Spring is typically more a concept than a thing. We wait all winter for spring and it arrives in fits and starts that both tantalize and frustrate us. Warm days are followed by chill and clouds. Rain spits horizontally one day and falls languid and splattery from above the next. Most of all, spring is the product of an extravagant explosion of building warmth, energy and sunlight. Spring is chemical too. all processes in nature have a chemical foundation. Plans stir into life and begin their new dance with photosynthesis that works at a molecular level. We can’t see these minute processes at work, but we do know they exist. Science has provided us wonderful insights into how nature really works. No longer are we dependent on wives’ tales and myths to help us appreciate the workings of the natural world. And that is good. Science is much more satisfying because it is verifiable. We can understand the infrastructure of spring. We know how bees and insects pollinate plants. Moving from flower to flower, these pollinators perform a work of sexual magic. It is entirely programmed into nature as a symbiotic relationship. People who pay attention to spring are much like those who go about town fixing things. The infrastructure of a community, its light poles and sewers and streets, does not happen on its own. Those informed and responsible for the infrastructure therefore look at a village, town or city through different eyes. Nature does not need human beings to function. But it does need human beings to understand the importance of its functions. It has long been recognized that the human race can have profound impact on the natural world. This is not always good. Sadly this adverse impact is often based on ignorance, but also knowingly wasteful habits. As bright as people can be, they can also be greedy and wasteful. It’s true at the community level as well. People who don’t really understand how the electrical grid works get frustrated quickly when a passing storm knocks out the lights. At that moment the television does not work, or the lights. So people whine and complain inside their homes, wondering when the juice will flow back into their abodes. Those who maintain the power grid can usually trace the source of the outage and get things working again. Sometimes it takes an hour or two because safety comes first, and the massive flow of energy through the power grid is not something one can take lightly. Our water works and sewage systems are similarly dependent on repair and maintenance of the infrastructure. Think how helpless we’d all be if that knowledge base were suddenly removed. When workers in these trades go on strike (and it seldom happens) entire cities can be put at risk. It is remarkable then how poorly the average person seems to comprehend the workings of nature as well. The incurious  mind regards nature with the same bland, banal attitude that is cast upon the infrastructure of a town. Too many people only seem to care about nature when it isn’t working to their advantage or behaving like it should. You talk about lack of gratitude? The infrastructure of nature is far, far more important than the infrastructure we tend to impose upon it. Yet how many people recognize even a few species of birds in their neighborhood, or can identify the sound of chorus frogs singing from a wet ditch in spring? Spring is flowers and green grass and April showers, yet asking people to look beyond these basic cliches seems almost like an affront. That’s why it is so hard for so many people to conceive that the infrastructure of spring is at risk beyond the shifting and changing it typically does in a given year. In fact the infrastructure of the entire global climate is being impacted by what amounts to a human storm of carbon that never ceases and never releases from the atmosphere. These changes we can see happening right before our eyes. But the attitudes of some politicians is much like the ungrateful soul sitting inside a dark living room complaining that the lights are not going back on. It’s a shortsighted approach to life that refuses to look at the reasons why things occur rather than claiming the status quo is business as usual and should not have to be examined. The next time you look at a flower, be it wild or domestic, know that its bloom does not require your will to occur, yet it still depends on you caring about it to see another year. And another. Lest there come a day that it cares not that you are gone. Sooner or later we all push up daisies. Better to appreciate them while you can look them in the eye and help nature propagate its infrastructure for yet another generation.