What is it about wild land that offends us?
I’ve just come back from a walk in the woods, on the ridge that rises above our house.
When we first moved here, almost 20 years ago, one of the things that I particularly loved about this area—especially since we had just moved from the concrete suburbs of Toronto—was the walking trails along this untouched, unimproved, undeveloped ridge.
But the pristine environment has been whittled away, lot by lot.
One favoured trail got literally blasted out of existence—dynamited and leveled for a house.
Another owner strung fences across a walking path used by generations, to contain his horses. On today’s walk I passed a property where the owner had bulldozed every single tree.
I don’t question the owner’s legal right to do what they want with their property. If I owned that land, I would want that same right, although I probably would not do what they did.
I do question the apparently unchallenged assumption that land has value only when it is cleared, farmed, paved, or covered with buildings.
I’ve yet to hear of a municipality that assigns any value to wild land in calculating its assets.
Wild land is seen only as a potential site for houses, golf courses, or industrial parks. It has no value as a habitat for owls and squirrels, as a sponge for retaining rain, as a sanctuary where diversity can flower.
In urban planners’ eyes, a paved parking lot that grows nothing has economic value. An endless ocean of warehouse roofs has value. Even a landfill site that will remain toxic for centuries has value.
But untouched woods are worth nothing.
Nature, as friend and former minister Bob Thompson observes, shows an amazing ability to heal its wounds. Healing, he argues, is the underlying principle of existence. Over time, polluted streams clean themselves. New seedlings green the blackened ruins of a forest fire.
Granted, nature itself can do enormous damage.
Barely 400 years ago, a volcano devastated the Nass River Valley in northern B.C. White-hot lava flows seared the valley bottom, sealing it in solid rock. Ash smothered upstream benches.
But nature eventually healed its own devastation. Lichens and mosses muted the harsh lava. Seeds found crevices to root in. All that ash later made soils incredibly fertile.
As far as I know, nature’s efforts to recover have never made things worse. Nature seems to have no auto-immune diseases, no necrotizing fasciitis that consumes its host.
Except us. Nature has been so thoroughly expurgated from the festering cores of Mexico City, Manila, or Mumbai, that healing would now require excising humans from the equation.
Of course those are extreme examples. But they’re a direct extension of the mindset that land has value only when developed for human use.
When we view land as wasted until humans exploit it, we make Manila our Holy Grail.
Sometimes I’m almost glad I’m growing old. With any luck, I won’t be around to see “my” wooded ridge stripped bare and paved over.
