ROVIN'
AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE
Copyright © 2001 by Michael
Segers
Brought to you by Peanut.org
Both
Armies Wear Green
There’s something about human beings that makes us feel that if we
really want adventures, if we want to experience life, we have to go somewhere
else. From Homer’s Odyssey
to Cervantes’s Don Quixote,
from Melville’s Moby-Dick
to Survivor
and its related un-reality television shows, people have left home to find
excitement, adventure, and conflict.
If we know what we
are looking at, rather than what we are looking for, we can find epic struggles
going on all the time, right in our own back yards.
I’m always humbled to think that the great French entomologist, Henri
Fabre, based his life’s work on observations he made in an area not
significantly larger than my back yard.
As long as plants and animals have been alive, things have never stood
still. Today, in a quiet patch of green, we can see the kind of struggle
that may have been a factor in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
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The lizard-tail
(right), named for the shape of its flowers, is a modest little
plant native to the southeastern United States.
You can find it in moist, shady areas blooming in the spring.
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The air yam (left) is a relative of the yams that are almost as important as
turkey for Thanksgiving dinner—and also to the plant that provides the active
ingredient in birth control pills. An
invasive vine, it can grow very rapidly, because, like all vines, it does not
have to devote nourishment to building a sturdy upright stem.
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When the two plants are growing in the same area, it is likely that the
lizard-tail will be crowded out by the air yam, and so, a few square feet in the
back yard or along the side of the road can be a battlefield (below).
In my day job, I often talk with children about carnivorous and
herbivorous animals. Just this
morning, a little girl asked me if a particular animal was “good” or
“bad.” Of course, animals are
pretty much beyond good and bad. A meat-eater
does what a meat-eater gotta do, while from the point of view of a blade of grass, a cow is a
mass-murderer.
So, although it is tempting to cheer on the home team, the gentle little
lizard-tails trying to hold onto their homeland, the truth is, the air yam is
not trying to do the natives in. It
is simply doing what it does best: grow.
We don’t have to buy a controversial ticket to become the first space
tourist or head out to the Australian outback.
If you keep your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your
eyes open to see what you are looking at, you can see Heaven in a grain of sand, a mighty epic in a patch of
weeds--not to mention a great community free-net in rural southwest Georgia.
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