Backyard Naturalist

I just finished reading a wonderful book. It's Suburban Safari by Hannah Holmes and it chronicles Holmes year spent detailing and recording everything in her backyard. She chronicles a wonderfully wild quasi-ecosystem in a quirky humor full of pleasant anthropomorphizing. As compared to saccharine anthropomorphizing, which is what I do with my bunny Carson.

"Carson-warson-darson! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH! My sweet prince!"

Like that. The guinea pig gets it too...

Anyway, I enjoyed the book for several reasons. I mentioned this earlier in the blog, but during the summer I enter my naturalist phase. My first summers here I spent lounging by the scrappy rock islands in Six Mile Creek, reading God Emperor of Dune on a fallen oak log over a divot cut in the stream bank. I can't help but enjoy a good piece of nature writing, particularly during the summer when I can see all the life mentioned. Holmes demonstrates a greater understanding of the impacts of lawns and suburbia on the environment. The American Dream tells us to isolate ourselves in the big house with the big lawn. But the big lawn; with its Kentucky Bluegrass monoculture, lawn mower fumes, and pesticides, brings the problems right to the castle.

OK, that's a bit melodramatic. Most of the lawns I see are the types of "Freedom Lawns" that Holmes describes. Not just perfectly manicured grass, but little patches of dandelions, clover, and plantains also making up the greenery. The whole book made me wish I owned the land I lived on, so I could run about creating edge space and planting natives all summer long.

I also enjoyed the book because it demonstrated how nature is all around us, not just in wild lands and mile-long hikes. Nothing beats a John Muir style hike through the sequoias or musing about taking on the Appalachian Trail, but I guess I am just too much of a Romantic. Even the pesky Ailanthus tree, can inspire me to wax poetically. Not very well, mind you me, but waxing nonetheless!

In The End of Nature, author Bill McKibben, describes just that-- the end of nature. But McKibben does not talk about total apocalypse. He means the end of nature as something completely separate from humanity. There is no wilderness, at all. Climate change and global pollution took care of that. But there is still wonder and awe in nature. It will always be gorgeous and violent. Holmes even describes the micro-fauna of her living room carpet in documentary terms. A carpeted Serengeti where mites and pseudoscorpions, all microscopic, fight for life. Holmes describes another scenes where a native plants enthusiasts does a survey of her lawn. It does not go well.

Everything is from somewhere else. The common garden slug, common earthworm, iris, lily, and those loathsome English Sparrows are all imports. Our nature isn't old. It's just a different kind of new.

However, it is still something. Something "natural." And for that it inspires me, while it also bothers me.

Peace.