Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
Earlier this summer frogs by the thousands emerged from Otter Creek south of Middlebury, hopping their way across the fields, roads, gardens and lawns of Salisbury, Cornwall and Leicester. Motorists encountered a carpeting of flattened frogs on nearby roadways, and residents were reluctant to mow their lawns because of the abundance of frogs in the grass.
According to a story in the Addison Independent, these mottled green amphibians were northern leopard frogs, or Rana pipiens. Biologist Jim Andrews told the Independent that it was unusual to find this species in numbers so large in the region of the Cornwall swamp. They are found more commonly in and around Lake Champlain.
Craig Zondag, field coordinator for the Lemon Fair Insect Control District, told the Independent, that heavy and continuing rainfall had kept the environs of the Cornwall swamp flooded longer this spring than he has ever seen it. Ordinarily, the swamps, rivulets and channels in the relatively flat land south of Middlebury dry out in the spring and do not provide good conditions for northern leopard frog tadpoles to mature. This year, the water remained high, and the frogs proliferated. Zondag made a comment to the Independent that may have been more salient in our era than he intended: “This was unprecedented in all of my field work,” he said. “It seemed like it was biblical in proportion. If they were falling from the sky, it would have been a plague.”
The biblical reference is apt. Whether he meant to or not, he was referring to the Book of Exodus and the plagues that descended on Egypt as Moses was seeking to persuade the Pharaoh to let the enslaved Jews go. The second plague was a plague of frogs, about which God issued a warning: “The river shall swarm with frogs; they shall come up into your palace, into your bedchamber and your bed, and into the houses of your officials and of your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowl.”
It did not rain frogs in Egypt; the frogs swarmed out of the rivers, as they have done in Addison County. The plague of frogs was one of 10 that included pollution of the Nile, gnats and flies, diseased cattle, hail and thunderstorms, locusts, darkness from dust storms, and the death of firstborn children. Nature had turned against the Egyptians.
A swarm of northern leopard frogs is not exactly the same thing, but more and more, it seems appropriate to reach for biblical language to capture the scope of the changes and threats besetting the earth. In the case of Addison County, it has been a surprising abundance of frogs. Elsewhere, changes threaten to wipe out whole species. A recent New York Times story described how the encroaching waters of Lake Michigan, swollen by the extreme rainfall of the spring and summer, were threatening the endangered piping plover, whose nesting areas had been flooded. It is a story told over and over around the globe as whole ecosystems — coral reefs, arctic ice — are threatened.
The epic dimension of these changes suggests that a new mindset is in order, requiring more than the usual reasoned consideration of public policy. As in the case of the Egyptians and the Jews, the nature of our humanity and the meaning of right action in the face of disaster are at stake. Already millions of people are fleeing poverty, war and oppression, on the road to Europe or the United States from the Middle East, Asia, Africa or Latin America. Not every decision to uproot one’s family can be traced to a specific, climate-related cause, but drought, heat and flood are becoming prevalent enough that they are at the root of much of the violence and suffering plaguing the world. And plaguing is the operative word.
The minority of humanity already safely ensconced in Europe or North America has already begun to pull up the drawbridges to keep people out. The migrating millions will find a home; they will not wander in the desert forever. The challenge of the so-called Western world is to recognize the quasi-biblical dimension of the changes underway — take a look at the Bahamas — and to find the moral and spiritual resources to allow scope for the ordinary human impulses of compassion and understanding. This story is not going away. It will be the story of children born today, just as the passing generation had to live through the epic disasters of the mid-20th century.
In fact, the comparison is useful. The upheavals of the Great Depression, World War II and Holocaust challenged the United States and the other democracies more than militarily. They demanded that we recognize what it meant to be human — to respond with strength and conscience to mortal challenges to our humanity. There were plenty of voices wishing to accommodate Nazis and other murderers — including America Firsters in the United States. Instead, our parents and grandparents rose up to face a threat unparalleled in human history. Those who would accommodate themselves to tyranny had their eye on their narrow self-interest, as they saw it, rather than on their obligations to fellow humans. History left them in the dustbin, but accommodationists today once again question the very idea that obligations to fellow humans exist.
The proliferation of the northern leopard frog in Addison County is a small reminder of a big story. The handsome little amphibian does not even count as exotic or endangered. In fact, it is so common and integral to the Vermont landscape that in 1998 the Vermont Legislature designated it as the Vermont state amphibian.
“A healthy northern leopard frog population is desirable in Vermont,” the Legislature declared, “and is threatened by loss of habitat and deformities that may be related to changes in the environment. Environmental problems that affect frogs could be a warning about further impacts upon other species, including humans.”
It is now incumbent upon us to recognize the plagues we have unleashed on ourselves — as rain forests burn, hurricanes rage, ice sheets melt and species vanish. It is happening in small ways and big all around us.
