When I lived in the ‘Big Smoke’, TOR-AN-NA… or Toronto for the rest of you, I mean, I loved the vibrancy, loved living right on Lake Ontario, in an area lying outside the city’s heart, in a port community that hugs the shore. I loved the fog rolling off the lake early in the morning, to the river where Salmon would return to, I did, I loved it. Yet, yet, what I missed is the wild bits, the hidden bits, the secluded enchantments, the chaotic and unpredictable beauty of an overgrown riverbank, or the forgotten places just off the well-worn paths through a forest, like that deer forging on the edge of Euston Meadow as I bike through in the morning on my way to work.

And there it was, as the mist left the meadow grasses, just at the edge, there it was grazing. It saw me a fraction of a hair before I saw it, but our gazes locked, and I thought about stopping to capturing it, yet, that would have broke the grip of its magic. I mean, I had plenty of pictures of deer, and a picture just could not capture how seeing it made me feel.

Here in London we have that magic, here and there, as the river runs through the heart of London, and over the last couple decade our environmental groups have worked hard to protect these areas of rich vibrancy, identifying significant ecosystems that keep our watersheds healthy. There has been an uphill battle fought to ensure they are left as untouched as possible, recognizing their strategic importance, from just pure joy, to quantifiable benefits, such as clean drinking water and meadows and forests to act as lungs to filter the various poisons our lifestyles shed like dead skin. These things are FREE, they are built in, they are not a thing to be squandered and ignored, but protected and utilized.

That world to me, the metropolis and its nodding acknowledgement of green space, was too manicured, not enough wabi sabi, no wild corridors, or few, it made me feel trapped.

Yet, I know that many people fear those wild spaces, so many have this need to control EVERYTHING around them, leaving nothing to chance, always knowing what’s round the corner, and those places to me seem stagnant and boring, stripped of their magic.

You know, magic can not exist without a little mayhem, just sayin’, I know because it is in those wilder places I’ve been that I have learned more, felt more, felt capable of more. Hope.

And, of course now I read where that horrible man that runs the show down yonder in that troubled land of my birth, rolling back protective measures for endangered species in order to satisfy the greedy capitalist butchers who would put a bounty on the head of precious species throughout the land, to ensure their profits rise as everything they touch dies, and my blood doth boil, my heart aches tangibly, I can literally feel my breath catch when I think about what he is doing to some of the most beautiful places on earth.

Our own right-wing extremist pile of crap provincial Premier, Ford, tried to kill our green space/belt that rings around our cities, he wanted to turn them over to developers. The greenbelts purpose is to protect our agricultural lands from urban sprawl, but also protecting our precious watersheds, our air, our water. Oh, yeah, he tried, but the hue and cry that went up was tangible, and he backed off. Even had some developers group he had made some promises too, but all his dirty secrets came out, but NOPE, Ontarians’ were having not of his shite.

So I grabbed my cup o’java after reading about Trumps disdain for those wild places were magic resides, slamming down the case of my laptop, grabbed a smoke and headed to the sanctuary of my stoop, to get away and be thankful I have this little enchantment of my own just outside my door. This place to rest and watch chipmunks and birds travel through my little wabi sabi corridor of magic. Its purpose is to protect me, to catch my breath, to take my blood off the boiling point. This man is breaking something real and sacred, something inside me clenches its teeth in anger.

“In nature nothing exists alone.”

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

These are things I don’t often speak of because I sometimes just can not organize my rage into words that make sense. These actions from the right-wing morons to roll back environmental protections, just as they are most needed, is so incredibly shortsighted and dangerous, after decades of work to get them implemented. The arrogance and ignorance, the sheer selfish grab for whatever they can take away, whatever they can rip from the land for profit, whatever they deem to be unnecessary, they will destroy for their own selfish greed and profit, and damn the consequences, damn the research, damn the wisdom and knowledge of scientists that have tried to warn us what is at stake.

But these people are deaf, dumb and blind and all they see is profit and lining their own pockets.

Back in the misty long ago (the 60s), there was a time when a movement of eco-warriors were first created, after being ripped from their nests of ignorance by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, when they first saw the real and present danger to our way of life, humanity itself, and it ignited a call to action.

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost‘s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

IBID

At the time we knew nothing of the warming earth and the chaotic changes to climate our warming earth can have. In those early years many began to explore the interwoven nature of us and our surrounding ecology, a time when pumping poisons and gases into our waterways, the smog that polluted our lungs, were just ignored as just the price we paid for progress.

But we know better now, or we should.

Rachel Carson was saying that it was too high a price if we destroy ourselves.

Now, sitting atop the mighty throne of America is the grand ignoramus, suppressing anything that does not feed his and his cronies vast coffers, and the rage I feel towards these evil men is so tangible that I have struggled to respond, and not merely ‘react’.

This is an issue that touches something inside me, this knowing that all this is a gift, and the birds, the trees, the butterflies and bees, as insignificant they all may seem to some, in truth they are the very most important things, the keys to it all, within this vast and entangled web of life we are tangled up as well, they are the canaries in the coal mine, and every time a species dies before its time, we are weakened, and that link in the chain is gone, our lifeline to this earth becomes more fragile.

Yet, in our arrogance, some believed it was our job to save the earth, yet that was a fool’s errand as the earth does not need us, it is us that needs the earth.

Therefore, what we do to it we do to our selves.

Regardless of what some may WANT to believe, this is not just mamby-pamby-treehugger speak, or libtard corporate conspiracy for profit (rolls eyes), this is the facts on the ground, the science bearing witness, that our ignorance and our greed WILL, not maybe, WILL be our destruction.

“To stand at the edge of the sea, to sense the ebb and flow of the tides, to feel the breath of a mist moving over a great salt marsh, to watch the flight of shore birds that have swept up and down the surf lines of the continents for untold thousands of years, to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea, is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.”

Rachel Carson

The nature of life is to protect itself, and the amount of money that future generations will have to spend in order to, well, sustain life, will be FAR more. I mean, someone will pay, it is just a matter of how much and how many.

If we destroy enough, if we take it for granted enough, if we ignore the scientists wisdom and knowledge, it will go on, just it will go on without us.