Whose Woods These Are

Today was a little warmer and more overcast; rain is expected tonight and tomorrow will be a little colder. It feels cold until I get moving climbing over downed logs in the logged study plots to get to the rain gauges. Then I feel quite warm. It’s very sad to see the logged area… there are weak, scraggly trees still standing, some of them dying. There are large logs just left to rot. I wonder why they cut them if they weren’t going to haul them off. It reminds me of stories of the buffalo hunters, how they would slaughter and skin a herd, then leave the rest of the animal to rot.
I feel what I’m doing here is so important, and yet what I do every day is even more so: educating the youth of our country in science, especially environmental science. We know and understand so little of the relationships among organisms, and we are destroying whole ecosystems at an alarming rate. In the end, I fear we will destroy ourselves, not by war or nuclear attack, but by cutting the strands of life that bind organisms together until our world falls apart. We need to protect the living things around us, because we and they form an “uber-organism”, like the different cell types in a single human body. By protecting our environment, we protect our species as well.