This afternoon, my husband and I were in Marin County. Standing along the beautiful bay shore there, I found myself suddenly in the grip of an incredibly strong feeling - a blend of sadness, anger, urgency - looking at the land and thinking of how the CDFA and the forces behind it had been threatening to soak this place with poisons under the guise of a ludicrous pursuit of an insect.

I looked at the bright water, the air-giving trees and the friendly, clear sky, and I guess I had one of those moments of wondering how to make sense of life in a world where some of my fellow men can actually suggest that it’s reasonable to destroy health and life in order to say there are a few less moths on the globe. It’s an insane suggestion, clearly - a trade no reasonable mind would see as beneficial - and that’s why it scares me so much to think of the proposal that was made to pollute Marin County and its neighboring counties up and down Coastal California with vile, carcinogenic garbage, dropped from spray planes, on defenseless lands.

They dropped the garbage on people, animals, plants, water and soil on the Central Coast last fall. It wasn’t just a proposal. It’s a done deal there, and the victims are still living with the consequences, not knowing what this means in regards to their future. And the victims aren’t just the thousands of families of human beings who pleaded for sanity and mercy and ended up utterly unprotected by the very agencies all of them have been funding with their tax dollars, all of their lives, to act as their protectors. The victims include what we often rather vaguely refer to as the balance of nature. This sweeping term encompasses the blue whale, the sequoia, the coyote, the otter, the wildflowers, lichens on the rocks and the microscopic organisms that make up the bulk of our land, sea and sky, invisible though they are.

Ours is a very special planet, with life here turning on the dime of our distance to the sun, the makeup of our atmosphere, the minerals in our soil and a climate that stays just within so many degrees of hot and cold to make this a blue and green globe instead of a scarred orb of dead dust. All of these things are in someone else’s control…that’s right, we humans are out of control when it comes to whether life is.

But you wouldn’t know it when you hear those officials talking about dusting a little pesticide here, spritzing a little poison there, eradicating this species, monitoring that one, making up their minds about how to control it all. When, of course, they can’t. It’s a charade, a scam, a pathetic joke of self-appointed self-importance, stepping into giant shoes that don’t fit mankind.

As I once heard an entomologist explain, if humans became extinct, the earth would probably eventually recover from all of the abuses it has experienced, but if ants became extinct, the entire chain of life would be destroyed.

In that scheme of things, it isn’t the Secretary of Agriculture who is the big important deal…it’s a bug the size of his eyelash.

Standing on that beach in Marin today, my anger turned into the familiar, desperate wish that Secretary Kawamura and his ilk could just see the world this way, just for a moment, and be so shocked by their own lowliness in the order of important components of the planet that they would humbly put away their God-forsaken chemicals, go sit under a tree somewhere and calm down.

It’s pretty tough, listening to the politicians of the day talking about the ‘need’ for offshore drilling, the ‘need’ for nuclear power plants and the concept that we should really do something about climate change, perhaps by the year 2050, while Norway is rushing to figure out what crops they’ll have to grow in order to sustain life as the oceans creep over their shorelines and thermometers rise. It’s pretty tough to look around and see that the priorities of the people ‘in charge’ of America have literally nothing to do with sustaining life on the planet. They’ve got other more important things to use their special skills for, I suppose, like bailing out CEOs and making TV commercials.

I tune in and out of the huge, official noise, maybe still hoping that one day, I’ll hear any of the people in my government talk about anything I can relate to. And, at the same time, knowing that even if I can relate to them in some way, some day, nearly all of the life forms I care most about will never be able to. What does an oak tree think about voting fraud? What does a Great Horned Owl think about Wall Street?

As humans, we have been able to talk back to the group we call our government, even if it comes down to no more than screaming our heads off when they suggest that they spray us and our families with carcinogenic pesticides. Even if we can’t stop them, we have a common language, if not common values. But explain that to this tiny crab I took a photo of on the beach in Marin. Look at him in his tiny world, a whole life on Earth lived amongst a cluster of lovely rocks, keeping cool and happy in the seaweed. Explain to him that someone will dump chemicals into his water and his lungs because it’s profitable to do so.

Earth is his planet, too, and like all of us, he gets just one shot here. Secretary Kawamura’s life isn’t any more real to him than life is to this little crab. The difference is that, so far as I know, the crab hasn’t gotten mixed up to the point where he believes he’s the Creator of life, in charge of that elusive balance of nature. The way things are going these days, I think I’d rather have the crab in charge than anyone my taxes are funding.

Some days I try to see the irony of it all. Some days I genuinely find humor in being alive, so mixed up and wondering what it’s all about. Days like today, I just have to remember that I can’t control it all either and that, in my heart of hearts, I know that Someone is watching over it all and has a plan I just can’t see. There’s comfort in that.

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