A Disappearing Act

Being that I grew up in a house not 20 yards away from a thick forest, I have had many small encounters with wildlife in my life. We have deer, turkeys, and rabbits running through our backyard frequently, and I even find the occasional garden snake in the woodpile or under the heap of old cement blocks leftover from when we redid our landscaping. These encounters help to remind me how simple life can be, or should be. However, advancement in our society results in a growing population, and a growing population calls for more houses, more businesses, and more landfills for all their trash. Unfortunately, the habitat for these animals continues to disappear by our own hand. We continue to tear down the habitat of these simple creatures for our own use with no regard for the preservation of our earth, and someone needs to put a stop to it.

Of course we benefit from the growing development of our society, which is great, but at what cost is that benefit coming? Is it worth destroying the earth and all of its other inhabitants? People have lost sight of the value of these more simple creatures that we live with on our wondrous planet. Deer, elk, turkey and many other wild game animals can be hunted as a source of food, as well as the fish in the rivers, lakes, and seas. Predators such as bears and mountain lions help keep these animals populations in check, so they don’t overrun the forest. When all these animals die, their bodies decompose and replenish the nutrients of the soil to help plants grow. The vast and complex ecology of our planet keeps our environment balanced the way to should be. The more we desecrate the habitat that these animals call home, the further we damage the ecology that keeps the environment in shape.

Besides the scientific reasons for needing to preserve the habitat for wild animals, we also get a sense of perspective on life from these creatures that goes greatly underappreciated. As hectic as our lives tend to be these days, it can do the soul a great deal of good to just relax under a tree watching a deer waltz through the woods. They don’t have anywhere near the same worries or stress that we do. They just walk peacefully from one bush of berries to the next, getting a snack, not a care in the world. The only time they aren’t at complete ease is if they sense danger, perhaps in the form of a natural predator or a hunter. Although, even in these brief moments of peril, the deer can simply run away to where it feels safe. Such events are relatively rare anyways. Taking in that kind of serenity from another living creature can change the way you feel in a heartbeat. An instant calm comes over you in the realization that life simply does not have to be complicated. Yet we continue to destroy this gentle deer’s home.

What a shame it is that we continue to rip down forests for new housing developments and strip malls, when there are clear alternatives to this destructive pattern. We have the technology and intelligence to build skyscrapers nowadays, so why build out, over the forests, when we can build up where we aren’t hurting anyone. I’m not saying we should build skyscrapers everywhere, but even multi-floor apartment buildings that house multiple families can do a great deal to save the forest. Why build eight new homes on their own lots when you could build a four floor apartment building that will house all eight families on only two of the lots? Sure, saving six lots worth of land doesn’t seem like much, but when you multiply that to consider the thousands of new homes that are built each year, it could save acres upon acres of natural wildlife habitat. The solutions prove to be very feasible, so why not see them through?

After housing developments, the other major contributor to the destruction of wildlife habitats is the growing need for landfills. With our growing society comes a lot of garbage, and we are running out of places to put it. My freshman seminar class recently took a field trip to the Arden Landfill in Washington County, run by Waste Management. I had never seen a landfill before, and I was amazed by the size of the fill as well as the entire process. Federal regulations are a lot stricter for landfills today than a decade ago, and this particular fill was a shining example of that. The fill must first be approved by the government before anything can be done. The fill is first dug out then covered in six, 12 inch thick, plastic liners in order to prevent any waste from reaching the soil. Then, they begin loading in the trash. It can take nearly twenty years to for a fill to reach capacity, and over the course of those twenty years, a lot of methane gas is released from the degrading garbage. In the past, they had just put pipes in the fill to let the gas out into the air, but the air pollution resulting form this is awful. So in recent years, Waste Management has developed a system where they pump the methane out of the fills and into electric energy that is sold the surrounding homes and businesses. Basically, they have created a mini power plant at the landfill that helps stop air pollution while turning a profit for the company. Also, once the landfill is capped, they cover it in another set of plastic liners and topsoil, then replant grass. Many of Waste Management’s retired fills are now parks where animals live or golf courses which would have otherwise been built on natural habitats. The steps they have taken to preserve the environment and habitat are great, but not all landfills across the country do the same. If Waste management can do it, then everyone can do it, and we need to hold other landfill companies to these same standards.

The creatures that live in the world around us have just as much a right to this planet as we do, and we need to recognize that before it is too late. There are plenty of ways to change our destructive ways, and many are trying, just like Waste Management, to do so. Unfortunately those many are still not the majority. People need to realize what they are doing to their fellow inhabitants of earth and take stand to stop the disappearing act.

A Piece of History

Today it seems as if nothing remains the same for very long. We are always pushing forward, building new modernized buildings and tearing down the old, perhaps less desirable ones. Our world changes around us faster than we could ever expect, and in that rush of progress, we lose some important things along the way. By advancing our society so recklessly in an attempt to better ourselves, we lose a sense of history and hurt the environment that supports us.

In life, it is very important to know where we’re are headed, what the future holds for us. Yet, even more important than our future is our history. Sometimes we forget where we’ve come from, where we started our journey. We push forward often without taking a second to reflect on the past. The advancements we try to make in society are not always successful ones, and if we forget where we started from, how will we ever know how to get back to a better place when we screw up? The famous Spanish American philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The past holds endless power in the knowledge we can gain by remembering and learning from our mistakes. The past is wisdom. The quality of our lives can be greatly improved with a healthy knowledge of our past struggles and downfalls. We need to preserve any and all great reminders of our past, and the one such reminder is Washington and Jefferson College’s Old Main building.

Old Main the embodies Washington and Jefferson College entirely. It is a grand; an architectural masterpiece not unlike the masterful education the college bestows on its pupils. With its solid stone foundation, it has stood strong throughout the years, its two magnificent towers, representing Sirs Washington and Jefferson's namesake colleges that combined to form our illustrious hub of academia, overlook the city of Washington gracefully. The building is the centerpiece of the college itself. Those two magnanimous towers gracing the college’s logo, remain to be the most recognizable symbols on campus. The best part about Old Main is that the community of the college embraces it. Every student that attends the college will take at least one class in Old Main before they graduate. The building bursts at the joints of each wall with the history of every Washington and Jefferson student that has been there before us.

The marble floor greets me as I enter, beautiful spiraled stairways on both sides of I, and I examine the bust of Thomas Jefferson on the second floor that was the actual model for the head of the Jefferson memorial in our nation’s capital.

The great history of the building speaks to the quality of the people that have graced it as students, professors, and founders. As to our history as students, Old Main reminds us that we don’t need anything more than some desks and a chalkboard to learn. That’s all the first students here ever had to work with, but they were all successful. The process of bettering oneself relies more so on a strong desire to do so more than anything else. Old Main should be standing as long as nature will let it. Losing such a valuable piece of the college’s history would be devastating.

Fortunately, it appears that the communtiy here at W&J understands the value of Old Main and truly appreciates the building. No plans of demolishing the building have been discussed or even brought up by the college. However, renovations have been mad to the building. Although the updates that were made were relatively low scale and helped to ensure the functionality of the building, the fact that we did in fact make renovations means that there are probably more to come in the not so distant future. The prospect of such renovations or even at some point in time the destruction of Old Main, which would greatly hurt our value of history, as well as our environment, scares me. Taking down Old Main would stand to be a difficult process. The building is located right in the middle of the campus and sits directly across the street from the cafeteria and alongside both the business office and fitness center. Demolishing a building of that size would certainly cover the said adjacent buildings with a film of dust as well as possibly damage them with debris. Also, the amount of dust released into the air would greatly affect air quality on campus. The fossil fuels burned off by the machines that would be used to destroy the building, as well as those used to build the replacement buildings, would just add to the air pollution problem. Even renovations seem to be a bit troublesome. Working on a building as old as this is both costly and a bit dangerous because of the lower grade of structural standards that were held when it was built, and over time these renovations would change the look of the building and damage its historical value.



There appears to be no reason to change Old Main. Sure, the building is very old, but renovations can be made strictly for improving structural integrity of the building to increase safety, without damaging the historical value of the building. In addition, the college gets great use out of the building with the recent updates. Old Main houses numerous offices for professors and loads of Mathematics and English classes. Math and English require very little to no in class technology, so the building should be able to support such classes for years to come without any more updates or renovations. Even if a teacher decides they want to use computers for a specific activity for a class, there are always free rooms in the tech center, and there is even one computer lab in Old Main. Professors from those fields can easily get the job done on a regular basis with just a chalkboard and books. The building also serves as a home to the PAL program, a peer tutoring service for students. Old Main can serve today, and for a long time to come, as a fully functioning building, so why even think about undergoing major renovations or tearing it down.




Progress benefits our society greatly, but just like anything else of life, even though it is good, it can become a problem if we have too much of it. We tend to move forward as a society with no regard for the past, and that mindset must change if we want to survive. We need to always keep our past experiences in the back of our mind to use them as a guide for what we do in the future. The best way to do that is to keep around great reminders of our rich history, such as the shining example of Old Main. These are the types of losses that we could not afford to take as a community.