Into the Wild?

Hello, this is my blog. I shall update this as thoughts and concerns

pop up in my mind during my time away from Bristol.

My current home nation of Canada has a fairly good track record as one of

the 'Western World's' most environmentally sound nations. The following entry may

seem to sully Canada's good name; but that is not my aim, its is merely a criticism

of our selfish human nature in general, and the disappointment I felt when the

eco-friendly venire of a country that we look to, to set an example was pulled

away for my viewing displeasure. If anything, this entry is an indictment on the

rest of the world; if the world considers Canada to be environmentally friendly,

what sort of abuses must be occurring elsewhere?

As my family made its move from Wiltshire, all the way to mid-west Canada, we knew that we were embarking on what would be a very isolated venture into the expansive wilderness of the North American Great Plains, a far cry away from Foxham, a village tucked into the hills behind Bath. But what our new home would lack in proximity to historic towns, we thought it would make up in other areas; peace, nature, solitude and wildlife. We had the feeling that in Canada we would be leading lives of simplistic, rustic beauty; where one could go on day trips to the lakes, rivers and mountains, take in the clean air, maybe, at a push, see bears and elk foraging and grazing in their natural habitats - and not from a bus window in Longleat wildlife park. All in all a life where noticeable human impact is scant. A sort of 'colonic irrigation' of the soul was the intended achievement of living in the absolute middle of nowhere. The reality was somewhat different, but before the I reveal the true nature of the situation, I shall detail my first impressions of the emigration to our little house on the Prairie.

[Ralston]

I was, of course, shocked by the sheer vastness of the place. My jaw remained slack and open for virtually the entire duration of the first three hour car journey back from the airport. One endless, almost perfectly straight road pointed home. A barn I could see a little further down the road, turned out to be 14 miles away and on either side of the Trans-Canadian highway was a field that stretched all the way to the very, very distant horizon.

I threw myself with enthusiasm into my new surroundings. I jumped at the chance to walk dogs for all my neighbours , just so I had an excuse to walk and walk until I had passed a set of small hills that obscured the very small community of Ralston completely from view creating the illusion that I was surrounded by nothing except a very distant shack or grain silo. I relished being able to observe storms raging away upon the distant horizon, while directly overhead the weather was comparatively clement. I enjoyed seeing gophers scurrying into their burrows at the alien sight of my human form, the deer tentatively wandering past and at night, packs of coyotes howling at each other, mere yards from our front door. I imbibed it all with a voracious appetite.

All of this was to seem false when I discovered the true nature of Man's impact on the area.

Ralston is situated a few miles from a vast British Military training ground; every soldier who goes to Iraq or Afghanistan must be put through a rigorous and very realistic training regime, with live rounds and authentic Pashtuns, wielding Kalashnikovs, clad in the garb of the Mujahedin, explosions going off all around them ... At this point one would be forgiven for assuming that this was the problem; that our military was shelling the proverbial shit out of the local, beautiful, Canadian ecology! Not so. The animal deaths caused by gunfire or artillery are far and few between. A soldier may occasionally have to euthanise a wounded deer, or something of the sort, but in actual fact, this vast part of the Prairie has become a haven for the burrowing owls, dear, coyotes and many others, due to the lack of mechanized farming there. The animals are forced off of the rest of Alberta's chemically enriched land, which sees mechanical leviathans tear up every square inch of soil, leaving none for the wildlife to inhabit.

Its sad that every creature I see before me is a refugee. But what with the culture in North America, to hunt and build and dump and consume ad nauseam, it is nice that there is at least somewhere for the creatures of the great plains to live, even if that area is only the size of Luxembourg and the fact that they have to dodge the odd stray shell here and there. It certainly isn't perfect, and there are yet other extant problems, corroding the local ecosystem, which could be solved by a more effective environmental department, but these are too manifold mention in an entry which is already longer than I had intended.

Despite the clear environmental angle of this, my first ever post; I am not an eco-warrior. I had merely hoped that there were still some inhabitable parts of our world which were not being squeezed and exploited to the very farthest reaches of their potential by us humans. I had hoped to visit them and revel in them. What I found instead was a vast asylum of displaced creatures, fleeing destruction, from mechanised farming, a human vice which is often overlooked when placed beside other, more topical environmental crises, perhaps due in part, to its isolated, expansive and rural setting. Has my soul been shrieved as I thought it might be? No. I have merely become more misanthropic and cynical. I have looked closer at an edenic garden and seen decay.

My next post will follow shortly and probably won't be as politically motivated as this one.