of living creatures. He would find communities where roughly one-fourth of the children suffer from asthma and other respiratory diseases.
He would find rubble or towering steel-framed skyscrapers where historic Colonial and Beaux Arts buildings once stood; and strip malls, parking lots, gas stations, and sprawling housing developments where oaks, pines, and prairie grasses once dominated the landscape and ducks, pelicans, toads, bears, and muskrats once raised their young.
He would find mutant frogs inhabiting fetid swamps, deer impaled on hood ornaments, and turtles and salamanders squashed on highways that have come between them and their ancient feeding and breeding grounds.
He would find hundreds of species endangered or vanished—from the Bachman's warbler to the leafshell clam to the Delmarva Peninsula fox squirrel.
Help is on the way
The CLA scholars and alumni featured in this issue are doing their part to save our beleaguered earth. Reaching across disciplines and geographic and cultural boundaries, they are finding ways to balance diverse interests—economic and environmental, self and community, local and global—to develop solutions that work.
Their research and teaching are advancing efforts to protect the earth's precious resources and to preserve and create habitable spaces—cities and forests, wetlands and deserts, mountains and prairies—for all of us, including the multitude of non-human species that are our earthly companions.
Their efforts would make Thoreau glad.
Did you know…
The human population of our planet is steadily increasing at the rate of one million more people every four days, and the total human population is now over six billion. In 1970, world population was less than 3.5 billion.