A friend contacted me, distraught about an Indiana Senate Bill. I met Wesley Homoya — who signed his e-mail to me, “Ornithologist. Ambassador. Friend.” — in September 2016, and wrote of his passion for birding and nature in a column, “Bird Man of Indianapolis.” Since then, Wes has taken me on local birding excursions, both of which had been attended by his parents, from whom he drew his love of nature. But the event that prompted him to contact me was the imminent passage of Indiana Senate Bill 389. A summary of SB 389 reads in part, that it will “(repeal) state regulated wetlands law. Repeals the law requiring a permit from the department of environmental management for wetland activity in a state regulated wetland.” The practical effect of that, according to Wes (and members of several environmental organizations) will be the lifting of the kind of oversight designed to insure such things as flood management and the purity of our drinking water.
Double-masked, Wes sat across from me at my favorite cidery and as I sipped a glass of Blueberry Lavender, leaned across the table to tell me that, prior to 2004, there were no protections for wetlands, which are defined as “those areas that are inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions.” Wes contends that the 25 Republicans who co-authored the bill claim that it is in response to “overregulation” which causes harm to farmers by preventing them from making changes to parts of their property. He further contends that, while protections for the wetlands are environmentally necessary, that it would be appropriate to the process to address exceptional situations for aggrieved farmers, and that scrapping the appropriate regulation of the wetlands is not an environmentally sound approach.
Wes’ need to call attention to SB 389 grows out of his desire to “do what’s best for nature.” He told me that while birds are his specialty, “conservation is (his) great love.” He believes that it would be short-sighted to put into place environmentally devastating regulations, especially ones that he — and environmental organizations — believes will benefit a small group of people intent on developing and building on the newly-unregulated land. He thinks that the way to counter the belief that the opposition to SB 389 is “anti-farmer” is to craft a way for small farms to address the environmental impact of their property development plans without creating a devastating future for the earth that they till. One day at the cider-house, I told Wes that my roommate/daughter, who is allergic to poison ivy, believed that she had identified a large crop of it around our house and planned to lay waste to the land in order to eradicate it. Wes came to my house and as we sat on the porch finishing a bottle of a superb cider, he pointed out the Nuthatch at my feeders and noted the Carolina Wren’s call in the distance. He also identified the bad weeds, which enabled me to talk my daughter into dropping her flamethrower.
In 1971, Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel published a children’s book called “The Lorax,” a fable concerning the human destruction of the natural environment. Wes ended our interview with a laughing nod to Dr. Seuss’ book: “I want to be the Lorax.” And more seriously, “I want to speak for the trees.”
And for the birds, the tadpoles, the salamanders, frogs, microinvertebrates, dragonflies, plants, his two nephews and my three grandchildren, Xavion, Imani and Myah.
cjon3acd@att.net