RE: It Takes A Village so what's wrong with asking for help?
In the fifties and sixties, we walked alone hand in hand to school, and home again. At five I was taught where adults/perverts would be immensely hurt if I struck sure and fast and ran away, so in our village the silly old men were known, and at times like Guy Fawkes, needed to be wary of the older primary kids of nine and ten who might light a three penny banger and frighten them, and tease and run, as we laughing kids could be cruel if we knew a bully. But by young teens I knew every kid within ten mile up to two villages away in any direction by bicycle. We were often the news carriers, not tale-bearers of spite, but real news, like old granma Kennedy fell over and has an arm in a sling, and some adult parent would call in and do her shopping therefrom. We all worked the picking harvest, and not just the farms, but the hedgerows for the old ladies Jam's and chutneys or the old men's sloe wine or elder-flower or berry wine. Villages are wonderful places in which kids can learn a great deal from old vet's and the vet's left at home womenfolk. One old lady showed my gang how to hold birds with car or cat injuries, and let us watch when she bandaged and fed them in her cat proof glasshouse. We stood for hours watching the blacksmith, or puffed up his flame and earned a cup of 'char' - the strongest tea I've ever tasted, but he only let us kids have a small cup for helping his forge-fire, and never offered any adult, with whom he always appeared grumpy and sour until they left his forge. We felt 'SO' privileged to work on chopping sticks and pumping the bellows. Ah, the village, the horse chestnuts, the blackberries, the water so clear you could see the hunting pike. 😇
In the 80s, we'd pick green beans in the garden and eat them raw, or blackberries at a different friend'a house, or honeysuckle at our house.
But the nearest river was the most polluted river in all of New Jersey, which is saying something. 😂
When pre-school in Boxford in East Anglia, the local University at, I think Colchester, sent a grad' student once every little while to test the water as the river beside our house, which used to be a mill, was actually drinkable (4 microns, is it?), well anyway, when I was Four I specifically remember the excitement among the adults when Trout were seen swimming up river to the spring-pool behind our land. This on the East Coast. The Box empties into the Stour estuary and now the mouth of the Orwell and Stour have Harwich seaport on their south head and Felixstowe containerport on the north head, where used to be the wetlands and marshes, very similar to further north just south of Walberswick at Shingle Street. Mind you, I don't know if Shingle Street has also been filled, since I've not been there since early eighties. But I doubt very much if trout are found in the Box or the Stour.
Remembering the Trout in an East Coast river, I've thought that after the mid-west USA study, on oysters that picked on the East Coast of USA, we're transhipped to the mid-west where they closed, then began opening two weeks later as if still on the coast, because apparently they tune in to the Moon no matter the water. My idea was milking Trout/Salmon, and putting row and milk together in Moon-time in a spring-pool such as the Box, and breeding the fish out of cleansed or re-cleansed East Coast Rivers and any western rivers that they no longer breed in. If the fingerlings born in that water/soil make it to the sea, they should in their Moon-time return to that pool. I've heard biologists who have papers from book-learning say nay, but I've yet to hear from a practical trier, or one of those oyster research fellows. 😇
Scientists can hypothesize, but until a practical trier does some tests, they don'tnknow for sure!
Yay! That's what I reckon. That's what immediately came to mind when I read about the behaviour of the oysters. Where one might find clean enough rivers to experiment is a conundrum, but once proven to work, it becomes an enormous incentive to spend cleaning the rivers. 😇