Paradise River

Day 276: In 'The Round River: a Parable,' Aldo Leopold wrote, "One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds...Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise."

The "Round River" to which Leopold refers is not a geographic location but features in a legendary tale of Paul Bunyan who, according to the story, floated much of Wisconsin's timber down its never-ending, circular waters. This, in Leopold's interpretation, is a parable for the biosphere: a perpetual cycle in which the products of the Earth return to the Earth in a different and restorative form. This concept is sometimes referred to as the "food chain," in which plants are eaten by bugs which are eaten by birds which are eaten by mammals, all of which leave a legacy of renewal when they decay and become fresh soil in which new plants grow. This, of course, is a simplification. The process is actually much more complex, but nonetheless, it is circular: what goes around, comes around (and I'm not talking about mean behaviour coming back to bite you on the bum). The thing corporate man fails to acknowledge because he deliberately blinds himself to being told otherwise is that the resource is not being renewed by mysterious outside sources; it is in fact finite, and we're gobbling it up as fast as we can. We're putting things back into the system, to be sure: toxins and microplastics so altered by processing that they do not break down into any usable form for centuries. In short, we're not just depleting the world's biosphere; we're wreaking havoc on the entire system as we go along, claiming for our species resources which should by rights belong to the whole biotic system. Obviously, this can't go on (well, obviously to anyone with half a brain cell, present administration notably coming up short in that department). Quoting Leopold again, our global situation "...calls for a reversal of specialization; instead of learning more and more about less and less, we must learn more and more about the whole biotic landscape" else the Round River will cease to flow. Ol' Paul would not be happy about that. Lumberjack though he might have been, he understood the principle of perpetual flow.