The success of a fishing trip, I used to think, is ultimately up to the whims of the weather gods. Not to be confused with the forecasts, predilections and predictions by those folks who crew the Weather Channel: The weather gods are more independent and much less reliable, and not on any media payroll.
I don’t know all of them, the weather gods, that is. But having taught mythology in high school for many years, I know the likes of Aeolus, regent of the winds; Boreas, in charge of the bullying North Wind; Zephyr, the Wild West Wind; Auster, the South Wind; and the indecisive Eurus, the East Winds.
Then there’s mother Nephele, the cloud, who with her sister, Nimbus, the rain, comes to visit every time I get around to hooking up my fly rod.
Maybe it’s the fault of what ancient Greeks knew as naiads, dryads, and miscellaneous nymphs. It’s those lesser deities who make it rain when the hay is down. When the forecast is for fair skies and light winds, here comes a free-lancing nymph full of fun to whip up a quick rain cloud out of what should have been a classic clear day.
I suspect they’re the same demigods who conjure up showers on picnics and class reunions, send rain when I go out minus umbrella or when I prepare to sleep out on the patio. Even as I write this column, there’s a monster thunderhead looming above the horizon of the western hills; the skies grow darker by the minute; the rumble of the afternoon storm threatens to silence my keyboard and monitor.
But as the quality of life, including fishing and hunting, diminishes in some areas, we can’t always blame the minor gods. Mankind has a history of fouling up his and his neighbor’s nests.
It was perhaps understandable back when world populations were more reasonable, a few million here and there. When conditions got too bad, all they had to do was pack up, head out for new frontier and start over.
History is rife with examples, one of the most familiar being what happened in a place once called the Fertile Crescent, Biblical land, a “land of milk and honey.” Overused, overgrazed, it became a desert of shifting sands, hardly fit for human habitation.
The same story can be written throughout Asia, where populations struggling for existence over-cultivated, deforested and lost the topsoil that takes thousands of years to rebuild—half of China’s topsoil probably went down the Yellow and Yangtze rivers.
No continent has escaped the consequences of land abuse.
Our own West lost much of its fertility in a scant half-century of overgrazing, when white men replaced migrating buffalo herds with confined European cattle not allowed to move with the change of grasslands as wild animals could.
Prairie grasses disappeared.
To some old-timers, recollections of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s remain vivid.
And we’re still at it, with another step down the line of nest fouling.
The richest known fishing grounds in the world occupied extensive shoals located between northern Europe and northern North America.
Since the days of the Vikings, fishermen have depended on the fishing grounds around Greenland and Georges Bank off Nantucket.
Unbelievably rich in sea life, with cod by the millions of tons, they fed folks from Portugal to Norway, Canada, the U.S., Russia—you name it.
Today, that fishery is considered on its very last legs. Now fishermen are facing ever-increasing restrictions, limited landings, quotas, things unheard of a decade or two ago.
Sea turtles are declining. Sweet, salty oysters once were affordable by the bushel; recently oysters were selling at 50 cents each.
The main reason we haven’t really attacked these problems is that we haven’t wanted to interfere with industry, including agriculture.
A British ambassador to the U.S. once called the national parks our “best idea.”
Nowadays some 260 million people visit the national parks every year; a figure roughly equal to the population of the U.S.
To most Americans, the opportunity for individual renewal in these protected settings seems an inherent right.
They are mistaken. The stresses of our age have become manifest in the parks, whose integrity and survival are threatened by intrusive commercialism, legislative manipulation, and institutional poverty.
The physical and spiritual breadth of the National Park Service domain is breathtaking, including, at last count, 376 parks, monuments, battlefields, forts, trails, seashores, bridges and so on. Its 81 million acres contain some of the planet’s most transporting geography.
The Park Service domain extends halfway around the world, from Acadia in Maine to the Pacific war memorial on Guam, from Denali and Gates of the Arctic in Alaska to Buck Island Reef in the Virgin Islands.
Tax money, not corporate money, should be used to revive our great national holdings. The parks represent the one true American entitlement, and Congress should provide the wherewithal to administer them and preserve the land and structures so crucial to our sense of ourselves.
The latest Park Service appropriation was less than $2 billion. Keep in mind that our bombers now cost a cool $2 billion apiece.
We mistakenly assume that the parks will always be there for us. They will not be unless they are tended to for their own sakes—not for profit or political advantage, but for posterity.
No one group can be blamed exclusively. It’s not just government promoting economic development, or fishermen trying to make a living, or regional sewage discharges, or the dredging of marshes and nursery grounds, or the pillage of forests.
We now find that what once was without end is ending.
We can’t blame it all on the gods.
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Top o’ the morning!