I.

I have had bats invade my house 3 separate times, and not all the same house. The first time was in a house in Annapolis where I grew up. I was about 13 and watched the bat (who had apparently found a way in through a small hole in the chimney cap of the fireplace) through a window as he went crazy circling the living room. Thankfully we could seal the room off from the rest of the house by closing the door. At the time, my family had a cat, named Sniffy (my little sister picked the name…) who took care of the bat. Then again, I lived in another house in College Park and a bat flew its way in again through the chimney. A friend came over and caught the bat in a bag and let it outside. And then, I woke up once in the middle of the night from a sound sleep and felt something on my arm. Of course, being asleep, it didn’t register right away, and I brushed it off and kept sleeping. But I heard some kind of flapping circling my room, and as soon as it registered, I ran out of the room, locked the bat inside my bedroom and shoved a towel under the gap between the door and the floor so it wouldn’t escape and went back to sleep on the couch. The next morning, the bat was nowhere to be found. I looked everywhere, but chalked it up to a crazy dream. The next night, I was sitting in the living room, and from above my head, the bat flew out of the curtains and started going crazy! I ran around from the living room, to the kitchen, and the bat followed me. Then I ran to the bathroom and it followed me. By then, I had all the lights on in the house and I ran outside to get away from the bat. From outside, while thinking about how to get the bat out of my house, I watched it go ballistic from one room to the other. Finally, after about an hour, I mustered up the courage to go in and handle the bat, and as I opened the door, the bat flew straight at my head, and at the last second swooped away! While in the moment it was super creepy – I had visions of the bat trying to bite me, or some “vampire bat” situation. I know that poor bat was just as scared of me as I was of it. My rational mind tried to tell my emotional mind that bats are good, and they eat all kinds of pesky bugs. Of course, that really never helps when there is a bat in your house.

II.
I have some issue with the idea of “saving nature”. Of course, in an ideal world, it would be as easy as designating certain species of plant or animal that has a low population, and creating a figurative “fence” around them until they have repopulated. The problem is that this view is much too simplistic of an idea. There are so many problems to this approach, some which we read about such as a.) who gets to choose what to protect? b.) how much money will we spend to protect it? c.) is it a good preservation method to captivate the endangered species so that we can protect them, and if so, how many should we captivate? These kinds of questions can go on forever. And part of the problem is that they still do – when we leave it to our politicians to make decisions, they do what politicians do: talk, rather than do. Part of the problem with “saving nature” is that we still think about it in terms of “saving nature”. When we think in these terms, it creates the sense that we don’t HAVE to save nature, but that it would be a “nice” thing to do. It is something that you get extra credit points for, and can brag about the good deeds you have done to make yourself look good with your friends. We think that donating a bit of money to an organization (who is at the mercy of the politicians) means we are doing our part. This is the biggest problem. Of course we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that we don’t interfere with the intricate balance and inner workings of nature, so that habitats are preserved and human activity doesn’t impact the natural cycle. But that means more that “saving nature”. When we use those terms, we are saying that we are the heroes, when in fact, we are the ones who caused the problem. Our nature-saving approach is also a continuation of the very activity that caused the problem in the first place. How can we expect that taking animals from the wild, and putting them in zoos where we can “monitor” them, and feed them a precise diet is somehow saving them, when all they really needed us to do was leave them alone in the first place? (Unfortunately, in our human selfishness, we usually don’t realize the damage we were doing until it is too late.)

Obviously this is a multifaceted and highly complex problem, and there are many angles to the solution. But I think that it is extremely important to remember that the root cause of the issue is us. WE are the invading species. If we really want to save nature, we need to do it with a radically different approach, which means answering the hard questions, like how much are we willing to give up to save beetles, spiders, snakes, lizards, etc. If we say that we are, we need to be prepared for a complete shift in the way we live, and start looking at OURSELVES as part of the problem.