All Creatures Great and Small

Today's news wire showed an interesting tidbit, apparently Bush managed to do ONE good thing for the environment during his eight-year tenure—protecting more ocean area than any other president.

Which dove tails nicely with the Writer's Almanac email I received for today that mentioned the following:

British zoologist and writer Gerald Durrell worked for a while collecting animals for zoos, but his methods clashed with the zoology ideas of the day — he wanted to get rare animals and increase their populations, not just get the showy animals that people would pay a lot of money to see.

Gerald Durrell wrote a letter to seal in a time capsule, and he said: "The world is to us what the Garden of Eden was supposed to be to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were banished, but we are banishing ourselves from our Eden. The difference is that Adam and Eve had somewhere else to go. We have nowhere else to go. We hope that by the time you read this you will have at least partially curtailed our reckless greed and stupidity. If we have not, at least some of us have tried. … All we can say is learn from what we have achieved, but above all learn from our mistakes, do not go on endlessly like a squirrel in a wheel committing the same errors hour by hour day by day year after year century after century as we have done up to now. We hope that there will be fireflies and glow-worms at night to guide you and butterflies in hedges and forests to greet you. We hope that there will still be the extraordinary varieties of creatures sharing the land of the planet with you to enchant you."

Obviously, Durrell was a wee bit optimistic in his hopes that his fellow humans would learn from their environmental mistakes. Heck, we can't seem to learn when it hits our pocketbooks, like it did last fall with gas (prices are rising and expected to go higher again and OPEC is threatening production cuts). So it is highly unlikely we have learned much about being kind to the lesser creatures on our planet.