"...Alone in a world of wounds"

This is my non-outspoken version of some recent events where I live.  This entry will never live up to what I want it to be in elegance and profoundness in my head with all the emotion and frustration surrounding it.  I could word things more gracefully and use more links and information, but then you'd be reading a short book, so I will spare you.  It's not in me to be confrontational, and I've had more than half a mind to draft a strongly-worded letter to the editor, but instead, for now, I give you this.

My family has lived along the confluence of a creek and the Blue River since 1998.  It is a beautiful place, and the woods and river are my favorite parts.  I grew up all over the place, and it helped develop my interests in science and nature.  I always looked forward to walks down along the river with my dad and family, and the occasional wading or swimming adventures as well, and more when I grew old enough to venture there on my own.  Big sycamore trees (and many others) stand tall and white in the river bottom and along the banks, some with washed out circles around them from the somewhat frequent flooding or high water events over the years.  The Blue River is one of the cleanest waterways in the state of Indiana, and parts of it are home to endangered species like the Hellbender Salamander, or just to a great diversity of other species.  Along its run eventually feeding into the Ohio River, it is fed by your usual sources, as well as many freshwater springs.  Each year, and sometimes each season, subtle changes occur in the river as the water carves its way against the banks or floods break log jams, create log jams, and carry trees and rocks downriver.  It is natural, and nothing drastic, and takes its course with nature.

The drastic changes come when properties along the river are sold, or a landowner decides to farm or extend his/her farm, or when crop prices are incredibly high like they are now.  Old and new farmers all over this area are doing it, and I'm sure they are in many other areas as well.  Crop prices are high, so they turn previously uncultivated land, often wonderful nature habitat, into rows and rows of crops to make a few extra bucks.  For some, it is even worth it to extend their fields by clearing any trees and edge for more production.

Sure, they have the legal right to do almost anything they want with their own land, but it gets me when they just completely ignore what they are doing to the environment, their neighbors, and water quality in the area--especially when with a bit of thought, research, or common sense, they would find that in some cases they would be better off putting the land in the CRP for what would often make them more money than they would make farming it, or simply leaving a better buffer zone along the edge of their field in places like river frontages.

All of this is true of what the people across the river from us have done.  The bank opposite us is more steep and unstable already than ours is, but there has always been a good buffer zone of trees and edge species beyond that before the field on the other side they have always grazed cattle in.  Over the years, we have had some issues with their fences being really faulty and the cattle escaping and hanging out in the river and wandering up into our fields, behind our barn, and even up into our yard (that's a fun story of last year especially).  Apparently an old lady own(s/ed) the land and left her sons to take care of it, but they are city boys and don't really have any interest.  So after some major cattle escapes last summer, we don't know if they got rid of the cattle and sold the land or if they've kept it but just decided to farm it now.  Either way, whoever owns it now has been doing some serious clearing for weeks now.  It's been loud from over there, and somewhat painful when you know what the sound means is happening.  I cannot even imagine the amount and expense of fuel they have been using during this process.  It has to be something insane after all the all day every days.  This past week, they got right to the edge of the river.  I honestly didn't think they would come that far with it.

They've just been knocking all the trees and brush over with some sort of bulldozer or something and reaching the shovel part up into the branches of the larger trees to drag them over and uproot them.  Then they shove it all over into a really huge pile and just burn it.  When the wind's been right, we've had a bit of a snow of ash coming over almost all the way up to our house sometimes, which makes us worry that some lit material will be aloft and catch our woods or CRP fields on fire.  The fires are so big and the now fields so far from a road, that there is really no way they could contain the fires should something get out of control.

Aside from that remains the fact that they are clearing all the way up to the edge of the river bank!  You have the horizontal plane of the "field" and then an immediately steeply-slanting bank to the river.  So now, in addition to raping that whole woods and just burning it all in a pile, they have likely severely destabilized huge sections of that bank.  It could erode so much so quickly now!  That's so bad for the sedimentation and course of the river, and, if they had any common sense, they'd know that it is bad for their farming plan as well, as they are possibly just going to lose those apparently precious extra rows of crops anyway.  It would have been so much more effective to at least leave a few meters of buffer to prevent that.  That area across the river from our place floods two or three or four times a year, too, so they will likely have problems getting crops to take with that as well.

It's all such a mess, and so useless.  Now the river will be sedimented more, the whole lighting situation will be off without the trees there and algae will bloom in a big burst, use up all the oxygen in the water, and make it hard for anything else to live in there, any pesticides and herbicides or fertilizers they use will run off directly into the river, and bam:  The water quality of at least this section and downstream is shot, the woods are gone, they will end up losing crops anyway.  All for naught.  Sometimes I really hate people.  None of this is even mentioning how awful it looks from our side now.  I'm sure that to someone who hasn't seen what it used to be and should be, it would still look nice, especially since our side is still fine, but to me (and my family) it is ruined, and painful, and evil.

It really has been a painful and exhausting week for me, as I've heard it no matter what I've been doing up in he house and been down there everyday watching it all go down.  It was like part of me could not bear to watch it, but part of me felt like I needed to be there to bear witness to what was happening to such a beautiful (though not entirely uncommon) place all for the possibility of a little human economy.  I stood down there, practically able to look into the guy's eyes (and he saw us too), trying to capture some last photos (of the way it was and some of what was being done upon recommendation of the Corydon Nature Conservancy in case IDEM gets involved) while tears were basically cascading down my face.  I'll admit it.  I think you would too if you were there.  It was truly heartbreaking.  For all I cared in some of those moments watching, especially the larger, trees get pulled down like nothing, the excessive heat we've had to could cook me, the stinging nettles could brush my legs and sting, and the mosquitoes could feast on me.  I was a member of the human race that was destroying nature there, and certainly in countless other places at the same moment.

This picture does not do the scene justice, but is just a representative of that whole side now

It's very hard for me lately to not feel so hopeless about the state of our natural world and the things we are doing to it.  Even as the man in the bulldozer ripped the trees and brush apart, the plants' presence was ironically beautiful in the scent of ripped apart wood and plant tissue wafting toward me from across the river.  It is a quite pleasant fragrance really, but under those circumstances, it was only upsetting.  

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."

-Aldo Leopold                       

I have found truth in many quotations and excerpts like the one above this week. I wouldn't call it comfort, but it does a fine job reassuring me of how I want to live my life and of the paths I am working to follow or forge with my career choices in the future (not that I have doubted it).  The title quote at the top of my blog by Baba Dioum means a lot to me, as I feel that teaching people things at all ages and helping them become aware of their impacts and other options are one of the most important ways we can help the world--certainly in nature and the environment, but in many other areas as well.  I will end below with one other quotation by Henry David Thoreau that seems relevant to this entry in a way:

"If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising person."

-Henry David Thoreau