I’m sharing a story of one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.
It was around 1998 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was living in my Mom’s garage and working as a gardener. I mostly pulled weeds for wealthy home owners. My girlfriend had come to stay with me for the summer and was working with me. She was a horticulture student so it was a good fit.

We were detailing the yard at a huge house in the hills above “the city different”. We noticed something neither of us had ever seen before. In the bottom of an inoperable decorative water fountain, in the stagnant water, there were tiny creatures. We were sure we witnessing the natural evolutionary birth of a living species. It was the miracle of nature happening right before our eyes and we were witnessing Gods. They were obviously some kind of fresh water shrimp species. It was odd that they were trying to exist in the high mountain desert, in shallow, standing water, but it was amazing. We were forced with the dilemma of doing our job and cleaning out the water feature, and effectively murdering a beginning species of mountain shrimp, or pretending we somehow missed the cleaning of the fountain and let nature exist unharmed. Of course we chose to do the right thing. (If you don’t know what that is- you are a bad person).  Who knows, maybe this species would evolve and someday save humanity. Who were we to disrupt the natural destiny of this sporadic ecology.
Sadly, years later we learned that the species we had saved were just mosquitoes. Still, I’m not ashamed of our concern for nature, just our stupidity. My girlfriend, who was in college, might have known better if she was taking an entomology class. I must give her an excuse. She has a Masters degree now. Not in bugs, obviously. I might have known a little better if I had ever paid attention to nature. How did you learn about mosquitoes and their larvae stage? Maybe you just did. Maybe, we didn’t.
Then again, maybe those mosquito larvae fed a type of lizard or bird that will someday evolve and destroy humankind altogether.  We’re not going to think about that. Regardless, Charles Darwin and Sigourney Weaver would be impressed by us two naive and thoughtful twenty somethings. We refused to ruin the environment and instead preserve the theory of natural selection. Before you judge our ignorance, you must ask yourself, what have you ever done for the world?