Otters and old tires

We had baited a couple of trotlines and were just drifting down the river casting some top-water lures for bass, and it was getting very late in the evening.  We passed under a tree hanging out over the river and a wild turkey began to nervously call, the putting and perking sound which tells you he has seen you and is upset.
He was right above us, walking back and forth on the limb where he had meant to spend the night, uncertain as to whether he should stay or sail off into the dusk, risking his neck just to find another place to sleep.  He had a dandy beard, telling us he was a mature tom, if nothing else.  Finally he pitched down into the undergrowth and there was a great deal of crashing and thrashing around, making it sound as if he may have misjudged his landing area.  As tremendously sharp as a wild turkey’s vision is, he doesn’t see well at all in dim light.  I am hoping he found another limb and got a good night’s sleep. 
Believe it or not, there is still some mating and nesting going on amongst wild turkeys, and there will be some poults hatching in August.  It is nature’s way of insuring a few young turkeys every spring, regardless of the heavy rain we might receive in June, which is devastating to ground nesting birds like young turkeys, quail, pheasant and grouse.
Running our lines the next morning we came across a mother otter and three of her young ones.  As comical, graceful and beautiful as they are, they are cursed by those who know how many fish they can kill in one week.  There was a time when our rivers were deep and clean and gave enough habitat and cover to make the impact of the otter negligible.  Not today.  In a small stream, the new populations of otters, soaring in the years just after they were restocked, found bass and catfish all too easy to catch.  And they found, in this time, an abundance of fish ponds, well stocked.  They didn’t have those back in early part of the last century, when otters were nearly wiped out by trappers.
It is easy to become a real villain when you and your young have just eaten most of the catfish someone bought, stocked, fed and so painstakingly worked to raise to good eating size. Otters soared in number because their niche was unoccupied, and ground on which the seed was sown was so barren and fertile.  Now, with the value of their fur as it has been, they are coming back to earth a little.  The otter is one creature with a fairly high biotic potential (potential to survive and live long) and a fairly high reproductive potential (potential to reproduce in good numbers).  In the future, he may become less noticed, and actually decline in number to create less havoc.
I doubt that is so with the great blue herons, which are very efficient fish killers too.  They are very much overpopulated and there are few factors to control them.  So too are the cormorants which seem to darken the sky every winter on our lakes.  Both of them have that high reproductive potential and high biotic potential.  I wish that they were good to eat.  If cormorants were good to eat, there wouldn’t be half the chicken houses in the Ozarks, and our waters would be cleaner because of it.
Speaking of clean waters, I have mentioned before the old tires that show up in our rivers because to leave a tire at a tire shop, you must pay a government-mandated fee.  Did you know that tires can yield oil, and a very high grade of steel that can be economically recycled without pollution of any kind.  All the talk we have about “going green” by politicians who wouldn’t know poison ivy from a tomato plant, is really hollow.  We could do so much by recycling what we throw away, and we could even use water for fuel. 
You heard me right.  A neighbor of mine, Don Jones, showed me how he has hooked up a unit consisting of rubber tubes and wires and three quart jars under his pickup hood.  In the jars he has water and baking soda, and it brings about the creation of hydrogen, which is injected into his carburetor and mixed with gas.  It allows him to emit oxygen rather than carbon dioxide and it gives him about 30 percent better gas mileage. (see his website about this... www.ozarkswaterasfuel.com ).
What if every car and pick-up in our nation had such a device beneath the hood?  What would it do to those greedy oil companies we despise so much, and that little dictator in Venezuela who sells us so much oil while he berates us.  There is probably too much common sense in what Don can do so easily for the government to make it work, too much common sense in paying for old tires and recycling them rather than charging you to dispose of them in landfills.  Common sense doesn’t seem to work anymore.   
We do a lot of talk about changing things, about global warming and “going green”.  I think there are too many people on the earth to change anything now.  It is too late... we are way too smart, too technically advanced and too content with what we have to change anything.  I don’t know for sure that something catastrophic is coming, and I don’t know what it might be if it is.  I can just feel it at times, and I think those who are closest to the land can feel it too... and see it. 
Our progress a giant rock-slide which cannot be stopped now. It may be that there is nothing to worry about in seeing the ever increasing dumping of millions of gallons of sewage sludge all over the Ozarks watershed. Those who are doing it say it is safe... nothing to worry about in those viruses and chemicals.  They just disappear, and it is all safe... and besides, what else can we do.  There is ever-increasing tons and tons of it.
 It may be that just because streams I floated and caught fish from as a boy have dried up and disappeared, and it may be that just because ponds and creeks everywhere are increasingly devoid of life and choked with scum, and water tables are said to be farther beneath the earth than they were ever known to be, we really have no water problem at all.
It could be that we ought to make all our important decisions about what affects the earth merely according to what the economics dictate. But if you know anything about the basic fundamentals which sustain life, you know there is something wrong which economic answers seem to cause, rather than fix. Something will have to reduce the number of humans on the earth eventually. If He who created it all does not intercede before then, it will happen, as surely as the sun rising tomorrow. I think it might be good to live in the deep woods at that time.  As for now I am going to sit on the back porch and listen to the birds and wait for my tomatoes to ripen, a problem sufficient for the day.