Here’s a recommended resource: Check out Jay Babcock’s Nature Trumps. Over the past year or so, it has quietly marched to the top of my favorite blogs list. It’s an online chronicle of the life and times along one of America’s most polluted and unhealthy bodies of water — the Los Angeles River. In its own way, the blog reveals as much about about humans’ relationship to nature as the polls and focus group reports I cite here so often.
Jay shares stories and photographs of everyday Angelinos enjoying the river — risking arrest to fish for invasive carp, getting baptized in pools of polluted runoff, and spraypainting beautiful murals along the concrete walls that pass for riverbanks out there. Jay’s people love the river despite the abuse it’s received. In their stories, I find a comforting affirmation that humans have an inherent need to experience nature and want to provide that experience to their children.
But I also experience a sobering realization that these citizens’ vision for the river is all about today and tomorrow. The characters who appear in Nature Trumps spend little time reminiscing or regretting some bygone era when the river was pristine. For them, that’s water under the bridge.
When I look at the faces in the photographs on Nature Trumps, I see people who want straight talk from you about what’s important to them. Use words that work like nature protection, pollution control, family, children, safe, healthy, and future generations. I do not see faces that seem eager to embrace highbrow rhetoric like heritage, stewardship, and legacy.
Jay tells real stories about real people who love a river that’s hard to love. And that’s why I read Nature Trumps.
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