Gabe compares his experiences on Vancouver Island with those he now lives each day in Toronto. With humour and with passion, he engages us in a tour of the two contrasting world of wilderness and city, making us aware of what is at stake for us and future generations if we underestimate and de-value the learnings from the natural world.
This past summer I had the opportunity to work on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, at a summer camp for at-risk youth. Walking into the experience, I had only a very basic concept of what working with this population, in these surroundings, would be like. We (both the campers and I) learned which plants and bugs we could eat (dandelions are spicy, spit bugs are tasteless, but win you a completely disgusted look from whoever watches you eat one), how to build basic shelters, tie knots, chop wood and kindling and how to identify certain types of local fauna and flora, among other things. We learned the value of listening to the world around us, and the value of bringing extra socks on trips. We saw bears. We became mountain men and women, if only temporarily and only by conceit (each session was little more than a month long).
The logic was that the camp would provide a space outside of the youths’ comfort zones, one where they would have a chance to reflect on their lives and on their goals, and hopefully switch tracks on their return. Whether or not that occurred, I can’t say. But I am confident that the wild spaces these kids shuffled through, often swearing loudly, served two purposes – as a respite from whatever life these kids were coming from, and as a classroom in which the kids could discover, together, what life at its most rustic and basic was like. There were moments of drama, frustration and panic (as could be expected when your job involves taking city kids and walking them through a thoroughly rural, backcountry environment), but ultimately it was a richly educational experience, and a rewarding one.
I mention this experience because it provides a bold contrast to my current situation. Having left Vancouver Island behind, a friend and I took up the banner of Canadian tradition and traveled the Trans-Canada Highway from Nelson, B.C. to Toronto. After some weeks of working a landscaping job in Montreal, I was offered a position in Toronto, working an office job for a non-profit organization located near the intersection of Queen Street and Spadina Avenue – as close as possible to what might be the Canadian - sorry – Ontarian equivalent to the center of the Universe. The process of relocating here completed, I’ve recently had to come to grips with attachments and taken-for-granteds from this past summer; I had to adjust on a level deeper than trading in my gaiters and raingear for a collar shirt and loafers.
Toronto, if you’ve never been, is as close to a big city as Canada has, a huge, lively downtown, a thoroughly multicultural demographic, that famous tower, and condos, condos, condos – developments everywhere. It’s a noisy, smelly town with poor drivers and one of the more pleasant cities I’ve visited. It strikes me that construction cranes and freshly-dedicated foundations sprout and fill the landscape with the same dogged determination of the Douglas firs and hemlocks of Vancouver Island. And it comforts me that bears aren’t as much a concern here as are squirrels and rats, the upside being that the presence of the latter don’t require you to carry a can of mace at all times.It could be that my shock (because shock is what it amounts to) at the intensity of urban living comes from being spoiled in the wilderness this summer. I was working in a part of the world renowned for its natural beauty, stillness and contrasts, and, of course, now looking out of the window of my sublet apartment at the Toronto skyline, I notice a distinct lack of natural beauty, stillness or contrast. But my surprise also reveals something about the impact left by my time in a more natural setting and the implications of living in a city.
While urban living can supply a healthy diet of human diversity, varied food and entertainment, it sorely lacks the solitude and the natural learning opportunities that are taken for granted in a wilder setting. When we choose to live in cities, we make a conscious choice and set our priorities – our jobs, our families, our roads, our sanitation before our sense of place in nature. In earlier times, we may not have had to make so stark a choice as urban centers were smaller and the wild places more accessible. Now, for lack of contact with nature, we construct homages to the wild in the form of parks and arboretums, and place value on them in terms of aesthetics and dog-walkability.
Today, we must choose between accepting a human-made environment over a natural one. And the cost of this choice may be hidden behind the perceived benefit of civilization and control. The youth I worked with this summer weren’t all experiencing the natural world for the first time, but most were first-timers at experiencing it in depth. Their first time hiking for days straight, their first time alone in the woods. For some, their first time hearing crickets at night. For millennia, these were experiences that we took for granted as a species, but now, as those kids this summer aptly demonstrated, we can choose to live with or without.
Those experiences and the type of intelligence they foster shaped our development as a species and as a civilization. It may be that, as over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, our next step as a species is as informed by urban living as our predecessors’ growth was informed by their natural surroundings. If that is the case, then our awareness of our place in nature, and our ability to take lessons from it, will slowly be lost to accommodate a need for a purely urban – that is, artificial and human-made – intelligence. This would be the cost of urban-centric life. The lessons of the wild, at one time freely learned and accessible, would become arcane and our ability to understand the natural world which gave us life would diminish past the realm of pure necessity.
Young people would have to pay, as the youths I worked with this summer had to, in order to visit the natural world and learn its lessons. Today, we still place more than just economic value on the wild places left to us. I shudder when I think about what kind of value we will place on nature in a future dominated by an urban mindset.
So, I struggle with the lack of access I have to nature. I acknowledge that my priorities may not be shared by the next person, and that there are many, many people out there who live rewarding lives contained within an urban lifestyle. But, I also acknowledge on a personal level the importance of my fleeting experience in the wild and the understanding I took from it – the need for us as a species to reconnect, even if only from time to time, with the natural surroundings we came from, to learn the lessons of the environment, to explore again, and to keep the classroom alive and available for the next generation.
What You Can Do Links:
I wanted to finish this entry on a positive note! When I feel too cooped up in the city, I feel lucky that, artificial though it may be, the cityscape is a fascinating thing to explore. While I’m pretty happy to take in the sights in a legal fashion, some Montrealers and Torontonians have elevated the practice of urban exploration to an art, often an illegal one. Below are some links to ‘urban spelunking’ group sites. While I can’t recommend that you follow their lead, I encourage you to take some of these explorers’ ingenuity to heart!
Thank you, Gabe, for this thought provoking article. There really is a whole different way of learning, as well as very different lessons to be had in the natural world from those in the cities. We loose a great deal when we don't take time to explore even the smallest natural setting available to us.
Please let us know what your thoughts are on this topic by emailing your comments to: moczero@sympatico.ca or clicking on comments at the bottom of this Posting.
I'm inviting you to think about your special place in Nature as a child, or an experience you had in the natural world that made you feel at home, held, comforted or safely you. Write your experience down and send it to: moczero@sympatico.ca to share with our Virtual Community in our upcoming The Narratives Posting.
We now have a Rogues' Gallery on the sidebar. Send me your photos to hang in our gallery and share with our Virtual Community. We have Melanie's photo from Saskatoon of the deer at the sliding door and Vicky's photo she took of the December full moon.
Don't forget to look to the skies tomorrow night for February's full moon.
Earth Family First,
maureen
(Photos from Google images)
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