EnvironMental

Is the weather screwed up?  Ottawa is having its usual April showers, except today is May 16, 2003.  The old doggerel goes “April showers bring May flowers.  Mayflowers bring Pilgrims.” 

We’re getting our April showers, now.  If there were more Starbucks around the neighbourhood, I would figure we moved the house to Seattle over the winter.  Every day is a rainy day, making the park and woods and lawn sproing into green. 

Unfortunately, after a particularly nasty winter, our lawn is missing. It is not a big lawn, perhaps 8 feet wide and 25 feet long, with a crab tree in the middle but it was ours and we liked it.  Grubs and bugs ate most of the lawn in the fall, then burrowed deep to hide for the winter.  About two weeks ago I raked up the grisly remains and threw down a half-ton of grass seed, hoping to re-grow some turf cover.  I can hear the little grubs waiting below the surface of the dirt, just waiting for the seeds to sprout. 

The City Government has decided that spraying chemicals is illegal, immoral and fattening so I have no weapons of chemistry at hand to kill the little bastards.  The organic warriors insist that a lush green thick lawn is the best defense against weeds and bugs, except they miss the one step:  How do you get to lush, green, thick when the seed is carried off by birds, the little root shoots are considered a self-filling buffet by bugs in the ground and the neighbourhood dogs insist on pissing on the tree.  Sod?  Sure, if you want to spend $300 bucks for grub lunches.

There are occasions when Better Living Through Chemistry is needed.  DDT is an example.  We’re accustomed to looking at DDT as a horrid chemical that will give us all neural tube defects just by being in the same time zone as a DDT bottle.  Except, DDT, in the rest of the world, is an important chemical that prevents the spread of malaria, dengue fever and a few hundred other fatal illnesses by killing the bugs that carry the diseases. 

In Days Of Olde, the City would DDT fog the streets to kill mosquitoes.  As kids we would ride our bikes behind the fogger truck early in the morning, zooming in and out of the insecticide cloud, just for the sheer joy of it.  West Nile Virus, or for that matter any other bug-borne illness was as rare as intelligent life in government.  You could sit outside at night and not have to strap yourself in to prevent the bugs from carrying you away.  Birds still sang, frogs croaked and fish swam. 

I’m not going to apologize for DDT or other heavy chemistry that messes with nature, but nature is an evolving thing.  We could all have a purple martin condo with fat purple martins eating themselves into a coma every day and still have enough bugs around Ottawa to put small dogs and children at risk.  There has to be a balance between benign neglect and active control.

As an example, the City is allowing many areas of parks to return to wildscape.  Grass swards don’t always occur in nature, so the City won’t mow areas on the margins of parks.  Makes sense to me, cut the grass on the ball diamonds, soccer pitches and commons, but let the edges and some areas go back to their natural state.  Cut down on the spraying in the wild areas, as nature will handle most of it if we just ignore it for a while.

Nature is messy.  A real wildscape has scrub birch, long grasses, thorn bushes, rocks, moss, dandelions so big that they have pay-per-view cable, foxes, skunks, squirrels, groundhogs, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, scrub cedars, ratty pines, crabgrass that swallows cars and strawberry plants that just seem to appear for no good reason.  Taxpayers get agitated over nature’s natural mess in the middle of the city, especially in that ten to twenty year transition from manicured park to real wildscape, or that transition season or five where the Creeping Charlie wants to reclaim the city streets.

We can live with a less chemical environment, as this is a good thing, but sometimes we have to fudge nature a bit.  Chemicals are not always bad.