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DOUGLAS COLLEGE LIBRARY

ARCHIVES

Dont muddy up
the googo

*Googol: The largest number of things that has a name. Webster
defines as the number one followed by a hundred zeroes.

 

 

There are googols of little creatures squig-
gling and burrowing, flitting and squishing
under the mud, through the swamps and over
the sandy marshes. Sea squirts, copepods, lug-
worm larvae and the babies of little fish. Each
with a kind of a brain, each with the breath of
life. But their life is ebbing. And as they start to
go—you do, too.

You are standing on the threshold of time
in as sacred a place as any in the world. It's
where the life of the water and the life of the
land converge in biological blur. These are the
wetlands—the swamps and the mudflats that
sometimes smell like rotten eggs. These are the
marshes, clogged with weeds, swarming with
bugs, teeming with beautiful life. This is where
the moon moves the water in shallow ebbs and
floods; where the sun pierces down to the ooze
and the nutrients flow in a strange and mar-
velous way. Nowhere else except here in these
sopping grounds is there so much life in so
much concentration. But the life is dwindling.
And as these lands start to go—you do, too.

These squishy, mushy lands are where most
of our fish are born, the fish that feed the fish

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that feed the fish that fill the sea. These narrow
strips of estuarine land are where the birds
come to rest and nest and feed; and they are tied
inexorably to the life support for the raccoons
and the bears dnd the deer a hundred miles
away. And to you.

In Califorriia, most of the wetlands are
already gone. In Florida, they're going fast. Once
there were 127 million acres of interior and
coastal wetlands. Now forty per cent are gone,
the precious specks of life in these treasured
lands exchanged for yacht clubs and marinas
and industrial growth. As we dredge the bays
and fill the marshes and cover the mud with
asphalt; as we spray our poisons and scatter
our waste and spew oil upon the waters—we
destroy forever the great forces of life that
began millennia ago.

But now we have gone too far. Because this
planet belongs not only to us but to them as
well. To the umpteen zillion other things that fly
in the sky and roam on the land and swim in the
sea and burrow beneath our feet.

Now, especially now, if we will only stop to
think — perhaps we will think to stop.

   

   
  

       
 
  
  

 

 
  

 

 
 

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