8th Grade Honors English
October 20, 2017
This I Believe Essay

Modesty

Greed is the root of all evil—some might say. Modesty, in contrast, is a fundamental personal virtue (value), which I believe is crucial to being a good steward and citizen of the Earth. Modesty means not using too much, not being wasteful, and conserving whatever possible. Avarice destroys the environment. So why not be modest?

Last year, I could see the horrific effect of greed on the environment just two houses away from ours. The property had more than a dozen endemic Garry Oaks, which are threatened in Washington state. They only occur in small areas from Northern California to British Columbia and are a foundation of the oak prairie ecosystem. A logging truck came, and over the next few days I watched as every single tree on that lot was cut down and taken away. Later, I found out that they were bought by a predatory logging company, which buys trees from private individuals whose lots are smaller than the minimum that requires special permission from the City of Lakewood to cut down Garry oaks. To my disgust, the owners of this house removed all the trees in order to make a quick profit. The oaks were destroyed during the height of the birds’ nesting season in the last week of April—so all of the birds living in those oaks lost their homes, and the young hatchlings probably perished.

Greed does not only affect private land—it can also affect public land, like Lakewood’s Fort Steilacoom Park, on which the city recently executed a “beautification project”. A few days ago, I was shocked to see what this meant: more than four hundred trees had been cut down, and the already paved road around Waughop Lake was repaved, and the gravel parking lot had been newly covered with asphalt. The lake, whose claim to fame is being the most toxic lake in Western Washington, was covered with green bubbling vomit-like blobbular masses of cyanobacteria blooms, and the exposed shores were deathly black sludge. The lake was surrounded by invasive species such as English ivy and Himalayan blackberries, which were even climbing up the trees and smothering everything in their path. It just didn’t make sense to me that the city would pave the road and parking lot and cut down four hundred trees, while the lake remained a bubbling poison pot that kills the stocked trout within three weeks and leaves the ducks there looking diseased. Why would people want to have a picnic next to such a place, bubbling with poisons? Yuck! Well, if they did, they’d have the brand-new picnic shelter, in the middle of a field of foul water fowl feces, the smelliest section of the park. How is this related to modesty? It seems like it was easier for the people in charge of the city (and park) to hire companies to cut down the trees and pave the road than to solve the important problems of restoring the toxic lake and eradicating the invasive species. If it were more modest, the city would have found volunteers, or students from Pierce College, who are already doing oak prairie ecosystem restoration just next to Fort Steilacoom Park, who could remove all the blackberries, for example.

Watching these things happen here in Lakewood, I realized that greed is a major problem on various levels—from personal to local and global. I now see that modesty is crucial to the wellbeing of the world. This has changed me because now I realize the deeper importance of modesty, because it isn’t only a personal value, it is a global value.

In conclusion, I believe that to be a good citizen and steward of the Earth, I have to be modest, and this will be doing the world a favor. If I am modest, and only take what I need, the Earth will thank me.