I recently
bought THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT; A book written by various authors
that takes place during the aftermath of the world pandemic in Stephen King’s THE STAND.
After the first couple of short stories, I decided
to go back and reread THE STAND before completing THE END OF THE WORLD…
It has been
years since I first read THE STAND, and I am so much older. The story is still graphic, and grabs you
from the start, but the under story, the story not written, the story that
comes to my mind is how beautiful and natural this world would be without
humans.
In Alaska they kill the wolves to protect the moose so people can kill the moose.
When I
arrived in Maine in 1962 the state was not a major tourist attraction. There was a Maine culture that was
unique. One third of the state was
unpopulated – wilderness. I ran the
Allagash River, and for ten days never saw another human being.
The
population of Maine is growing. Today,
Maine is a popular tourist attraction and a cheap and safe place for
retirement. The old ‘Maine culture’ is pretty much gone.
There are fifteen-hundred miles of snowmobile trails crisscrossing the most remote and once pristine regions of the state.
The days are gone when you would walk silently through the newly fallen snow on wooden snowshoes, hear the chickadees in the trees, see a porcupine eating tree bark, and surprise deer out of its bed.
Now people, wearing crash helmets, ride snowmobiles at breakneck speed, screaming through the wilderness trails like Hell’s Angels on a cross-country run, seeing nothing on their way to the next lodge with steaks and a hot tub and a bar.
The Allagash River now has guides and trips
and tourists experiencing the wilderness that is no longer there.
Earth's human population is increasing exponentially. Resources are becoming scarce…
Picture a
world without humans. Clean water. Clean air…
the Ol'Buzzard
Unique cultures do require remoteness and isolation to be created, that's very true. Almost nothing in our world is remote/isolated anymore.
ReplyDeleteI lived in Maine as a Child and it was indeed a unique culture back then. It's pretty much a common story everywhere. When I 1st moved to Arizona the Desert Wilderness was unspoiled and there was also a lot of Agriculture here growing what was needed. Now it's a sea of Subdivision Hells and recently, the Mega Warehouses of Amazon and the like, and huge Apartment Complexes that resemble Chinese Prisons. It's not sustainable, a Desert is particularly fragile as an Ecosystem and Water is scarce. We kind of got a glimpse into how the Earth would recover during the Years of the Pandemic... and it didn't take long for Mother Earth to reclaim what Man had intruded upon. I think we're the only Species that if we were gone, the rest of Earth wouldn't miss us and would function as Nature intended.
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