Our young people have something to say about Skull Creek
VIEW FROM THE CHEAP SEATS
On this page today, you will notice that two young people are addressing you on the issue of Skull Creek.
We asked Rowdy Kunz, our county’s 4-H Water Ambassador, to write a Guest Voices spot for us on this important issue. Chris Brown, the Citizen’s Editorial Assistant, also addresses the situation at the creek in his column this week.
When you read both of these columns, you will note that both of these young people, in different ways, go in to great depth to ask you to think about what is happening at the creek and its impact on our natural resources and our wildlife in this county. I appreciate them sharing their voices with our readers.
Both Chris and Rowdy raise some important questions in their columns. I hope you will consider them.
Skull Creek is the greatest environmental calamity of our time in this county.
Over the weekend, as I was driving back from Gedenke! in Weimar to the Live Oak Art Center in Columbus, down US 90, just observing the natural beauty of this place we call home, my mind ran to January 20, 1867, when the french explorer René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, and his expedition came upon the creek and camped there.
The creek was known to the indigenous people of the county (indigenous people were here 12,000 years before Europeans), and at least one tribe lived along it at that time, so while La Salle wasn’t the first person to see the creek, he was the first European explorer to encounter it.
I wondered what La Salle and his men thought about the natural beauty of the creek when they came upon it. Was it full of fish? Was the water crystal clear? What wildlife did they find in abundance. Did they think the beauty of the place rivaled their native France?
I wonder, too, what La Salle, and the indigenous people like the tribe who lived along the creek that the French called the Hebemes, would think about the situation with the creek today. Could they have imagined a point in human history where any person would exhibit such callus disregard for our natural resources that the creek would end up in the situation it did today?
I doubt it, because, until it happened, I certainly never imagined such a thing would be possible.
Vince Leibowitz is Managing Editor of The Citizen and lives in Columbus. Connect with Vince on social media: http://fb.com/VLeibowitz or http://twitter.com/VinceLeibowitz or http://instagram.com/vinceleibowitz