The gulf coast beach is a ever changing ecosystem. The dunes have snakes, varmints and cats, the cats appear to
be well suited to beach life and help control the varmints, watching one of the
cats hunt can be an all day activity. The cat’s patience is inspiring. It can
sit, coiled for a strike, motionless, focused, and almost invisible in the
dune’s vegetation. I can almost feel sorry for the field mouse or snake, until
I remember the last time mice moved into my house. I had to hunt them down and
that is why I find the cat inspiring, I do not have that level of patience or
cunning. The mice consistently used better tactical moves than I could counter,
in the end I captured the cat and put it in my house, all varmints vacated the
premises within 24 hours, and then I rewarded the cat with a great, hot meal
and released it back to the wild.
Sitting on the beach house deck and
experiencing the surrounding environment is a lazy existence, something that
suits me well. The birds and cats and varmints are active and swift, the dunes
and gulf water and vegetation are quiescent and sleepy. Everything is in
motion, at greatly different speeds, nothing moves in a straight line, nature
hates straight lines. The beach is constantly seeking a balance, the water
currents pushes sand creating a new sand bar, which changes the current and
pushes the sand a new direction, the wind imitates the same action, everything
is moving, the balance never balances and nature never stops.
I can’t decide what to watch, any
direction I look there is something that can hold my attention. Every moment
can be a special moment, at one special moment each day the sun will reflect off the
water such that the water sparkles with bright star like flashes out to the
horizon, at another moment a pelican flock will cruise the water hunting fish
schools, then another moment with sand swirling into miniature tornadoes, and so
it goes, all day, all night. I can watch and I can think about what I am
seeing, a very satisfactory existence.
Seeing the damage we collectively
do to this wonderland is sad, we could be so much kinder to the world we
occupy, we could lessen the damage we cause with little effort. The short term
chase of profit is weak thinking; a greater profit could be realized with
longer term balanced thinking. There is a large body of peer reviewed studies
supporting this wisdom, anyone walking the beach sees the problem and
understands the solutions. All this shows the imperfection of human
organization, our fights to maintain a power elite with the only objective to
maintain the power elite, a circular argument with no exit point, a purely
human endeavor unmatched by any other natural creation.
I am not dreaming of becoming some
native living in the wild. I enjoy AC, I like hot food, and I like watching a
gulf storm from a sheltered porch. I do clean up after myself, I remove trash I
find from the beach, I use the municipal waste water system and I volunteer to
monitor turtle nesting. My individual efforts are not enough, we must have
collective action to make a real difference, as a society we have to make the
choice and we have to make the effort.
Americans demand our freedom. In
this case it is the freedom to trash nature, the freedom to shoot hawks, the
freedom to crash four-wheelers through sand dunes, the freedom to not pay for
what we take from nature. We use freedom to justify selfish behavior. We define
freedom to take what we wish.
In the end nature doesn’t care how
we define freedom; nature cares no more about humans than nature cared about
dinosaurs. Nature will leave the decisions to us.
Humans are the most creative,
adaptable and intelligent animal ever produced on earth, for all our
flaws a few will survive and continue, for this reason I have hope.
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