Happy Earth Day!

My family and I moved to California when I was in 5th grade. We moved from Sacramento and to Sacramento from Oklahoma. Living in Oklahoma was kick ass! And when I say kick ass I'm speaking in little kid terms: catching polly-wogs in the crick, going barefoot EVERYWHERE, playing in the rain, building forts in the woods, swimming in lakes/large mud puddles, playing hide-and-go-seek in abandoned barns...basically doing whatever you wanted until the sun went down. When we moved to Sacramento I was absolutely lost. My mom wouldn't even let me walk the 10 block distance to my elementary school! We had a backyard the size of a bathtub and it never rained :( I was in hell! Thankfully we only lived there for a year.

We then moved to the mountains of N. California. Yay! More barefoot time! Anyways, I am providing all of this fascinating background for a reason..I promise. After living in a big city for a year and then moving to mountains I found myself with a new, almost unhealthy respect for the environment. I was absolutely in love with the outdoors, the fresh air, towering pine trees, lack of cars/traffic and crystal clear streams right in my backyard. So...as I child I had a very difficult time swallowing the fact that these beautiful trees around me were being cut down to build houses. I remember getting into very heated debates with my father over the dinner table about such things as hunting, logging, fishing, bla bla bla. Like I said, I was very young at the time and have since come to accept some of these things and change my view about others.

So one afternoon my friends and I began our daily walk through the woods to our favorite spot to build forts. But this day was not like other days. When we arrived to our destination we noticed the trees all had strange graffiti on them and little colored ribbons. From my previous experiences hiking around in the woods I knew this could mean only one thing.....the loggers had come. I honestly could not describe to you how upset I was. I thought my entire little world could just end right there. Anyways, after a little tree hugging my friends and I devised a plan to stop the evil loggers from destroying the pristine forest.

The next day we went out with signs that we had made that said things like "NO Loggers Allowed", "Turn Back Or Else", "Save the Trees", "Do Not Enter"..you know, stuff like that. We planted the signs along the road and some in the middle of the road. Then we went to a nearby dumping ground (there were a few places like that where people would go dump their crap so they wouldn't have to pay the Dump fees) and collected broken bottles and situated them in the ground on one of the logging roads so that they would get flat tires when they drove by. I think we even planned on standing in the middle of the road....you know, just in case all of our other fool proof plans didn't work. But we chickened out as soon as we saw the tractors plowing through and we ran away.

It took about a week of them coming in everyday chopping down trees until they were done. But when they finally were done the place was such a mess that we really couldn't play there anymore. It's kind of a sad story actually but my point was just to tell a kind of earth related story for earth day. I'm really glad I grew out of that phase. Honestly, caring that much only made me miserable. Kind of like being in the Bahamas and realizing the plight of the Conch.

After I did a little investigating I learned what a horrible situation they are facing and the most probable outcome for them is that they won't be around much longer. It made me so sad and yet, could I do anything? No. Except not eat any myself. I even told my fellow Bahamian travelers but I saw it did not upset them nearly as much as it did myself and they really didn't even care enough to stop eating it. I realize that even today I take environmental issues to heart quite a bit more than most people so. I'm sure no one else on that trip laid awake at night worrying about the conch :) It sounds incredibly silly, I know.

Maybe this is why people are so unwilling to change their habits. I think all of us in the Bahamas were thinking "well, I'm not going to save the world by turning down the conch salad". Its very unfortunate that most of us think that way but I think that the best thing we can do as intelligent individuals is to stop thinking that way.

http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases2003/sep03/noaa03116.html