TRANSCRIPT
I’m gonna tell a little story about the moment I became an environmentalist. I don’t even know that exactly at the time I had any clue what being an environmentalist was, and I don’t think that I consciously used that word in relation to myself in any way back then. But this is the moment that sparked it.
First, I’m gonna tell a little bit what led up to that moment. There was a pond that I used to love when I was a kid. I grew up in an apartment complex on the edge of a highway, and the other side of the highway was a forest. There were fields all around, and across one field, across some dirt hills and across some streams, there was a beautiful pond. It was on the edge of a farm, and I used to go with my big net as a kid. I used to go catch turtles in the pond. It was my favorite thing to do.
I got a pair of waiter boots eventually so I could go deep into the mud and try to catch turtles. I would catch frogs, leopard frogs, and I would catch bullfrogs. I would catch the polliwogs of the bullfrogs. The bullfrog polliwogs were big and huge, and they were rare because they lived two whole years. I don’t know how they made it through the winter because it would be a very cold winter in upstate New York, in western New York. Big thick ice over the pond would develop all winter, and somehow the polliwogs would live under it. Maybe they would bury into the mud, just like the turtles. Everything would go down into the mud and get buried and lived through the winter. They would hibernate, the turtles and the frogs. The bullfrogs were huge. There were ducks in the pond sometimes. I had baby ducks that I would raise myself, and I would bring the baby ducks with me, and they would swim. They would go swim and enjoy the pond while I would be catching turtles and crayfish also in the pond.
I loved that there was just a whole ecosystem there. There were dragonflies everywhere, and in the pond, there were also dragonfly larvae. If you’ve never seen a dragonfly larvae, this is what my experience of them was: they were the most terrifying looking animals you’ll ever see. I used to catch snapping turtles too in this pond. Sometimes they would get big, but mostly I would—I mean, I was scared of the big ones. I think I caught a couple the whole time I was a kid, but the really little ones, they were amazing. I would keep them as pets for a while and feed them fish. They were very aggressive, and they would even bite me until they got to know me, and then I could play with them, and they wouldn’t bite me anymore. I had one named Snappy for a while. I had another one named Animal. I had another one named Rex when I was a kid. Then I would let them grow a little and then release them again back. I would sometimes keep them for a year or two or sometimes just for a couple of weeks or a month.
Well, dragonfly larvae were terrifying. They were like the scariest, most alien creature. They had this big snout, and they would catch—I would sometimes find one that had caught a tadpole. They would stick their little proboscis thing into the side of the tadpole, and they would suck all its juices out and literally suck it dry. This is like an insect larvae that would catch amphibian larvae hooked onto them. They were so scary. They didn’t bite, but they were just terrifying to look at. There was all sorts of different water beetles and water striders. There were snakes and their different kinds of snakes, garter snakes all around it. There were these snakes that had a yellow ring around their neck. There were milk snakes that were beautiful that I would find. There were also—what was there? There were water snakes in there, different kinds of water snakes. They were black rat snakes. Everything lived around here. There were mice, there were voles, there were star-nosed moles. I caught some of those sometimes. Different species of ducks. There were great blue herons. There were white egrets. There were killdeers that lived all around the pond. It was a wildlife, and there were fish. Sometimes I would even go fishing in the pond. There were sunfish, there were bass, there were carp. Hmm, what else? There were even perch in there that were minnows. I loved it. I caught everything. Mostly I just released everything. It was so much fun. I really loved it in this pond. It was a place where I could be free. Sometimes I would go with my friends, but often I would just go alone and just be there, just be in nature. Nobody would be around. It was great.
Well, I remember this one spring I went there. I was always going, waiting for the snow to melt and waiting for the ice to melt, waiting to see when the turtles were gonna come up because they’d be hibernating in the mud. Well, I went one spring. I would go every, you know, every few days to see, you know, when was the ice melted enough? When were the turtles gonna come out? It’s gonna be warm enough? Well, they hadn’t come out yet, but I heard a noise as I crossed over the fields, and I crossed over this big dirt hill, and I came toward the pond. There was all this heavy equipment, big machinery, and mechanized backhoes and scoops, and they were around the pond. The turtles still hadn’t come out, and the bullfrogs hadn’t come out yet, and presumably all the big things were still buried underneath it in the mud, hibernating.
Well, what were they doing? This big backhoe was scooping out a big thing, and they were draining all the pond of water. That was like, what are they doing? They were dragging out all the cattails out of one side of the pond, and they were draining all the water. I watched the water literally drain out of the pond and eventually just all the mud. I was thinking, well, what about all the turtles in there? What are they going to come up into? If they’re gonna drain the water out, the turtles are gonna come up, and there’s going to be nowhere for them to live. They’re gonna dry out.
Well, it would have been nice if that had been what even happened. That wasn’t even that. What I didn’t realize is the farmer who owned this land, he had sold it, and they were going to develop all of his farm and all of this land that the pond was on into a huge supermarket, a Wegmans supermarket. At the time, I didn’t know this, but I just stood there and watched. What they did is they drained the whole pond, and once they got all the water out of it, then they came in with a big bunch more backhoes, and they came in with a dump truck, and they took all this dirt, and they filled it right on top of the pond. They probably put five feet of thick heavy dirt, which they compacted right onto the mud, and they buried all the turtles, and they buried all the polliwogs, and they buried all the frogs, and they buried everything. They buried all the plants and all the crayfish and all the crayfish larvae and all the dragonfly larvae and all of it, and they killed the entire pond ecosystem.
By the end of a couple of days, there no longer was a pond. There was just a big flat area of dirt. Over the next few months, I watched, and what they did is they paved it all over, and they turned it into a giant parking lot for a Wegmans, which stands there to this day. Later, the food that I ate, my family ate, came from that Wegmans because that was the best place to buy food. My parents used to love going shopping there, and they’d go park in the parking lot. I pretty much remember where the pond was, and I used to, when I was a teenager, go and stand right in the parking spot that was somewhere pretty much over where that pond was, knowing that six, eight, ten feet down there were turtles.
Carcasses, the skeletons of turtles and frogs, and who knows what else, buried under that parking lot. And that day when I saw them drain that pond and kill everything there, I think that day, when I look back on it, to use that word that I just used at the beginning of this video, that was the day that I became an environmentalist and knew what we people are doing is wrong. That is wrong, you.