Nature and poverty

What environment do most people in the world see from day to day? Look around your room. Go look outside.

From my bedroom window I see a busy street, actually a highway. At rush hour, this is a noisy place to live. But now, in the middle of the day, perhaps 20 cars pass per minute under a bright spring sky. Across the corner is a variety store with a parking lot, empty for now. I can only see one person, a man raking a scraggly lawn behind a chain link fence beside the parking lot. If I wait for a few minutes, some pedestrians will inevitably walk by. Now there is one; a neighbour has stopped by the fence to visit the man with the rake.

If I went outside and walked down the street I would come to Eramosa River Park, usually almost unoccupied at this time of day. The city has kept the riverside free of development to prevent water pollution and prevent spring flooding, also to give the population of 96,000 a place to enjoy nature. If I follow the footpath for five minutes and cross the stream at Victoria Road bridge, I can walk beyond the city limits into abandoned farmland and fields belonging to a turf research station. Across the river, in the distance, I will see a several factories and a penitentiary. Further on, the path follows a railway line through old meadows and a large tract of woods belonging to a scout camp.

Within several weeks, the ice will have melted off Lake Fletcher. Then I will drive for four hours to that beautiful place, pull the canoe from underneath the cottage and go paddling. It is a secluded lake, with some 60 or 70 cottages, mostly at one end. At various times of the year such as early May, it is virtually uninhabited. In certain places, even in midsummer, it is easy to paddle for minutes at a time without seeing or hearing any sign of humanity. There is only the still, clean water, cedars, hemlocks and maples along the shore, and the alluring song of the hermit thrush.

There must be hundreds of lakes in Ontario much more remote than Lake Fletcher. I could probably spend my life here, driving, canoeing and portaging from one to the other without ever needing to retrace my path. And with each passing day, I could reinforce the illusion that this world has enough space and resources for everyone.

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