The Long Game

One of my favorite books as a kid was Bill Peet's The Wump World. It tells the tale of a peaceful grass-eating species, the eponymous Wumps, who are suddenly forced to share their planet with an invading horde of nasty blue creatures called Pollutians. "Share" is probably too kind a term, since the Pollutians eventually build on and pave every square inch of the grassy rock on which they landed, driving the benign presence of the Wumps underground. It is, of course, only a matter of time before the Pollutians decide that they have ruined their adopted home and send off scouts to find a new planet to destroy. When the scouts return with news of another green globe to dominate, the Pollutians herd back into their smoke-spouting spaceships and fly away. The Wumps wait until they cannot hear any more rumbling and screeching. One brave Wump burrows to the surface and discovers that the interlopers have left. The rest of the herd follows and they wander the concrete and steel surface until they find a lone sprout sticking up through the asphalt.
If this sounds a little like what goes on during Pixar's Wall-E, then you're not alone there. And it's no coincidence that Bill Peet began his career working for Disney in 1937. But this isn't about plagiarism or homage or copyright infringement. This is about how the idea that eventually nature would win out and humans would be on their way to the next planet to destroy. I say this because of the article I read this morning about the bear population in Yosemite quadrupling. Now before you set yourself to wondering about the gestation period of black bears, rest assured that these are not brand new bears as much as they are bears that have been able to wander back into the camp sites and snack bars where the Pollutians are not. Just a ranger or two who know not to stick their noses into the business of bears.
And the birds in our front yard. And my friend who lives in Los Angeles and says that one can see the Hollywood sign from twenty miles away. And my mother who tells me that the brown cloud that has hung over the Denver metro area for decades has all but disappeared. Things are as green as I can remember them, and while I haven't seen any Wumps meandering about, I suspect it's only a matter of time. Because this isn't about a few weeks or a month or two. This is about thousands of years. Millennia. On the spectrum of life on this big blue marble, the bears and the birds and the dolphins in the canals of Venice will be patiently waiting for more space to become available.