Green Tribe of Belonging

  The high point of this past week for me was attending a Field Day at Cold Spring Pond and Cabin, a part of our family’s farm. The program featured things like pollinator strips, water buffers, and riparian zones along stream beds to filter out nitrates and other chemicals from the water running from the fields. My cousin Ken and his son Thomas talked about the evolution of this family farm as well as farming in general over the decades. And it has brought back to me the memories of my childhood growing up on a large Iowa farm. My grandmother Fawcett raised her two sons pretty much alone, her husband having died while both boys were very young. Although the boys' father had been a farmer, Grandma brought them up in a little house in the nearby town of West Branch, leaving the farm in other hands until her boys were old enough to take over. Both brothers went to Iowa State University, studying farming science. And then started working the land on our acreage. There were two homeste...

  Who will speak for the trees? Or the rivers? The prairies and forests?  No one did for too long. Yet it is beginning to happen! It’s really refreshing to learn about all the groups, small town governments and countries that are pushing to give legal rights to Nature. We have for too long assumed that we can own and wipe out natural settings because it increases our wealth or status or happiness. Who cares about the streams and rivers we change? Or the trees we cut down? Or the prairies we cover with corn fields? The answer to that question is changing, though. Not long ago, our species looked upon the natural areas surrounding us as only resources to be put to human use. Certainly that was how it was when I was a child. But by the time I was in high school in the early 60’s, the concept of an ecosystem had started to creep into biology lessons. We were learning (perhaps yet again) that there were relationships between other living beings. Things were not separate. Everything...