Views of Nature in the Country and in the City

To what extent does the place in which we live affect our attitude toward nature?  Specifically, do people living in the city and in the country have differing views of nature?

I grew up on twenty forested acres in the country.  Our house was on a small, dead-end gravel road that had only two other houses on it.  When I looked out our front window, I could see hills, trees, and agricultural fields, but no other houses.  Although I say now that I have loved nature for most of my life, I don't think that I really became aware of this love until I had gone away to the city for university.

Today, I live (for 8 months of the year, anyway) in a university dorm, with other people living literally metres away on all sides.  When I look out my window, I see parking lots, buildings, roads, streetlights, and planes landing at the airport, as well as trees and the distant hills.  Once I was separated from the land and the country that I loved, I began to realize the depth of that love.  It is here that I have learned how precious and valuable nature is.

To those who have always lived in the country, nature is not precious; it is all around us every day of the year.  It is easy to take it for granted.  And in the country, nature becomes an adversary: it is mosquitos buzzing in my ear, ice and mud and potholes on a poorly maintained road, trees falling on the power line, coyotes killing our cats, bears destroying our strawberry garden, firewood that needs to be cut and chopped so the house will be heated in the winter, snow that needs to be plowed from a long driveway, the constant threat and fear of forest fires in the summer months.  In the country, people recognize that nature is not always a friend.

This is not to say that people living in towns and cities do not have these problems; they very well might, but not, I think, to the same degree.  In the city, nature becomes manicured lawns and parks, backyard gardens, birds at the feeder.  In the city, nature becomes something to be treasured and preserved.  In the city, we look more closely for the signs that nature is all around us, if only because these signs are not as obvious here.  In the city, nature has become safer; because we do not have to battle it as much, we are better able to appreciate its beauty.  The city is the place for dreaming of the country.

It is impossible to say which of these attitudes toward nature, the "country attitude" or the "city attitude" are better than the other.  They are both equally valid viewpoints, yet neither one is complete without the other.  To hold only the "country attitude" is to view nature as a constant enemy, as something that must be conquered, used, and exploited, to forget that it may also be appreciated for its beauty and that the creatures living within it have as much right to life as humans.  To hold only the "city attitude" is to forget the dangers of nature, and to forget that we humans are still completely dependent upon it, and that to survive we must use and exploit it.

I have made many simplifications in my descriptions of "country" and "city" views of nature.  I doubt that many people today are completely one or the other.  Yet it is important to recognize these viewpoints, within others and within ourselves, and to always balance one with the other.  Should we cut down the trees to build houses, or should we conserve the forest?  There are no easy answers.  There are only the trees, and the forests, and the mountains, rivers, and oceans, and the endless diversity of human belief and debate.

Spring Equinox 2010

March 20, 2010 - vernal equinox, often considered the first day of spring.

The greens of this land are subtle.  Sagebrush, one of the predominant plant species, is evergreen, a pale, greyish, washed-out sort of green.  It is a frugal plant, low to the ground (I have rarely seen an individual taller than I am), with small leaves and inconspicuous flowers - suitable for this dry, windy land, an environment capable of bitter cold in the winter and bitter heat in the summer.

The grasses of last year still stand, dead and brittle, lending the hills their perennial shade of pale brown.  I am still learning their names - bluebunch wheatgrass, Sandberg's bluegrass, Junegrass, and the invasive cheatgrass.  Up close, I can see the fresh, soft, brilliant green of the new foilage at the bases of the plants.

As I walk up the hill, I pass a lone saskatoon bush and I think of the juicy bluish-purple berries that we pick to make jelly out of in the summer.  The grasses become more sparse, and at the top of the hill there is not much more than jagged reddish rocks, lichens, and spikemoss, which is not really a moss at all.  I sit for a while and look down into the valley below, at the city, at the hills beyond it, at the snow-covered mountains in the north, their cold beauty a reminder of the impermance of spring, and that winter is not long past.

I walk down and over to the next hill, stepping carefully over the skeletons of dead ponderosa pines, their bark flaking off and their bodies returning to the ground.  These trees were probably killed by the infamous mountain pine beetle, and have been left to decay naturally rather being cut down and removed from the site.  I have heard my instructors talk about how over the last one hundred years or so, the grasslands have been increasingly encroached upon by forests.  Perhaps the mountain pine beetle epidemic will allow the grasslands to increase again.

I make my way back down, and down, to find bench to sit on where I can write.  The sun is warm on my neck as I sit, but there is a veil of high thin clouds over the sky today and the wind is cold.  I cannot sit for long before I must walk again to keep warm.

Another spring.

I love this land.  I love the shape of the hills, and the way the rivers curl among the hills and join together below me in the valley.  I love the dry, twisted shrubs of sagebrush and rabbit-brush, the waving grasses, the stately pines, the rocks and dusty paths.  I need nothing more than this.

Beginnings and Endings and All Between

Despite my resolutions at the beginning of this month and at the beginning of the year, March is more than half past and I have managed only one small post here.  To all of my readers (if you have not yet abandoned me), I am sorry.

It would perhaps be better if I had a good excuse, but I do not.  True, I have been kept fairly busy with school work, but not much more so than usual and probably not very busy at all compared to the lives of many other people.  All I can plead is procrastination, and a tendency to curl up in a corner with one good book after another instead of writing blog posts or leaving comments on other blogs (which, I must remind myself, was one of my goals for this year).

I am beginning to get an inkling of what it is to grow old (although I will be the first to admit that I am still very young yet): time gets shorter and shorter.  Monday turns into Friday almost before I have noticed that Wednesday is over and the months pass by with alarming rapidity (wasn't I just turning the calendar to February the other day?).  Sometimes I feel as though I am just drifting through the days.

Nothing particularly noteworthy ever happens.  I try to go through my routine of yoga, exercise, and meditation most days of the week.  I go to class.  I do homework and study.  I read an alarming number of books.  I read blogs and occasionally leave a comment on one of them, or even (gods forbid!) write a blog post of my own.  I write the odd poem or stream-of-consciousness rant in a notebook dedicated to that purpose, and I write in my journal nearly daily.  I water my plants, cook supper, wash dishes, set my alarm clock, and wake up at 6:30 AM every day, even on weekends.  Some days, if I have time and if I feel like it, I perform a bit of a ritual and do an Ogham divination.  I try to get outdoors when I can, feel the wind on my face, and watch for spring bulbs coming up.

I would love to write regular, thought-provoking, insightful, and inspiring blog posts.  But I have come to realize that writing regularly is harder than I thought, that I am not a particularly deep thinker, and that I am probably not any more insightful or inspiring than average.  I do hope that I can at least write reasonably well.  Words are my medium, I think, and I have wanted to be a writer longer than I have wanted to do anything else.  Since beginning this blog in November of 2008, I have realized that this is what I am:

I am a writer and a reader, a would-be naturalist and scientist, the kind of person who watches and observes but does not say much, a bit of a mystic at times, a bit of a romantic, an inconstant poet, someone who fills notebooks and tears out pages, someone who talks to herself when no one is around, talks to trees when she's in the mood, and is given to writing long sentences.  Am I a pagan (or Pagan)?  Am I a Druid?  Yes, I will say, for lack of a better answer, because I don't know what I would call myself if I was not.  I am self-contradictory and undecided if nothing else.

I started this blog hoping to have an outlet for all of things I wanted to say, and to connect with like-minded people.  Since then I have learned that I have a lot less to say than I thought I did, that I am more boring and ordinary than I thought I was, and that I am just as bad at connecting with people online as I am in person.  This blog has also become a part of my life; I don't know what I would think about if I was not worrying about what to write for my blog next.

If I could begin this blog again today, I would probably begin it very differently and write very different things (and get rid of the ridiculous name).  I am a different person now from the hesitant young woman who began this blog.  Yet having begun, I will not be quitting that easily.  I am stubborn as well.  I hope that this post has not sounded depressed, or bitter, or cynical, because it is not, and I am not (usually).  I will not say that I am going to write more, because I know that is an easy promise to make, and to break.  But I will try.

To those of you reading this (who have made it this far into a rather long and rambling post), new or old readers, thank you, thank you for leaving comments, even if I never responded to your comments, and thank you for reading, even if you have never left a comment.  And to those of you who are just stumbling upon this page, welcome.

World Trees, Canadian & Otherwise

Some time ago (last June), Brendan Myers made the suggestion at The North West Passage for Canadians to refer to the world tree as a sugar maple.  He argued that,

"...this can be a way for we Canadians to assert a distinct Canadian spiritual presence in the world, so that we can create the terms of our spirituality more ourselves, rather than importing almost everything from Britain and America. "

I always intended to write a response to his post, but apparently I'm rather slow at thinking about things, so it wasn't until now that I finally organized my thoughts on the topic.

The sugar maple (Acer saccharum), although its leaf is indeed the leaf on the Canadian flag and is fairly widely recognized as a Canadian symbol, has a limited native distribution in Canada (in southern Ontario and Quebec and the Maritimes).  Sugar maples are occasionally planted ornamentally in other parts of Canada, but I don't know if I've ever seen one.  I don't where the nearest sugar maple is to me.  It is simply not a tree with which I am familiar.  I live in British Columbia, on the other side of the country.

My suggestion is that the Canadian world tree should be a tree that has a widespread native distribution across Canada.  Flipping through John Laird Farrar's Trees in Canada (an excellent book), I find three trees that satisfy this requirement: white spruce (Picea glauca), white birch (Betula papyrifera), and trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides).  These are all trees that I have seen growing in the wild, that have grown in places where I have lived, and are much more familiar to me than sugar maple.  A few other trees, such as tamarack (Larix laricina), have a widespread distribution throughout most of Canada, but are more limited in my own province of BC.

Actually, though, I'm a bit undecided about whether a Canadian world tree (or an American, Australian, Japanese, or South African world tree) would really be a good idea.  When I think of a world tree, I usually visualize it as either a ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) or Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii).  These trees are the ones that I am the most familiar with, that I have grown up with, and have looked at every day out my window.  Even as I type this, I am taking occasional glances out the window, at two majestic ponderosa pines, glowing in the afternoon sun against a cloudless blue sky as they grow in the narrow band of wild space between two parking lots.

Connecting with nature means connecting with your own local environment, and finding out about the plants, animals, and other organisms that live near you, not about those that live in Britain, Ireland, or eastern North America (unless you actually do live in one of those places).  It just wouldn't make sense for me to think of the world tree as sugar maple, ash, or oak.

Do you use the concept of the world tree in your practice?  What type of tree do you think of it as?  Why that tree?  Is it a tree that grows in the area in which you live?