“Eventually, the first minute toads hopped out of the water and into the weeds, tiny replicas of their parents, whose mating song1had learned to imitate the previous spring. As I watched the little toads jump about, a bulldozer crested nearby piles of dirt, and in an act that has been replicated aroundthe nation millions of times since,proceeded to bury the young toads and all of the other living treasures within the pond. I might have been buried too, if I hadn’t given up trying to rescue the toads. I saved about 10 that day, but for nothing: the pond was gone, leaving nowhere for the toads to breed. Within two years, a toad was a rare sight near my house; soon they were completely gone, along with the garter snakes, whose main prey they had been, and other members of the food web supported by the life in that pond.” (22)

This passage made me feel pretty guilty. This past summer, I spent nearly every weekend turning the woods of my family’s lake house into a lawn. Yes, I was turning a native environment into a lawn… the exact topic we have been discussing for about a week. For my entire life, our “backyard” has been a swampy mess of underbrush that blocks our view of the lake. In my admittedly hypocritical opinion, the view of the overgrown woods took away from the “natural” view of the lake. Thus, my father and I went about rebuilding the backyard into a level forest, free of swamp and underbrush.

Ironically, I had the same toad protection process throughout the reconstruction project. While I was the one operating the excavator, I made a point to move as many of the hundreds of frogs that I could before filling in a certain hole. While we were careful to redirect the flow of water in order to maintain a natural habitat, my father and I probably had no idea what we were doing. We succeeded in improving our aesthetic ideals with the space, but it likely came at a cost of the natural plant and animal life. Looking back on it, I feel pretty bad about it. While I still prefer the view as it is now, did I have the right to alter other species’ natural space?

One last point of interest is that we went out of our way to protect a fox den that we know has been occupied for years. I have to question myself as to why we valued the fox over the toads and the plants?