The sad eventual fate of the sparce frightened wildlife remaining in Northern Virginia's urban woods and forests, which have been allowed to survive pending their certain untimely death in the midst of continual human deforestation, is as poignantly thought-provoking as it is emotionally evocative. For me, a country boy, raised in-and-around the thick green woods of East Texas and constrained quite involuntarily to live in cities only for the sake of gainful employment, the paving of paradise in order to build parking lots, strip-malls, apartment buildings, and shopping centers is a dastardly thing done in the name of civilized development that I would like to see greatly restrained. To better explain myself, I'll set forth a few environmental facts, and my aesthetic regard towards them.
Recently, while driving to a large, well-used park-and-ride early one morning to catch a bus, the headlights of my car illuminated what, at first, I thought was a glorious statue of nature erected at the edge of forested divide that bordered the vast expanse of cold concreted pavement. Yet, in the seconds that I beheld it, the regal statue moved ever-so-slightly and I suddenly realized that what I beheld was not marble or bronze, but gloriously alive. Amazingly, it was a large gorgeous four-point buck deer that was standing in front of me, sadly peering out over what was once his beautiful domain. For much less than a minute, the beautiful mammal ignored my presence, then turned his great head and fierce eyes toward me; and in a graceful, effortless turnaround bounded nimbly into a stand of trees and bushes out of sight.
A few thoughts crossed my mind at that instant, but the one that caused me the greatest reflection and sadness was the disturbing realization that remains the greatest truth; that such a magnificent creation of nature, along with his probable doe mate and fawns, are still, to a great many callous human beings, regarded as hunting prey, food, and trophies. To the great majority of people residing in urban areas, the few remaining deer, raccoons, possums, foxes, and beavers are merely annoying obstacles to routine car and truck movement. The many pitiful decaying bodies of large deer, beavers, squirrels, raccoons, and possums that have been hit by automobiles and left by the killers to rot on the sides of the roads evidence this fact.
The only remaining refuges for indigenous North American wildlife are the state and national parks that have been dedicated to the preservation of a select few wild mammals, compared to their vast number before the dominance of Western Europeans and the British on the American continent. In 1607, at the time of the founding of the Jamestown Colony, there were 86 percent more large mammals such as bears, mountain lions, foxes, or deer in the undisturbed forests of North America than at present time. Today, the only undisturbed forests remaining in the United States are those federal and state forests set aside as parks, which are patrolled on a regular basis by law enforcement to ensure that poachers, loggers, and vandals aren't destroying trees and wildlife.
Interestingly, the nature-loving Native Americans were regarded as cultural savages by most American immigrants and migrants who came to North America in colonial times, who, later, traversed the continent to eventually dispossess the Indians of their beautiful lands and resources. These were the same deceitfully pragmatic human beings who plotted hideous genocide against the North American Indian populations for their own insidiously gainful purposes. Yet, during their systematic decimation, the Native Americans continued to pursue their simple way of life, clinging to a pantheistic view of nature, not believing in the ownership of land; but, rather, in a common possession and use of forests, plains, mountains, lakes, and streams for the purpose of mutual, peaceful co-habitation. For, as they insisted, how could anyone ever personally, or nationally, own the Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls, the Great Plains, or the beautiful natures of Yellowstone or Yosemite, and regard them as mere real estate, to be bought and sold? Unfortunately, it took nearly five hundred years of savage killing, and eventual U.S. domination of all of the Native American tribes, before the white man finally awoke to the startling revelation that the Indian lifestyle might have actually represented something worthwhile and precious, and that with the death of Native American culture and philosophy also came the killing and demise of Mother Nature.
Every time I see a deer, raccoon, possum, or squirrel during the evening hours, trying to cross an urban road in order to find food and drinkable water, my heart goes out to those poor animals. When I see those, on roadsides, that have been carelessly killed and left as carrion, I frequently shed tears. And there are much larger mammals, elk, moose, and bear, in, other, more wooded urban areas on the American continent just trying to survive their domination by mankind, as their natural habitats become inexorably smaller and more polluted.
The great C.S. Lewis, in his writings about universal morality, penned several essays in advocacy for animals and their noble spirits. Believing that the Creator endowed all animals, especially large mammals, with spirits that make them essentially eternal in nature, Lewis remarked that, "mankind will have to answer to the Creator for all the unnecessary killings of precious nature carelessly perpetrated without due cause." Perhaps his observation was right.
