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"These are my people," writes author Michael Perry in his book "Population 485" about returning from the city to small town life in Wisconsin.

That's a little how I felt last Friday as I went to Coon Valley to attend the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Coon Creek Watershed project.

And it may sound funny for a German kid visiting a Norwegian community to say these are my people, but I grew up just a short drive up the hill and to the right and I understand the lessons learned from the Coon Creek Watershed project. I remember visiting the Coon Valley as a small boy. We usually went there to get some farm supplies. I remember my dad telling me about the watershed project and the CCC crews that were camped in various places in the area who would travel out during the day to do their strenuous manual labor. I would picture tired and dirty men in their work clothes tromping up and down dirt roads carrying shovels and picks.

I also remember the stories of how bad the conditions were back then with ditches forming in places they never were before and how quickly their destructive forces could undo what nature had taken care thousands or even millions of years. We would pass some part of the farm and my dad would say “When I was a kid this was a huge gully.” Then I would hear how the gully formed because they had done something to inadvertently cause the water to begin eroding there.

"We just didn't know any better," he would say.

I guess that's where my respect for the environment comes from, not from the Sierra Club or the World Wildlife Fund, it comes from what I heard in my father's voice as a youngster. It was a tone that said, “Be careful, nature is much more powerful than you can imagine and if you mess with it you can shift the balance and undo the natural order of things.”

My father impressed on us how important it was to respect nature and that if we take care of the land and gave back, it would keep providing and take care of us. It wasn't an overt lesson. He would simply do and say things that let us know we can't take things for granted because he had seen first hand that it can go away.

When I was eight or 10 years old I walked into the garage on the farm and on the wall there was a coil of rusted wire. I looked at it and it looked like barb wire but the barbs were much farther apart than normal. I said to my dad “That sure is some funny looking barb wire.” He looked at me and said “That's not barb wire that is check wire.”

He went on to explain to me that when his father first started to farm it was a common practice to use corn planters that would run on "check wire." The farmer would unroll the wire and stake it across a field. The planter would run along the wire and when it hit one of the barbs it would trip and plant a group of corn seed. Then the farmer would cultivate the corn in a crisscross pattern resulting in mounds of corn rather than rows.

I turned to my father and said, "Wouldn't that make the water run downhill and wash out the field?" My father turned to me and said, "It sure did."

The lesson had already begun to sink in.

The Coon Creek Watershed project is just one example of how far we have come in our understanding of how we can do things better and continue to do what we have to in order to stay in business, but in a way that is sustainable and not destructive. The lessons learned by my father's generation were passed to my generation, but we are not done learning and every now and then it is good to remember that 75 years ago things got out of balance, and some very wise and forward-thinking people took steps to correct the behavior that caused that imbalance.

It is a lesson worth remembering. If those who were there could tell us anything I think it would be just that, we do have the ability to destroy the natural order of things. Man does have that power, and we can use that power wisely. We can do things in a way that keeps everything in balance, like my father did, and still provide for all of our needs. And whatever we do in the future, we would do well to keep that lesson in mind.

The lesson I learned at the knee of my father was to look ahead and say to myself, “What is it we are doing today that will make us look back some day and say, ‘We just didn't know any better?’”