There’s a certain breed of person who moves out to the country and then instantly proceeds to turn it into what they just escaped: a sterile suburban front lawn.
You see it all across North America but especially right here at home in Prince George.
People move to a rural spread and begin their campaign against any herbaceous, native plant with a leaf on it. It gets cut down and turned into a carefully manicured lawn without anything so much as a fireweed.
Those aspen, birch and cottonwood? All weeds. Cut them down, maybe spray their root system, but be careful to leave every fire-prone stem of pine, spruce or fir.
This may be contrary to the recommendation of FireSmart BC, which says do the opposite, and it may expose your neighbourhood to more wildfire, but hey, that’s what home insurance is for. And if they can’t afford those ever-increasing insurance rates, well, that’s their problem.
Wildlife? The fewer birds, moose, deer, bears, god forbid garter snakes, the better.
If we can’t starve them out by eliminating all their food, we are going to get some dogs and let them run wild through the whole neighbourhood so our neighbours can’t enjoy wildlife, either. Besides, who wants coyotes and foxes threatening our domestic cats as they roam about killing songbirds anyway?
And that wetland we moved next to has mosquitos. Let’s call the regional district and get them to poison it with their $300,000 a year, mostly useless, taxpayer-funded mosquito control program.
We all claim to love animals and the wildlife of the countryside in the same moment we take away their food and drive them off the land and destroy that very countryside with a banal aesthetic of simplified monoculture and an astounding sense of entitlement.
It is deeply engrained in our psyche as a culture and a nation that our iconic native tree and plant species just aren’t good enough. Our northern ecosystem is to be suppressed and replaced with something alien.
It’s a great irony that Canada is a nation of wilderness yet we are one of the most urbanized, nature-fearing nations on the planet. We exist in a suburban/urban bubble and given the opportunity of living out in nature, we will project this sheltered, easily-annoyed existence on those surroundings as well.
If you want to understand why insects are petering out, why the barn swallows don’t show up anymore, why the moose aren’t on the Blackwater anymore, I would suggest this is a product of an intolerant and controlling impulse that is evident right there on our front lawns.
It won’t end well.
Let your yard go wild. Take a step back and let nature in.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer
