The first year I lived in Ketchikan, Alaska,
42.5 inches of rain fell during the 31 days of October.
I began to better appreciate a Tlingit
story I had heard about a village on a small island
occupied by sea lion people, who originally
had been human beings.
A great storm blew in, which lasted for weeks.
And when the storm finally had passed,
the people on the small island no longer possessed human form.
They all had become sea lions because that was how they could
best survive in that place.
For a long time.
I had a great many Sonoran red-spotted toads
around the rainwater pool behind my house.
I also had a few cattails and a yellow water lily.
This was a modest accomplishment,
since the pool is replenished only by rainfall
and there is no electricity to operate a filtration system.
Hundreds of toads used to sing all night
in magnificent choruses with complex harmonies.
One summer, when the water level of the pool was low,
a man I had recently met brought his sons and his dog for dinner
at my house.
The boys were 11 and 12 years old,
and they had been adopted off a Canadian Indian reserve
by the man's wife.
After dinner, the boys took the dog outside
to enjoy the coolness of the twilight.
A few minutes later, when the man and I joined the boys,
we found them with the dog by the rainwater pool.
Strewn all around the pool where the remains of toads,
smashed flat by the boys and their dog.
I managed to keep my composure until the dinner guests
and their dog had left.
I never saw them again.
The dinner guests from hell, I guess you could say.
The night-long choirs of multitudes of toads ceased.
The Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster
occurred not long afterward and may also--
didn't help-- and may also have affected the toad population.
I guess that's pretty much established.
It actually caused more human beings to die too--
babies born to babies died all over the world too.
They don't say much about that.
Last summer, the pool had polliwogs again
and the descendants of the red-spotted toads, which
had survived radioactive fallout and the boys with a dog.
The night-long choirs have not resumed yet.
The toads need a few more years to recover.
Some months after the Chernobyl accident,
neighborhood dogs trapped a big mule deer
doe as she came to water at the pool.
I heard the commotion of the dogs and water splashing,
and I ran outside to the pool.
I chased off the dogs with rocks and sticks,
so the deer was able to escape unharmed.
The water lily was trampled to pieces,
and the cattail was torn apart.
Still, I did not expect long-term damage
from the deer's frenzy.
But soon after the deer's ambush,
a strange red algae with a texture of mucus
began to float on the pool's surface.
This red algae smothered the yellow water lily,
and even the cattail died.
I did not visit the pool often after that.
Red algae slime covered everything.
But sometimes when I did visit the pool,
I found the floating remains of drowned creatures.
The red algae on the surface of the water
gave the appearance of solid material, not liquid.
I considered destroying the pool,
but since most of the desert animals and birds
managed not to drown and depended on the rainwater pool
for survival, I gave the pool a reprieve.
But then I discovered a decomposing mule deer partially
submerged, and I decided that I'd had enough of the pool.
I ordered six dump truck loads of crushed rock
to begin to fill in the pool.
But then I got tired of shoveling the rock
into the pool-- kind of what is--
well, I shoveled a lot in there.
The crushed rock, but not six dump truck loads, OK,
because look what happened which is a little work,
a little wheelbarrow pushing.
The crushed rock created a natural escape ramp,
which the lizards, birds, and other animals
use to avoid drowning.
See, this is an old, defunct swimming pool,
which drowns so many kids and stuff, too.
The rock also acted as a natural filter,
and the red algae seemed less hardy than before.
I decided to try one more time.
I resumed my struggle against the red algae.
I skimmed off tons of the red algae,
but this only seemed to stimulate the red algae's
growth.
I tried water plants.
At first, red algae overpowered and smothered
the roots of all the water plants I tried--
duckweed, water lettuce, or water lily.
They all succumb to the red algae
and its ally, the fierce ultraviolet rays of the sun.
I located some water hyacinths after I
read that they are hardy and pestiferous,
the bane of waterways and lakes throughout the tropics.
The water hyacinth might have a better chance
against the red algae in the summer sun.
But at first, I only put a handful of water hyacinths
in the pool.
And the red algae made short work of them.
So I put more hyacinths together,
and when I had assembled 30 plants,
a sort of critical mass, the red algae began to recede.
30 water hyacinths became 3,300, and then
33,000 water hyacinths.
The water in the pool began to clear and smell cleaner
because water hyacinth digests the worst sorts
of waste and contamination.
Decomposing rodents and dead toads--
nothing is too vile for the water hyacinth.
Water hyacinths even removed lead and cadmium
from contaminated water.
I write in appreciation of the lowly water hyacinth, purifier
of defiled water.
Only the night blooming datura, jimson weed, sacred plant
of the Pueblo priests, mighty hallucinogen and deadly poison.
Only the datura has the power to purify plutonium contamination.
Datura not only thrives in soil contaminated by plutonium,
the datura actually removes the plutonium from the soil
so that the soil is purified.
And only the datura plant itself is radioactive.
The datura metabolizes heavy water
that contaminated with plutonium because for the datura,
all water is sacred.
Across the West, uranium mine waste
and contamination from underground nuclear tests
in Nevada ruin the dwindling supplies of fresh water.
Chemical pollutants and heavy metals from abandoned mines
leak gold, lead, and mercury into aquifers and rivers.
But human beings desecrate only themselves.
The Mother Earth is inviolable.
Whatever may become of us human beings,
the Earth will bloom with hyacinth purple
and the white blossoms of the datura.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]