The Federal Government is planning to spend about a million dollars a year to kill around 9,000 striped owls because they are winning the competition with the deified spotted owl. Among the striped owls crimes are interbreeding with the spotted owls. And I had naively thought that the crime of miscegenation disappeared with the rest of the racist Jim Crow laws.
We were overrun with English sparrows when I was growing up
in Western New York. Everyone said that they came with the
original English settlers, had no known predators and were here to stay. But on a return visit a friend pointed out
that the sparrows were gone and had been replaced by wrens and finches. Nature
moves in cycles. The Ancients knew this, from the prophets in the Bible to the misunderstood
Mayans.
From the cells of our bodies to the galaxies of interstellar
space, everything is in motion. Creation is ongoing. To paraphrase an old Bob
Dylan song: those not busy being born are busy dying. There is no stasis. But science, by its very nature, requires a
freeze in time and space. This is
essential for observation, but serves poorly as a state religion. The change
from the ecology movement to environmentalism was more than a change in
terminology. An awareness of dynamism became policies, inherently doomed to
fail, of attempts at forced stagnation.
Copyright 2013, Mark L. Bennett
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