I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day Weekend.
There have been a number of themes in conversations that I want to touch upon, but first I want to reflect a bit about what we experienced around Semiahmoo this past weekend.
With a minus 3 foot tide during daylight hours, and with warm sunny weather lots of people were out and about. We couldn't believe where people choose to park and drive. Along much of the spit, there is county park while there is also some semi-developed land. By this I mean that they have put in the sewer, water, and streets, but haven't built yet. Some of this land has dune type structure above the beach, yet cars were parking all long the top of the dunes endangering to erode the hill.
In addition, while the spit has many oysters and other clams, it is closed to clamming/oystering. This is in part due to the fear of a water treatment facility (read sewage) malfunction, but also due to the fact that there is a large community effort to create a strong oyster ecosystem once again. When clamming one of the rules is to back fill any holes that you have dug. Any hole, the tides love to deepen, lengthen, etc. Yet, tons of people were leaving the beach with five gallon buckets full of oysters/clams, having not filled in their holes.
Finally, what really got to us is the following. The Semiahmoo Marina has a dock type of breakwater rather than the rock wall type. With the minus tide, that meant the one end of the dock is accessible by the now exposed shore. There are signs all over the beach saying to say away from seals. In addition, the breakwater has a large sign saying "stay off" "dangerous" "no." Yet six adults walked out onto the breakwater and scared the seals back into the water. Yesterday evening, by the way, we saw the first seal pup of the season. The breakwater acts like a nursery to the seal colony.
I was struck by the plain ignorance and non-thinking of humans in a natural environment. Rather than watching the animals for any sign of disturbance, and once seen, backing off a bit to allow proper room, complete lack of respect was shown instead. I was reminded once again that we humans are now officially an urban species. For the past roughly 5 years, there are now more humans living in urban environments than in rural ones. One of the draw backs to urban living is a cutting off a chance to participate in an more wild habitat, one that is outside human control.
This really hit home for me, as I had spent some time at the Padilla Bay Interpretive Center in Bay View, WA earlier this week on a field trip. The Center takes time to educate the children about proper beach protocol before allowing the children to explore. Then there is again time to not only look at what they have collected but talk about why this ecosystem is important to human and other species health.
I was also struck by our own children's response to their own actions regarding nature. Sunday morning as we were getting ready to leave for church, the kids found two spiders on the dock. They thought it would be great to put them together. I was never sure as to what the reason behind this motivation was. When put together, however, the larger spider pounced upon the small one, and ate it. Our first realization as to what had happened was the sobbing coming from the end of the dock. The concern wasn't over the fact that one had eaten the other, the sadness came because "I interfered with nature."
The last two stories do give me hope for the children of the world in terms of their response to ecosystems around themselves. First, because there are adults who are concerned with sharing with our children the passion of learning, experiencing and treating with respect the world around us. Second, because children do have so much compassion toward others and life in general.
Encouraging compassion can help us learn to tread a little more lightly and respectfully upon this God gifted earth.
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