Hard Work

"Hard work is a misleading term. Physical effort and long hours do not constitute hard work. Hard work is when someone pays you to do something you'd rather not be doing. Anytime you'd rather be doing something other than the thing you're doing, you're doing hard work." -- George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

This morning was not "hard work". Getting up each morning to go to clients ... that's hard work. I took part in the restoration, road removal & clean-up of a section of the Sonoran Desert National Monument with the Arizona Wilderness Coalition:

"A significant part of the Sonoran Desert National Monument is currently closed to vehicular access because of the excessive damage it is receiving from illegal off-road vehicle use, trash dumping, etc. The area we are restoring is inside a wilderness. We will be removing a road that has been illegally created inside the wilderness boundary ..."

About an hour drive SW of Glendale, it was a great way to spend a Saturday morning. Great scenery, nice weather and a worthy mission. We swung hoes or pick axes to break up the ground hardened by illegal vehicle traffic. The hardened ground does not allow the desert plant life to grow. By breaking it up, grasses will reestablish themselves ... and quickly. We moved dead logs and dug holes to put dead bushes in. This was done to discourage the use of these paths again.

The leader of the restoration showed us a different area that they had worked on last fall and you could barely tell anything had been there. It had been a large parking area that had remnants of fires and rutted paths, and now it looks like normal desert with grasses and creosote bushes.

I guess that's the heartening thing about fixes to our environment -- changes made can make a difference and can allow the earth to recover.

It sucks that this type of work has to be done. Shooting guns, littering, and a complete disregard for designated wilderness areas -- not things that will endear a person to me. And not exactly things that will convince me of your intelligence. But despite my disappointment of a section of our society, I was heartened and encouraged by the selfless effort of a different section of our society - the volunteers.

Large off-road vehicles, recreational gun use, and Budweiser (the most popular litter item) are things either informed by a lack of knowledge of Freud or perhaps by too much knowledge of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh:

"The Earth’s ecosystem is not fragile, and humans are not capable of destroying it" - Rush Limbaugh

One wishes that Rush's influence was more fragile, but people will always look for views that reinforce their prejudices. Our hope should be to rid people of their prejudices and then his idiocy will have nothing to take hold of.