The Land

by Charissa Nasrallah   

After completing college, I decided to dedicate my life to kindly teaching others about how they can help conserve the wilderness.  Since I was single and striving to be a minimalist, I figured I didn’t need much money, so I took a job with the South Carolina State Park System.  My job didn’t pay enough to live on, but I loved it.  The park provided me with the perfect place to present nature programs to school groups and other students and teaches them the best ways to conserve the local wildlife.  My co-workers were kind and the low pay let me simplify my life to the point where I only bought the bare essentials.  Still, my bills were a little more than expected, so I supplemented my income working as waitress at nights. 

Unfortunately, my environmentally conscious contributions did not exactly endear me my employers.  As a waitress, it was easy to see how pulling bottles out of the trash to be recycled created problems with my job duties of serving food, still I did not stop my independent effort in recycling the empty bottles I took off my tables. 

I took great effort to never throw something away something that could be recycled, since I believed it was the right thing to do.  I was well aware the recycling bins were already overflowing and there was still a question in my mind on whether or not the things that went in the recycling center ever really got recycled at all.  But as a idealistic ecologist it only made sense to me that reducing the wastes we produce would also reduce the amount of land and resources we waste.  So I fanatically filled my car with various things to bring to the blue recycling bins around town.

It was very upsetting to discover that none of the restaurants where I worked recycled. And even more upsetting to discover the State Park didn’t either.

The park where I worked was built to honor the place where the Settlers from Europe arrived.  There is still some debate as to how long the Settlers resided in this exact area, since living conditions were probably harsh and salt marshes comprised an estimated eighty-percent of the land.  Back then, there were no Piggly-Wigglys or any other mass chain of grocery stores, so the Settlers struggled to survive.  Without the help of the Kiawa Native Americans, I doubt they ever would have made it.  The Kyowa showed the Settlers how to hunt, fish, and find fresh water and taught them what type of crops they could plant. 

Various illnesses drove the Kyowa people into extinction, but I believe their spirits are still around.  Back in the Seventies the park was granted a rather large sum of money to build and interpretive center, so they made plans to construct an underground museum with artifacts and historical displays.  However, when they started to dig they discovered a Kiowa burial ground.  It was one of the largest Native American burial mounds on the East Coast and there were several debates as to whether or not to stop the construction.  But despite the protests and since there were no more Kiowa's around to defend their ancestors, the plans to built the Interpretive Center continued and it was completed the following year.

The Interpretive Center was a very unique building, with both outdoor and indoor exhibits.  A large stone awning stretched over pillars that featured paintings of historical people.  Underneath the ground, the building housed displayed artifacts and other works of the park’s educational department. 

Oddly enough this Interpretive Center was for the most part destroyed in the fall of 1989, when Hurricane Hugo came ripping through town.  The brick foundation was still left standing, but the all the electrical wiring and most of the pictures painted on the pillars were left in ruin. 

Ten years later, the same tattered structure still stood, off limits, in the center of the park where I worked.  Every time I gazed at this structure I couldn’t help but think the winds that had whipped through this building carried the Karma of the Kiowa people.  Since the State had no plans for this building, it had turned into its own type of aviary, housing a variety of birds in its lofty pillars and broad awnings.  Native Americans believed birds were sacred for their ability to fly, it brought them closer to Grandfather Sun.  Interestingly enough, one of the only paintings that were not destroyed by the water from the storm, was the large portrait of the Kyowa brave, which for a while still stood in the center of the ruins, as if it were guarding its avian occupants.     

The ways of the Kiowa called out to me, and my lifestyle began to be guided by many of their beliefs.  I started looking for ways to limit my possessions, and tried my best to never take more than I needed from this world.  Whenever I wandered the grounds of the park I would silently pray to the trees and sky.  I would ask wild animals for their advice.  I would pick up any litter in hopes in its small way it would be something I could give back to the earth.  I passionately presented my programs to students hoping to instill this same love and appreciation of nature.

Salt marshes made up the majority of the park’s land, and I loved teaching the importance of this ecosystem to others.  Marshes are the second biggest producing ecosystem on this planet, home to millions of fish feeding on billions of bugs.  An estimated seventy percent of all the fish in the Atlantic ocean rely on the salt marshes to live at some point in their life cycle, along with the majority of crabs, oysters, shrimp, and a long list of shorebirds. 

Pollution and pesticides are detrimental to these life-giving wetlands.  Chemicals flushed into the water and soil do not go away, but get passed on through the food chain.  So it was only natural that when I indirectly discovered I had been dumping a disinfectant pesticide into these marshes, I wanted to discontinue my use of that product immediately.

sustainable living - natural living - eco living - earth friendly  - ecological - green living

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