Shrink Your Ecological Footprint

The latest Orlando Weekly featured a piece on a local author’s collection of essays called Salvaging the Real Florida: Lost and Found in the State of Dreams. No matter how many times one might complain about such a thing, newspaper websites never seem to include links in their articles… but I digress.

I’m glad to see a book whose mission is conservation that is not a hippie call-to-action rag – that would only be read by one kind of audience. With any luck, the late emphasis on “buy local”, and “slow money” will end up getting books like this – made in Florida, about Florida – some much needed attention and have the after-effect of opening some minds in the process.

According to the Weekly’s Katie Westfall in her article “Nature’s Edge”:

“At some point, every reasonable adult has to ask that question: How do we keep these things functioning the way they were always meant to function?” Belleville asks during a phone interview. In “What if the Shaman is a Snail,” he examines how the tiny mollusks are a barometer for water health. He tells us there are some snail species that congregate around certain springs in Florida that aren’t found anywhere else in the world. Belleville has his own collection of goldenhorn marissa snails that he’s found during his travels, and he watches them in his home aquarium to see what they do. By the end of the essay, we learn that the little guys have a tough time outrunning the pollution that spills out of storm drains or the pesticides and fertilizers that seep into their domain. We’re told that “future Floridians will pay for the contemporary sins of our water-sucking developers and their political toadies.”

Yes. More of that. Floridians need to learn when to “eat their vegetables” like good little citizens of Earth.

I guess Belleville has been at this longer than me, because he (correctly) points out that my hope of people gainins new perspective is not a one-step process:

“Regardless of how well a person writes or describes a place, I don’t think that in itself ­- that narrative, that ability to describe a place – is not going to change a person’s mind,” Bellville says. “I think what it can do, in the best of worlds, is to have that person want to go outside and want to have ?an experience.”

I have been on a nighttime bio-luminescent kayak tour in Titusville, one of the places mentioned in the Weekly article. It is one of the most breathtaking things I have ever seen in Florida, and I tell as many people as I can about it. It’s difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to capture on film or video, so I’m glad I can now refer them to this book.