Words I Can't Get Out of My Head...

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

This is the final paragraph at the of end of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," an apocolyptic novel about a man and his son traveling across a burned, desolate grey, cold landscape where it rains ash. You never find out why, or what happened. You only know that the world has been destroyed beyond recovery. Joy is drinking a can of Coke, or -- a highlight -- eating canned fruits that somehow survived. There will never be fruit again. They get to the ocean and it is cold and dead. There is no chance of regeneration. The world is just dead--with a few people still roaming and surviving. Likely killing and eating each other. The vision is so bleak it has haunted me for a month since I finished the book. There is no blame placed, no evil person, no political statement. We are all silently implicated in the destruction of our world.

I want it not to be true. I want to not believe we are destroying our world. And yet every day I feel I read in the paper some sinister sign that nature is going seriously haywire, that the world--our majestic blue and green orb in space -- has reached a point of pollution and devastation caused by humans from which it cannot recover. Chesapeake Bay blue crabs may be on their way out. Strange viruses are killing oysters farther and farther north. Whales are dying off the coast of California and no one knows why.

When I was still in my Twenties I vowed to go and see every magical place I could before they were destroyed. I travelled to Michoacan to see the Monarch Butterflies, and I am committed to seeing the birthing whales in the secret inlet in Baja. Already since I saw the butterflies their numbers have decreased dramatically. Scientists say soon they will dip to a place below which they cannot recover. And I wonder: Will my sons grow up in a world without monarch butterflies, or Chesapeake Bay blue crabs, or whales? Will they no longer be able to swim in the ocean--one of my greatest joys -- because it will make them sick?

When I was young, and tortured, and traveling in Asia agonizing over what I would do with my life this weathered old Dutchman said to me by a pool in Indonesia: But why do you worry about the future. Children born in the future will not miss these things you worry about, because they will never have known them.

Years later, I think this is true. But it still makes me unbearably sad. Will we destroy all the beauty of our world? So that my sons will never know the parts of the world that are most fragile, most magical, that make you feel most joyful about being alive?