Back in 1980, the late Canadian naturalist, John A. Livingston, wrote the following on the loss of wildlife habitat………

There was behind my parents’ house a city ravine, with a little stream running through it. On one end, before the stream disappeared into a large pipe, there was a little marshy area where the water spilled shallowly to one side. There were toads and frogs and newts. If you lay very quiet in the grass at the water’s edge, you could observe them. The longer you looked, the more deeply you were mesmerized…possessed. There was no world whatever, outside that world…nothing beyond shimmering light on water, smooth clean muck, green plants, trickling sounds, flickering tadpoles, living, being. That was when the pain started.

The knife of separation is cruel. I not only remember in factual sense but I can feel to this day the anguished frustration, the knowledge that I could never—not ever—be more than a boy on the grass, excluded from that world wholly and eternally. But why? Why pick on me? I wished it no harm; I only wanted to be part, to join, to “plug in.” The denial was impersonal and cold and final. It had gnawed at me ever since—not all the time, mercifully—but much of it.

I wept over it, in a dogwood thicket. In the certainty that through no apparent fault of my own I was being unjustly denied something that was as fundamentally important as air, I felt much anguish at times. Unpredictably, of course, as it is with pre-adolescents, there would be unexpected moments of pure inexpressible joy and happiness when the “free flow” between nature and myself was unobstructed and open. Such moments always seemed to happen accidentally: why couldn’t I will them? Always there was a mix of sadness and pleasure. My early experience with nature was bittersweet; it still is. I rejoice in wildlife and I despair, in equal measure.

That is one side of it. Plans were revealed for the construction of a storm sewer through “my” ravine. Shock, dismay, and all the rest of it were mine early. The ten-year-old mind is not subtle: how can I warn the frogs and toads and newts? Can I get them out of there, take them away somewhere? They are defenseless; it is wrong to hurt them. What right do we have to hurt them when we cannot warn them? They don’t know what is happening, or why. There was much puzzlement here. All logic seemed to be backwards or upside down; nothing made sense. I could do nothing but watch, with sorrow and fury. But why the sorrow and the fury? What is compassion, after all, and where does it come from? And why do so many other people feel nothing at all? Those questions are as germane today as they were when I was ten. It seems clear now that, although there was no gainsaying the intensity of my emotion, my feeling for the wildlife beings involved, the sorrow and fury, were perhaps entirely on my own behalf, I was responding intensely because I was being impinged upon.

I think that through these moments of “free flow,” in the grass by the pondbeneath the dogwoods, the toads and the frogs and the newts and their hypnotic sunlight had been irreversibly incorporated into my world, literally into me. My world was being tampered with…Next spring I would have a piece missing, chewed out of me by the ditch diggers. The hurt was much more than resentment and sympathy. It was real, and I would feel it always.

…Despite repeated attempts, and despite even having heard and smelled him, and having photographed his fresh footprint, I have never seen a wild tiger. At this late date—meaning both my own chronology and the status of the tiger population—I probably never will. That is not as important now to me as it used to be, because the fortunes of the tiger are no less close to me for that. The tiger is already an integral part of me and his fate is mine. He entered me with the toads and frogs and newts.