Parenthood changes your perspective.  It wasn’t until my kids were born that I became an environmental activist.  I had always loved the outdoors, and I sent my annual dues to the Sierra Club.  But it was the birth of my daughter in 1985 that stirred me to act.
     Not long after she was born, I felt a restlessness that gradually resolved itself into anger and sorrow.  After several years I came to understand why:  my children would live in a world less free, less beautiful, and less hopeful than mine.
     My father used to take me fishing in Canada for a week each summer, returning often to the same lakes.  At first we filled stringers with big walleye, but as the years went by the fish were fewer and harder to catch.  He said the lakes were getting “fished out”  and started looking farther north.  But a more likely cause, I now realize, was acid rain — something we hadn’t heard of back then — or the massive logging in the surrounding birch and pine forests.  By the time we quit fishing together, those once-pristine lakes had grown sad with trash, and our campsites had taken on the appearance of garbage dumps.  (We had packed our garbage out, but some people couldn’t be bothered).
     My son, who like my father is a born fisherman, loves to hear me tell about those Canadian lakes — so clear that you could see fish on the bottom twenty feet down and so clean that you could dip a cup in and drink.  But he will never see them that way.
     One of the grandest experiences of my adolescence was making hay on my Uncle Jim’s farm.  We’d start with a huge breakfast before dawn and be out in the fields by sunup.  My job was to stack bales in the wagon as they came out of the baler.  It was sweaty, itchy work, and as the June sun climbed toward the zenith, so did my thirst.  About mid-morning my Aunt Ruth would appear with a big jug of home-made lemonade. Few human pleasures can equal the wet, icy trickle of that magnificent beverage down throat and chin after a hot morning on the hay wagon.  By the day’s end, the muscles of my back and shoulders knew the meaning of work.  We would eat an enormous dinner after sundown and fall into sweet oblivion until morning.  And by the time the hay was in, I was less a boy and more a man.
     Those fields are now bisected by four lanes of asphalt and traversed by thousands of cars and trucks daily.  My uncle Dick’s farm, where my father and I hunted rabbits, is a suburban housing development.
     When I was a kid, I spent much of the summer half naked in the sun.  I hated caps and never wore one.  When my kids go out in the summer they are not so free.  The sun’s ultraviolet radiation now penetrates the damaged ozone layer more intensely, and they are at greater risk of skin cancer than I was.  So some of the time, at least, against their wills and mine, I make them keep most of their clothes on and wear their caps.
     When I was a kid, my spirit soared at the sight of countless stars set deep in a midnight blue sky.  My children can see a few dim specks.  The smog that hangs over the Tennessee Valley catches the glow of hundreds of thousands of advertising signs and street lights, turning the night sky a filmy grey and blotting out the heavens.
     When I was a kid we had summers and winters in due season.  But now we are changing the climate and confounding the seasons, so that those natural rhythms are losing their tempo.
     When I was a kid, I walked to school — and had adventures along the way.  But schools are bigger now and farther apart, and the landscape has been remade to serve the automobile.  Kids today must be driven.  So they spend much of their childhood strapped in the nervous confinement of the back seat.
     These are some of the sources of my anger.  I am not consoled by the new opportunities my children may have.  I doubt that they are worth the loss of the old.  Virtual reality is a sad substitute for the Creation; fast food after a quick drive to the mall does not rival cold home-made lemonade after a morning of hot work in the sparkling air.
     So my anger persists.  I have found only one constructive use for it:  the motivation to protect and heal what I can.