By Cathy Hird

When talking about our impact on the environment, we often use the term "footprint". Sometimes it seems as if we picture the way we lightly press our foot on the sand making a mark that single wave can wash away. But let's consider the way feet leave marks.

If once in a while we walk across the lawn to trim around a tree, no one would know by looking. But the path from where we park the car to the front door is clear. Sometimes on that path we put in a sidewalk so that the grass doesn't wear to mud.

The path to a shed, a pond, or a chair in the shade we don't pave so the grass shows where we walk. On our farm, there is a clear worn track to the barn that we use everyday when we do chores.

In the field, there are paths that the sheep use. Much of the time the group is spread out and seems to move in a random way across the field, but still there are paths they have made when they headed from one field to the next. These days there is a clear narrow path between apple trees because first thing everyday they check for windfalls.

Along the lane from the road, there are a couple paths that come up from the swamp. These are not worn as well as the sheep paths, but the cats don't like to get wet, so they tend to use the same place to dive in under the trees, a place where they have pushed the grass aside. The deer know the dry places in the swamp so as they travel from one corner to the other, they made a subtle path where the grass is just a little worn.

Then there are our tractors: the tracks they leave are not subtle. The grass up to the main doors of the barn is flattened in July as I make 300 trips from the place the hay is stacked to the doorway so it can be stored inside. These days the grass around the manure pile is pressed down as manure is pilled into the spreader to go onto the fields.

The grass in front of the barn is long again now, and the grass and weeds will come back around the manure pile. This is not the case on the track that the spreader takes to the field. Wheeled equipment has taken this narrow lane for 150 years. Horses pulled rakes with metal wheels and wagons with wooden ones. Now tractors pull things with rubber tires, but the width of the wheels has not varied much. There is grass growing in the middle of the lane, but there are two bare hard tracks. Nothing even tries to grow there. Even if we quit farming, the two brown lines will remain for a long, long time.

So what about our environmental footprint? When we are very careful, when we visit a fragile ecosystem and stay on the boardwalk, we come close to being as subtle as the deer. But our regular daily routines are much more like the tractor on the lane. We use about the same amount of power every day. We recycle the same number of cans and the same pile of plastic. Most of us put more carbon in the air than the land around us can absorb. Most of us have made small changes: we recycle and compost more than we used to, but realistically, we've used up the same resources every day for years.

There are things we can change. We can heal over the tracks we've driven for so many years. It takes commitment though. It takes a new approach, the commitment to be more like a deer than a tractor.
Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister and writer living near Walters Falls.