Closed System

by Matt DeNoto

Up until about a week ago, my kitchen was infested with fruit flies. They pop up every summer, seemingly from out of nowhere, makes annoyances of themselves and, eventually, go away. Usually I try not to pay them any mind. I let them go about their business and they let me go about mine. But my kitchen was apparently a bit too fruitful for the flies, and their numbers started to grow beyond annoying into simply gross.

So I took a day, rolled up my sleeves and cleaned the kitchen thoroughly. Then I used the hose attachment on my vacuum to commit a little fruit fly genocide.

And silly though it may sound, I felt a little bad. I understand that they’re not intelligent creatures and that they don’t live long lives anyway, but I still try to hold as much as I can to the principle that living things generally have the right to go on living.

In my mind I began musing on the subject of niches. When we as humans started to become ‘civilized,’ living in houses with walls and roofs, we didn’t really reserve a place for the rest of nature’s creatures. Our homes are for us, and nothing else. And we have accepted this as natural, despite the fact that our dwellings take up significantly more space than we do as individuals.

Obviously we do not wish for the whole world to be standardized in this way. Even in our own neighborhoods we value parks and green spaces. National wildlife reserves protect species that might otherwise be endangered. But we have become addicted to control, drawing very thick lines between what parts of nature we are prepared to allow and which ones we are not. Hence pesticides and weed killers and immaculate lawns, to say nothing of the spaces inside our homes. Hard, flat surfaces and straight lines everywhere, so very unlike nature. They are designed for the comfort of humans, to the detriment of everything else. To those creatures that would dare to try and make themselves at home in our space we have given the name pests.

Of course, recently we have begun to see the benefits of the natural system. Over the centuries, the world has developed processes that keep things balanced. We are not yet so mature.

But we are starting to learn. We can now replace sewage systems with living, breathing mini-ecosystems that use our waste as food. We can build natural pools that utilize the inherent balances in nature, instead of harsh chemicals, to keep them clean and beautiful.

By slowly learning to reintegrate nature with our cold, selfish society, we not only benefit ourselves by cutting out those dangerous materials we used to keep the rest of the world at bay, we allow the rest of nature to do what it does best – allow every creature to perform its function to everyone’s benefit.