One day in the late 1850s, Samuel Clemens, a young pilot apprentice later known as Mark Twain, took the wheel of the steamboat Pennsylvania for the first time. Beside him for the next several months was the boat's master pilot, George Ealer. As Clemens steered, Ealer recited Shakespeare to him, "not just casually but by the hour;” constantly confusing Clemens by injecting steering and pilot commands into his recitations.

Later in life, Clemens marveled at how Ealer had spoken all those plays from memory: "He did not use the book and did not need to; he knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication tables." George Ealer was not unique in early 19th-century America. From New York City to the western frontier, Shakespeare was the king of popular culture.

Theater companies struggled over wagon trails to perform for frontier com¬munities who watched, enthralled, and often spoke the lines right along with the actors. Walt Whitman remembered riding down Broadway as a young man "declaiming some stormy passage from Julius Caesar" along the way. And in 1845 in Texas, soldiers passed the time by putting on the plays, including a production of "Othello" where Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant played the role of Desdemona. It's doubtful they had, or needed, scripts.

Today’s transition to ecologically prudent decisions is essentially a new, second industrial revolution. Where the first industrial revolution gave us all the energy we could want in order to create unimaginable wealth, now we've decided--we've learned--that we can't do this without some sense of sustainability, which includes ecological planning. So it's a little harder.

Now we've got to protect the air, soil, water, plants, animals and human public health and safety without killing our economy or ecology. That's going to require a rebuilding of government, rebuilding and creation of new infrastructure. It will require incredible intellectual ingenuity and invention because the folks with outmoded jobs like them and the benefits.

Ecology is a low-technology issue, not altogether different from Mark Twain’s “lear’en the river” under George Ealer. What will be new is spending money on organizations that can get the ecological job done and constructing infrastructure where it will do the most ecological good; but, "What Fools We Mortals Be" (ca. 1595) spoken by the character Puck in William Shakespeare's in “Act III, scene 2, line 115 of A Midsummer Night's Dream,” looking the other way seems efficient to many.

Although I rather suspect that 2010 is going to drag us further under the bus as the “old guard” clings to their influence and paychecks at the expense of putting our tax dollars in the hands of licensed county businesses who employ certified and fully skilled ecologists, hydrologists, etc., this may not be the decade when ecology takes the lead. It doesn't need to be that way if you speak out!

Duke