Developers in Sonoma County are feeling so skittish these days, they're bending over backwards to make nicey-nice with the tiger salamander. But it's still not good enough for some friends of these slimy little critters. 
How often do you see a tiger salamander? Tell me you really care about tiger salamanders. Go on.
What exactly do tiger salamanders add to anyone's life? Is it the way their moist skin glistens in the moonlight, or what? Maybe....it's the imputed personal virtue one is able to roughly appropriate from non-specific others......in return for having articulated one's concern for tiger salamanders?
Don't laugh now, this blindingly veritable insight is - in actuality - a direct and obviously beneficial externality of my college sociology course of studies, and embodies an unintended nod to my dad, the social psychologist.
At any rate - and continuing my rant - how, precisely, would the ecosystem, and society as a whole, really, have been worse off without some indeterminate number of tiger salamanders from Sonoma County? Would the denizens of Santa Rosa have discovered that their nature walks were lacking, for want of visible tiger salamanders? Would property owners along the Russian River, periodically, upon arising, and on their cedar decks ingesting their morning Free Trade Shade Grown coffee and apricot-ginger scones, have paused between chews and sips, to voice worries that they had not lately seen enough tiger salamanders - and that their lives were therefore somehow inestimably diminished?
I should most certainly think not.
Can we possibly care too much about beings such as the tiger salamander? I would submit that we can, and, tragically, do.
Sorry, folks. But I just have to draw the line at these oleaginous amphibians.
My closet of compassion is overflowing already, thanks mostly to Iraqis these days.
There's no space there for salamanders - and no space for them in my heart.
I am a bad man.
TECHNORATI TAGS: TIGER SALAMANDER, SONOMA COUNTY
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at December 16, 2005 03:01 PM
yes, matt..you are a very bad man.LOL.
but on a serious note...they are an important part of the eco-system and amphibians have long been known to be the canaries in the coal mine ,so to speak, of the environment.
and, i admit, being a marin girl...they are pretty nifty little creatures.
"At any rate - and continuing my rant - how, precisely, would the ecosystem, and society as a whole, really, have been worse off without some indeterminate number of tiger salamanders from Sonoma County?"
Uh...don't you think you should be able to answer the question before you rant?
Posted by: David Sucher at December 18, 2005 10:15 AMWhy don't you answer it for us, David? Go on, take a chance....
Posted by: Matt Rosenberg at December 18, 2005 10:24 AM