Naturery

November 7, 2015
Naturery 

The nature columnist for the weekly paper in Froyd County, LoriAnne Woods – I get her columns third hand. Axel Sundstrøm’s hippie sister Sigrid cuts them out, very neatly, puts them in an envelope to Axel. He passes them along to me. I enjoy the columns for the most part; the most part of me admires the columnist’s simple earnestness. But I’d enjoy them more if I could discern in her the smallest sense of humor, which seems to be lacking, in her and in her friends. She writes about her friends often, and they seem as solemn as she is, not so much friends as colleagues in earnestness.

     There is much to be earnest about. To put it in Axel’s terms – he agrees with me: Is there any reason to make preparations for the coming of the bridegroom, if there will be no heaven-and-earth for him to come to?

Cow Knob salamander with
frackery sauce and onion on white.

In the column he handed me yesterday, LoriAnne is writing about a 2011 discovery that indicated that homo sapiens sapiens might well have been in Britain far earlier than we thought, coexisting – even cohabitating – with homo neanderthalensis: How much were we responsible, then, for the extinction of the wooly mammoth and the wooly rhino and a species of horse? Perhaps more than we thought. 
     This has to do with biodiversity, as if this was the first, or maybe only one, step toward the planet’s ruin, because it led from gathering to herding to farming to the industrial age, which led to smoke, which led to fire, which burned us up, so when the bridegroom returned he found only a smoldering cinder.

     Enter the Cow Knob salamander found only in certain dark corners above 2500 feet in the Shenandoah and North Mountains on the border of Virginia and West Virginia. but near a section where The Power Company plans to build a pipeline to bring frackery down from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and the Eastern Shore. LoriAnne has talked to C. K.’s representatives, who have declared he doesn’t like pipes. She can’t blame him.

* * * * *

I am never quite sure why we embrace evolution and then want to interfere with it. Or I think I understand the reasons why, but I am never completely convinced by them. There seems to me something awry with the logic, though I’m not logician enough to say what.