By SJ Otto
I remember when I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, I lived in St. Louis , MO.
Most of the small creeks I lived by were open sewers. I remember being taken to
a beautiful park, back in those days, for a picnic with my family. I remember
walking through a path that went past a large creek. The creek went over the
path and from there went to several deep pools. Some were between three to four
feet deep. I looked down deep in the water and it had a gray tint to it. There
were no fish in it. It had no tadpoles or crawdads. Those are found in most
healthy streams. This stream had nothing living in it, except some frogs along
the shore. The water smelled like sewage.
This was common back then. There was a creek down the street
from me. We found minnows and crawdads in that stream. We enjoyed going long
that creek to find all the animals that lived in it. But there was a sewage
treatment plant at one point. after the creek passed that plant it was dead. No
minnows or crayfish could be found past that. There were some frogs along the
creek. There were snakes along the sides of the stream from time to time and
some large rats. There were blood worms in the
creek, tiny red worms that looked like threads. They seem to be able to
tolerate the low level of oxygen in that stream. The water always had a gray
tint and there was often that ugly clump of bubbles found in dirty streams.
I like to swim in streams. As a kid I used to go swimming with my family at the Big River, in Missouri. Occasionally we also swam in the Meramec River and a few other streams in that state. After I moved to Kansas I have swum in the Fall River, the Walnut River and the Wakarusa River. I've waded in the Arkansas River but that is nothing to brag about. I would never swim in any of these if they had no fish in them. I would hate to imagine what these rivers would be like if we get rid of the EPA and other environmental agencies.
I like to swim in streams. As a kid I used to go swimming with my family at the Big River, in Missouri. Occasionally we also swam in the Meramec River and a few other streams in that state. After I moved to Kansas I have swum in the Fall River, the Walnut River and the Wakarusa River. I've waded in the Arkansas River but that is nothing to brag about. I would never swim in any of these if they had no fish in them. I would hate to imagine what these rivers would be like if we get rid of the EPA and other environmental agencies.
By the time I left St. Louis
for Wichita , in
1969, they had just put in a new sewer line along the creek by my house and the
pollution went away. Then I started to notice fish returning and the stream was
alive again.
My point to all of this is that I have no desire to go back
to the bad old days when our water ways were nothing but open sewers. We have a
lot of politicians calling for an end to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Many of their supporters are calling for this also. When I think back to the
wasted environment I had to endure as a child, I can't image anyone wanting to
return to that. And that is what we will have if this country goes backwards
and starts to chip away at our environmental protections. Before that we had
rivers in the east were completely dead. Their water was often a horrible pee
green color or had water that looked like red paint. This kind of half hazard
treatment of out lands and waters should be a thing of the past. We should
never want to see that kind of industrial abuse ever again. And yet we have
given our government in Washington
over to such
men as Donald Trump, who sees our environment as some kind of impediment to
business. We can make money in many ways. But it is really hard to replace the
natural world once we have killed it off.
Pix by LinkedIn, now8news.com, Pammy's
World.
No comments:
Post a Comment