Torturing helpless animals for entertainment is wrong. The decent reverence for life that is in every sensitive person cries out against it.
- That was the lead paragraph of my first environmental column, which ran in the Deseret News on Nov. 14, 1977. I was attacking the "sport" of chasing bobcats with large hunting dogs. Since then, I've written hundreds of environmental columns. This is my last.Recently I took a cursory look into our microfilms, and the earliest byline that I could find with my "environmental specialist" designation was printed July 18, 1973.
The article began, "Mayor E.J. Garn today delivered a searing attack against the recent Environmental Protection Agency proposals to bring Wasatch Front air quality within national clean air standards."
I was assigned to write this column more than four years later. I had doubts, fearing I'd have trouble keeping my reportorial credibility if I also had to take positions on the same issues. But I was assured I could both record the environmental news fairly and express my feelings on the opinion pages.
It was tougher than I imagined.
If I were to keep my integrity I had to forcefully state my conviction that we must protect nature. Nature has its own value. Also, an undiminished landscape and intact ecosystems enrich our lives.
The natural setting shapes character, both of a people and of an individual person. From biblical times to today, the wilderness is where you assert your core beliefs or find out who you are. It's near the center of most people's values - Moses leading the Jews, or Jesus fasting in the wilderness, or Thoreau writing in his cabin beside Walden Pond.
If the rugged natural setting is destroyed, our spirit will be diminished.
But advocacy carries a heavy price. To talk about that, I should mention my grandfathers.
Jozsef Baumann was born in a peasant village in Hungary about 110 years ago. In the Hungary of his youth, the local count could demand that the villagers supply a certain number of men to work his fields every month. He grew up in a country that was still locked in the Middle Ages.
Grandpop Bauman came to this country, where his name was Americanized and where eventually he was the oldest working carpenter in New Jersey. I especially remember his square hands: rough, gnarled, strong-fingered. The hands of a worker. In his robust old age, he helped demolish houses that he had built in the early years of this century.
Edgar Stone, my other grandfather, lived all his life in New Jersey. He was a gentle soul who grew flowers for a living in his back yard. When we visited him, he would show us around flower beds that were boisterous with color - a contrast to his soft-spoken ways.
Both made their livelihoods from the land or the land's products. And I worked outdoors myself for a few months.
One of my most exciting jobs was working as a deckhand on an oceangoing tugboat and on other craft, in the Marshall Islands during the summer of 1965. I wanted to follow the sea and I bitterly hated leaving the Pacific to start college.
People like my grandparents are entitled to the highest respect, that is, those who wrest their living from the ground. The people like that whom I know are all good people.
Thinking over these hundreds of little essays, there is only one I can remember that I would retract. In it I said, either in a sarcastic or jingoistic mood, that the United States and the (now deceased) Soviet Union should get together and bully the world. I don't know what got into me. I take it back.
But a worse regret is that because I was forced to expose my real feelings - to advocate protection - I found myself on the other side of the fence from many people I admire - farmers and ranchers, men and women working in sawmills and coal mines. There was a lot of friction, and that hurts.
In the realm of factual errors, I once talked about watching Venus rise higher and higher in the sky, one night when I was camping; I suspect it must have been Jupiter. Again, I called El Nino a volcano, when it's really an ocean current. As far as I know, I corrected other mistakes soon after they were made.
Now it's time to say goodbye. As of this week, I am assigned to cover the medical beat, in addition to my science coverage. It's a step up.
The new environmental writer will be Brent Israelsen, a lively and intelligent young man who loves Bob Dylan's music almost as much as I do.
It's scary to be launching a new beat at nearly 47 years old. But it's not as bad as jumping from a wet, moving deck to a dock with a hawser looped over your arm.
Another big regret is that this column might not have accomplished much.
For example, not only are inedible animals like bears, cougars and bobcats hunted for their pelts in Utah, they are hounded relentlessly for "sport" too. But torturing helpless animals for entertainment is still wrong.