The Land Ethic

How did your childhood shape your relationship with the environment?

This is a hard question for me to answer without writing an entire book on the subject.  In my childhood, I spent a lot of time outdoors.  My brother and sister and I would play outside all the time, literally until our cows came home.  Growing up on a farm gave us a lot of room to explore.  The woods behind our house became a perfect place to play imaginary games.  We would pretend that a fallen tree was a grand castle that we had to protect from invading armies.  It seemed like I never had shoes on and I was constantly dirty, much to the despair of my mother who was constantly trying to clean up the dirt we tracked all over the house.  I always loved being outside, especially in the summer.  This is where it started, I wanted to fix every flaw in the environment that humans have ever made; quite the undertaking for a 13 year old.

My dad was truly the person who influenced my love of nature though.  As a farmer he cares for the earth as much as he cares for my siblings and me.  When he had cows, he knew all of their personalities, and named them accordingly.  His favorite, Bessie, was the kindest and he would always milk her first.  He could never hurt a cow, no matter how frustrated he was with them.  That is how he taught us to treat animals.  Even as an avid hunter, he focuses on making the deadliest shot so that the deer doesn’t suffer.  He provides the deer population with food and salt licks in order to take a deer for food each year.  He always told me that one should never kill unless it is for necessity.  

I have a strong memory of a kitten I once had.  I kept it in the barn with heavy doors.  It always tried to run after me so I would slam the door shut before it could get out because I didn’t want any animals to get to it.  One day, the kitten was too fast for me, I slammed the door right on the cat.  The most horrifying screech resulted.  I quickly opened the door only to see that its middle had been smooshed and it was still alive.  I instantly burst into tears crying with big heaves, not knowing what to do.  My dad was just around the corner and came up to me asking what happened.  He told me to go to the house and he would take care of it.  I cried all the way home wondering how dad would fix the poor thing.  When he came home I asked if the kitten was better.  He shook his head sadly, he had had to kill it so it wouldn’t suffer a long slow death.  I cried all night, feeling so sad for the poor kitten.  This is why I would never eat veal, cows deserve to be given room to roam around and decent food.  They should not suffer.   I have always felt that they had their own intrinsic value.

Growing up in a strongly Catholic family, we were taught to be stewards of the earth.  Humans are here to use the earth for their use, but they are also to take care of it, respect it, and maybe even improve it.  That is what my dad tries to do.  We have free range chickens that use for meat and for eggs.  We also have a garden so that we can have fresh produce.  But as humans, we are not perfect, my dad still uses some pesticides and recently turned an untouched meadow into a field, because it was no longer profitable to keep it natural.  He says the taxes were just too high to let the meadow go unused.  While I think this is a shame, we also need to make a living.  My dad recently bought hunting ground that he is keeping in its natural state (other than the food that he planted for the deer), which he says makes up for turning the small meadow near our house into a field. 

All in all, I love the environment, and while I no longer desire to fix all of the world’s environmental problems (for that is just too large an undertaking), I plan on making my impact on the earth as small as possible.