59

One of my classes this semester is Literature and the Environment. As part of our discussion today, our professor asked us when we had first percieved that the environment (the world we live in) was in a form of danger.

One person remarked about how she (back home) lived in the country, and she watched the land being parcelled out and divided and built over as a child.

Another commented on how, in kindergarten, it was impressed up him (and many of us) that the rainforest, though beautiful and full of life, was being destroyed and cut down.

I had to think really hard.

And this is what came to me:

When I was little, not more than five years old, I was out on the bay with my dad and I think a friend of his. We were motorboating around, having a good time. I liked to steer it in circles. We at lunch in the middle of the bay.

When I was done eating, I dropped my plastic fork in the ocean, not even thinking. My dad told me not to do that, that a fish would try to eat it and die. I was killing fishes. I love fish.

I was so ashamed.

And I really, looking back on it, think that that was the first time I realized that we -- humans -- have the capacity to negatively affect the environment.