Banana Slugs and Bunnies

A mature forest environment, such as in the now-protected Olympic rainforest, includes trees older than the United States. It simultaneously contains the frailest seedlings - tiny spruce which may live for nearly 400 years but which must first spend several decades maturing in the unique environment of a nurse log. Nurse logs, simply fallen dead mature trees, are virtually the cradle of life in the forest - and they exist nowhere in the "resource renewable" tree farm.

There, same-aged homogenous stands of commercially popular trees grow in a near monoculture. The wondrous diversity, which supports the life in a natural forest, is absent. When the trees reach economic maturity at around 50 years (perhaps a sixth of their natural lifespan), they are felled - clearing huge tracts of land for erosion, runoff, and chemical contamination. The wasteland is seeded, and the cycle continues.

Any single forest organism could be the next Tamoxifen, another digitalis. Or maybe something as useful as latex, or petroleum. Maybe it is just beautiful, novel, and unnerving. Regardless, it deserves - and needs - our protection. Without that fundamental commitment on our part, it doesn't matter what the rainforest holds. Whether it's the cure for cancer or the buffer between us and another ice age, we will never know. At the rate we are currently destroying the forest - and nearly every other natural environment - we'll be lucky if our grandchildren can visit it someday, a tiny patch roped off somewhere, a scenic overlook with an informative plaque.

Which is why I'll mention another interesting aspect of banana slugs' reproductive habits. Here - lest you overestimate my imagination - I'll just quote Kirk and Franklin: "The penis - and inch long - is so large and turgid that withdrawal apparently is difficult. The solution sometimes is to gnaw it off. Nobody yet knows whether regrowth occurs." Which, while disturbing in a tragicomic Bobbitt-esque way, perhaps makes my initial assertion even more to the point. Rabbits are harmless. We humans are doing something much more self-destructive.

Go To Page: 1 2

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic