It is hard to imagine a natural world without me in it.
There is the question: If a tree falls in the woods but there’s no one to hear it, does the tree’s crashing to earth make a sound?
I say no. The tree’s crashing produces a series of sound waves. If there are no ears to intercept the sound waves, there is no sound.
We walk out our front doors on the way to where the newspaper lies in a puddle of natural rain water protected by a prophylactic plastic bag. Natural meets unnatural. Formerly clean air and water meet polluting chemical plants that provide jobs that allow people, you and me, to better enjoy what’s left of the natural world.
Unlike the crashing tree, we are there to see and smell the funny air of pollution, to skim unnatural fluids from bayous and drainage ditches. We make the decision to ignore what’s happening to our natural world in exchange for jobs.
When chemical plants use our ground water for their industrial purposes, as they have for years, we are free to say, “Take all the ground water you want. We’re happy to buy bottled. No reason you should trouble yourselves to take water from the Mississippi River flowing behind your plants.”
Here’s a radical thought: What if we relied more on employers whose products didn’t make a mess of the neighborhood? We may spend too much attracting the movie makers, but the filmmakers and their crews, in T-shirts and shorts and running shoes, don’t make the key ingredient in Roundup.
[Read Ed Cullen's May 2019 essay: "There's a Place"]
The natural world was once a pristine, freshly-drawn bath into which the first bather climbed sweating and dirty from chasing dinner. So began our destruction and appreciation of paradise.
When I can’t get to the deep interior of Kisatchie forest or the banks of a spring-fed creek I know near Amite or even ride a bicycle to the levee opposite Farr Park on River Road to glimpse the daily life of nesting eagles, I find a shady spot in my yard to read.
John D. MacDonald, one of the early alarm bell ringers in Florida, wrote about a wildy unrealistic knight in urban armor named Travis McGee. McGee rescued leggy damsels while decrying the development of his beloved Florida. Carl Hiaasen picked up where MacDonald left off, crafting wonderfully comedic, stupid, evil characters who befoul the Everglades.
MacDonald’s and Hiaasen’s novels made the writers wealthy. Did their stories save Florida from development? Have the ’glades been restored? Nope. But they are home to some really long pythons freed by nature lovers who frequent pet shops.
Nevil Shute’s On the Beach will not stop this country’s exchanging missiles with other missile-tipped countries, but the book gave us the haunting sound of the last telegraphic signal (an electrical short, actually) broadcasting gibberish to a world dead from nuclear war. I love On the Beach for all the wrong reasons.
Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire didn’t save Arches National Monument from big highways and paved park roads that carry millions instead of hundreds of visitors to rock formations carved by water, wind, and gravity.
All the nature photography and novel writing and documentary film making will not save our natural world. But they do remind us that a tree has fallen in the wilderness, and though we didn’t hear or see the crash, it happened.
This mild warning is the best I am able to do for the natural world.
I don’t think our world was meant to last forever, but why speed its demise? Is it not better to go down in a noble, smart, we-fought-the-good-fight way than to place the natural world in the hands of a fellow with a Three Stooges haircut, a guy who rides shirtless over the steppes horseback, and another who might just end man and woman and child kind by launching The Big One while attempting to switch on the lights of the White House Christmas tree?
It is June. What is left of the natural world is good. Like mamma’s earth, we ain’t making any more natural world. What’s left is all we’ve got.
Ed Cullen’s wry observations on life in South Louisiana will be familiar to readers of The Advocate, where he worked for forty years. Letter in a Woodpile, a collection of his newspaper and radio essays, was published in 2006.
