We've Wrecked It All

Well, I'm convinced (and have been for some time) that we've finally ecologically wrecked the globe. There are far too many humans on this planet consuming far too much of its resources for the natural world to recover. Whatever hope I had that things could ever get better for Mother Earth were dashed years ago.

Visit your National Parks. See them before they're ruined.

So my advice to those of you who give a damn is the same advice I've been giving for some time now:

Go out and see the wilderness!

It's not all gone, just yet. There are places that appear to be relatively untouched, so if you want to experience what looks to be unspoiled wilderness, then you still have a small window of opportunity to do so.

For while longer the water is still pure.

Go to one of our great National Parks near you, or to some far away. Just now you can still hike and camp in forests and on river banks and mountain peaks and in canyons where the green things still grow and the wild things still roam. We'll have this for a short time, anyway.

And there are hundreds of wilderness areas all over our nation where you can go to find genuine solitude. I've been to many places where the only unnatural thing that can break the murmur of the woods is the faraway gravelly scratch of a jet flying high in the sky. And sometimes you can get lucky and such a thing won't  happen.

Smoky Mountain elk...for now.

Your kids likely won't  know what that's like, I'm afraid to say. At the rate things are unraveling, I doubt there will be anything like what we now have available to them or to their children. Our wild megafauna are dropping away like dominoes, one after the other. In a little while there will be no grizzly bears, no wolverines, no wolves; elephants will not roam the plains of Africa, and lions will be only a memory. Whales are going to vanish one by one until we have only their images in books.

The big trees are going, going....

Our forests are going to strangle in drought and heat and succumb to hoards of invasive insect pests. Our wetlands will dry up and burn. The birds we take for granted will fade away and come no more to roost in trees that remain or go to nest along lakes that will be fouled forever.

So now, while we still have a few places left; while we still share the globe with some of our wild companions--go out and see them. They'll be leaving soon, and they'll never come back.

They're fading fast. You'd better hurry to say goodbye...