Editorial of November 14, 2024

Please Pay Attention

Last week, the Village of Milford issued a Mandatory Conserve Water Order, the first ever of its kind for the village, effective immediately and to last until further notice. The reason, as we all may easily guess, is due to a low water table, brought about by a serious lack of rainfall. Also last week, Otsego County officials reconfirmed that the county will remain in a local State of Emergency, including a ban on outdoor burning, indefinitely, or, said they, “until we receive significant rainfall or snowfall, whichever comes first.” The water supply throughout the county has been severely challenged, leading to fears of wildfires, water shortages and drought, the likes of which have been ravaging the rest of the country though they have only very rarely before been here.

Take a good look around. Otsego Lake has never been lower. The water is still very clear—the zebra and quagga mussels have taken care of that—but the shoreline is revealing a new, very low, often muddy waterline that has not been visible in living memory. Elsewhere in our midst, the streetlights, parking lot lights and even some house and business lights are still shining brightly in the early hours of the day when now, because of the end of Daylight Savings last week, there seems to be no need for such illumination after 7 a.m., as the sun has already risen, or at the very least a cloudy day has dawned.

All of these—the new threats of wildfires, the new existence of low water tables and water sources, the continuing unnecessary overuse of electricity, along with our ongoing misuse of waste and the irrational abuse of our extensive flora and fauna habitats—scream for some kind of conciliation: We must really conserve—now—our energy and our environment if we are to continue to enjoy our uniquely superb upstate way of life, where being outdoors is most often better than being in. To conserve—“to keep in a safe place or sound state; to avoid wasteful or destructive use”—is to preserve and protect, to manage our resources to prevent exploitation, destruction or neglect so they will be here for us and our children in the future.

This conservation movement is not new. It can be traced back to a paper presented by John Evelyn to the Royal Society in England in 1662, when timber resources were becoming dangerously scarce. Evelyn advocates for the conservation of the forests by managing the rate of depletion of the trees and ensuring their replenishment—all this so teak might remain available for the construction of ships for the kingdom’s all-powerful Royal Navy. In the mid-19th century, the conservation ethic expanded to include a proclamation that human activity damages the environment, and mankind has a civic duty to maintain a healthy environment for future generations, using scientific methods. Earlier, in 1827, our own James Fenimore Cooper bemoaned the ravages of mankind, writing in “The Pioneers,” “The world has no better fish than the bass of Otsego…But, like all the other treasures of the wilderness, they already begin to disappear, before the wasteful extravagance of man.”

These steps, in both environmental and natural conservation, were taken a few centuries ago. Surely, we can do this today, here in Cooper’s Otsego County, even in the face of a new federal administration that probably isn’t going to pay it much heed. Let us pay it much heed.