It wasn't too long ago in my home in southern Minnesota, that I could encounter minnows, crayfish, frogs, salamanders, birds and a huge variety of insects just by stepping out my front door and going for a walk.

It wasn't like I lived in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area or anything either.  The river that ran through the middle of our town was the outflow for a mill plant.  Everywhere was waste ground from this building being torn down or that parking lot being paved.  Yet if you just looked you could always find everywhere the signs that you were not alone.

This morning I saw a grasshopper clinging to one of my fence posts.  I haven't seen a single grasshopper in months.  Talk about a survivor with an uncertain future.  After decades of Chem-lawn and such, good for him and his that they have hung on this long.

About a week ago I found a toad hiding beneath our bird bath.  It has been literally years since I last saw a toad.  Once they abounded everywhere.  I remember having to walk carefully through fields to avoid stepping on the hundreds of tiny frogs and toads around.  Now, years since I last saw one.  The last frog I saw was one that one of my dogs critically injured last autumn.

When I walk through a field or forest now and see a firefly I am dazzled not just by their amazing star-like glow as I have been since I was small.  I am dazzled that after the years  there are still fireflies, some of the most delicate and sensitive insects to poisons.

Signs of life are becoming scarcer, and more and more homogenous.  The animals that have been the most successful at adapting to us.  Ironically, the very species people use poisons, traps, and insecticides to kill.  Our chemical arsenal weeds out their competitors and leaves us alone with our nuisance animals.  Roaches, ants, squirrels and rats, pigeons and gulls.  Now and forever, world without end.