Pollutions

The past few days I have been editing a historical document about a special lake called Leonard Lake. The certain details that have surprised me the most are those describing how much cleaner and more beautiful the lake had been in the past, a past that I had never known because it was well before my birth.

The water in the lake had been so clear that you could look down and see vast arrays of underwater plants and fish in the depths. Now you can barely look through five or ten feet of the lake, which may be as deep as 100 feet.

You see, at one point they decided to add blue gill fish into the lake in order to provide food for a special species of bass, or so the story goes. Then, shortly after, the lake got all opaque.

The funny thing is, I never noticed or even imagined that the lake could have been that way. The opaqueness, to me, was normal.

And yet now I see it from a different perspective. I see a lake that had been polluted with the wrong species of fish by some blundering humans who did not understand ecology or biology enough to make the right decision. The lake had had more bass before they tried to bring in these other fish. And they were big, special bass.

I can't help to think of this specific case as an example for what humans have been doing around the world. Over and over they take virgin lands and destroy their once held beauty. People seem to have no real understanding of, or respect for, the simple notion of cause and effect.

The good news is that to some degree the earth knows how to renew itself. In the end, we cannot control our planet; it controls us. We are just a small part of the planet that has gotten egotistical.

I guess we must also separate the well-intentioned mistakes (those that stem from simple ignorance), from the careless, malicious acts of destruction that happen just as often. For example: wars. Wars produce perhaps the worst forms of social and environmental pollution. They no longer stem from passion and ignorance as they may have used to at some point (i.e. when chimpanzees battle and kill each other)....

There are other questions worth asking. Where does one draw the line between artifice and pollution? Is an airplane a piece of pollution, or is pollution only the exhaust it emits? Are some forms of art pollution? When does a pile of garbage become a mountain rather than a pile of pollution? Are really annoying television shows a form of pollution? Perhaps the concept of pollution should expand and contract in particular ways and then we can really clean this place up.