I remember the night when I was in line at Wal-Mart buying some batteries.
A beautiful thunderstorm had been brewing just before I entered the store.
Then there was a thunderbolt.
It shook the building.
The power went out.
It was my turn to pay the cashier for my batteries when the cash register conked out.
I don't know why (the mind works in strange ways), but I picked this moment to say to the cashier, "You know, frogs can tell you a lot about the health of the earth. When they're dying you know there's something wrong in the environment."
Behind me a voice piped up "You better stop talking, or I'll have someone who’ll stop you."
I turned around and saw the woman, and figured that it was her husband that she was referring to who would stop me from saying any more about frogs.
I didn't see her better half yet, but I took her at her word, and I let the subject of frogs jump out the window (if there had been any).
I paid for my batteries and leapfrogged out of the store.
I still don't know why frogs and what I had said about them agitated this woman so much.
Maybe she raised frogs and I was stepping on some webbed toes.
But frogs have come home (not to roost).
Amphibians are in the news again.
My comment that stormy night was accurate and ominous.
“For the first time in modern history, because of the way that humans are impacting our natural world, we're facing the extinction of an entire class of organisms. This is not the extinction of just a panda or a rhino; it's a whole class of organisms. Certainly if it were impacting mammals, we would be taking this a lot more seriously.”
(Claude Gascon, a herpetologist with Conservation International)
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