The Rural Voice, 2002-04, Page 10"Our experience
assures lower cost
water wells"
102 YEARS' EXPERIENCE
Member of Canadian
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Licensed
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of the Environment
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Serving Ontario Since 1900
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Nature in a man-made world
Keith _
Roulston is
editor and
publisher of
The Rural
Voice. He
lives near
Blyth, ON.
On my way to do the chores on
my tiny hobby farm this morning I
was stopped dead in my tracks.
From overhead came a strange
honking -whistling sound and as I
looked up, I saw two flights of low-
flying tundra swans: Watching their
powerful breast muscles flexing to
make their wings beat and keep those
huge bodies in the sky is one of those
truly inspiring rewarding experiences
of living in the country.
And it got me thinking, coming as
it did a day or so after the urban
media trumpeted the fact that 2001
census results show more and more
Canadians live in three major urban
regions, about how our nation's
consciousness may be altered because
a smaller percentage of the
population will witness a stunning
natural sight like this, instead being
impressed by man-made
achievements like new buildings.
I've lived in city and country and
I'm living in the country now because
I don't feel alive if I'm not
surrounded by natural things. When
cur indigo buntings put in their
annual appearance in April
(hopefully), their sight is as precious
to me as the rarest of jewels is to an
urban sophisticate.
Though I know they're close to
becoming pests, I'm still in awe when
I see Canada Geese fly at low altitude
and while I know from hard exper-
ience the penalty for having too many
deer around, my heart still leaps
when I see one in our field.
Increasingly people in our cities
are cut off from the natural environ-
ment. A city park may have trees and
squirrels and, yes, those pesky
Canada Geese, but that doesn't make
it very natural.
So how are your perceptions
altered if you live in a manmade
world and you're seldom in the
presence of nature? And how are
those perceptions, multiplied by
millions, reshaping the culture and
politics of the country.
Watching media coverage over
the past 10 years or so, it seems to me
urbanites are both romanticizing
nature and fearing it. Both trends
hold dangers for farmers who make a
living in partnership with nature.
Betty Zyvatkauskas, a freelance
travel writer, suggested at a recent
rural tourism conference that there's
a sense of urgency that nature is
disappearing, which it certainly is in
the Golden Horseshoe where cities
creep outward like an oilslick on
water. On one hand this creates
opportunities for country people to
offer natural activities like bird
watching or nature walks but on the
other, it means that city people want
to preserve what's left of nature.
While they make their living from
selling shares in forestry companies
that have stripped the land bare or
building cars that pollute the air, the
urbanites expect those still living in
.he countryside to preserve what's
left of nature, even if it means
economic hardship to the farmer who
owns a piece of land where a rare
animal or bird has been spotted.
At the same time as people
romanticize nature they seem to fear
it, used as they are to their man-made
world where everything is under
control (except other people). So we
have a terror of germs that makes
anti -biotic soaps hot sellers. We have
demands for tighter food inspections'
(do you not think OPSEU knew what
fear buttons to push when they went
on strike?) though there's no evid-
ence food poisoning is more preval-
ent today than a generation ago, and
it's probably less so. We have urban-
ites who have come to think that
spreading manure on fields is a dang-
erous, unnatural thing to do. After all,
isn't some man-made process like
sewage treatment more effective?
I feel sorry for city people who
don't see incredible sights like those
swans but I worry that, cocooned in
their manmade world, they may
control the way the rest of us live.0