Free All the Little Live Things by Wallace Stegner

nature?”
    “Well ... Yes, of course.”
    “So if the germ on the tick on the gopher happens to get off the tick and onto you and gives you spotted fever, you should fold your hands like the suffering Arab and say, ‘God is kind’?”
    “I wouldn’t like spotted fever, no.”
    “It’s only nature,” I say with my district-attorney smile. “It’s only those little germs distributing their seeds. From their point of view, which you seem to suggest is as good as yours, you’re only a swamp where they have squatter’s rights.”
    The girl says stubbornly, “You can become immune to germs just the way you can to poison oak.”
    “Some can. How much do you envy the people you know who became immune to polio the hard way?”
    Catlin looks at me pleasantly, sipping his drink. I have the distinct impression that he wishes, in a friendly way, that I would shut my mouth. But good Lord, what this charming idiotic woman is saying! She wants to restore natural balances that have been disturbed ever since some Cro-Magnon accidentally boiled his drinking water. The Jains who go at night to break down the pest-control ditches, and build little bridges so that the locusts can get across onto their fields, are her appropriate playmates. Though for the moment I seem to have silenced her, I have certainly not put her convictions out of action. They are down there in the cellars and bomb shelters and among the rubble, and as soon as I drone away they will come out and go about their business as before.
    “Isn’t it lovely how violet the deciduous oaks look when everything is green around them?” Ruth says.
    If she wants to pretend that the conversation has now exhausted its present topic and will turn to others, she is whistling in a wind tunnel. I fix Marian Catlin with my wise old eye, and don my curmudgeon look, which says that though I speak brusquely my heart is as mushy as a papaya, and I say, “My dear child, it’s one thing to be fond of little live things—who isn’t?—but you can’t simply ignore the struggle for existence. There are good kinds of life and bad kinds of life....”
    “Bad is what conflicts with your interest,” she says. This is more acute than I expected from her, and I grant her the touch.
    “Yes, why not? We’ve become a weed species, we exterminate or domesticate species that threaten us, but we didn’t invent the process. Every kind of life you can think of is under attack by some other kind.”
    “Of course,” she says. “Everything’s part of some food chain. But that doesn’t mean we have the right to ...”
    “Even porcupines,” I say, riding over her. “Even porcupines seem to have been invented just to feed fisher-cats. Is it news that nature is red with tooth and claw? The gopher I shot back there was crawling with fleas and ticks, and he probably had tapeworm—at least our cat gets tapeworm from something he catches. If he knew how, don’t you suppose that gopher would eliminate all his pests and parasites so he could live happily ever after in my tomato patch? Do you think we could live here ourselves without fighting pests every day of the week?”
    “Not if you want to live in a botanical garden.”
    Ruth’s eyebrows are pulled clear up into the white widow’s peak of her hair. Young Catlin yawns and stretches, squints at the view of Weld’s shitepoke pigeon house and Tobacco-Road dog run across the gully, sips his drink, looks at me with a pleasant opaque expression. But I have to strike one more blow for sanity before quitting this silly debate.
    “Look,” I say. “Do you really like the woods and pastures as kind old Mother Nature designed them? Once they start distributing their seeds, which they will about May, you can’t walk through them. The woods are choked with poison oak and wild-cucumber vines till they aren’t fit for a rabbit to run in. And did you ever dig underground in these parts? It’s underground that you really meet the evils. Ever