WITH RELUCTANCE AND ASTONISHMENT, I HAVE BECOME A MEMBER of elders in society. As I reflect on the changes that have occurred during the brief span of my family’s and my own life on Earth, it becomes clear that the enormous changes made during that time cannot be sustained. All across the planet, people in towns and cities undergoing explosive growth in population and economic development have reason to pay attention to the experience of their elders.
My grandparents were driven out of Japan by poverty at the beginning of this century and came to Canada to seek their fortune. They had no intention of staying in what they considered a primitive and backward country. All they wanted was some of its wealth to take back home. My grandparents were aliens in an unfamiliar landscape with which they had no historical or cultural link, let alone a sense of reverence for its sanctity. To them, Canada represented an opportunity; the land was a commodity full of resources to exploit. My grandparents became a part of a massive assault on the “New World” initiated by Columbus’s arrival and causing vast ecological and human catastrophe.
Following World War II, my family moved to Ontario, the industrial heartland of Canada and the most populous province in the country. First in Leamington, then in London, I grew up in a land named after the homelands of the European settlers. There were few reminders that this area had long been occupied by people with proud histories, people who had been mistakenly labeled “Indians” by the newcomers. But lumped together as red Indians were dozens of nations, including Algonquins, Mohawks, Cree, and Ojibway. Today, most aboriginal people of Canada are invisible, sequestered on reserves or hidden through forced assimilation.
In London, we lived on the northwest edge of town next to the railway tracks, along whose banks I would pick asparagus in the spring and hunt for insects in summer. One year I worked on a vegetable farm only a kilometer (half-mile) or so down the railway line. A few blocks east of our house was the Thames River, where I discovered an incredible treasure—a softshell turtle!
Bicycling west on Oxford Street, I would quickly run out of pavement and hit the gravel road. In about twenty minutes, I’d be at my grandparents’ 4-hectare (10-acre) farm at the end of Proudfoot Lane. But first I’d always stop at the large swamp beside the road to look for frogs, snakes, and damselflies. Many times I returned home with boots full of mud and bottles containing frog eggs and dragonfly larvae. The woods surrounding the swamp always beckoned with the promise of a glimpse of a fox, skunk, raccoon, or owl.
My grandparents’ farm was a child’s paradise. Besides large vegetable and berry patches to be raided, there were several hundred chickens to be fed, eggs to be gathered, and fences to be mended. At the end of the fields, a creek ran year-round. That was where I dipped for darters, discovered freshwater clams, and hunted snails. In the fields, pheasants tooted like trains, groundhogs sunbathed in front of their burrows, and hawks skimmed above the ground in search of rodents.
In the thirty-five years since my boyhood, the Thames River has been saturated with industrial effluent and agricultural runoff accumulating along its length. The river was too convenient for dumping garbage and chemical wastes. Now there are few clams, crayfish, or minnows to be seen. Londoners today recoil at any suggestion of eating fish from the Thames or asparagus from the tracks.
When I arrived in London in 1950, its population was just over 70,000. Five years later, we were proud when the city passed 100,000. By 1960, it had almost doubled to over 185,000 and reached a quarter of a million ten years after that. Today, London boasts 350,000 people. This spectacular rate of growth was accompanied by a booming economy and a sense of civic pride. But at what cost?
The road to my grandparents’ farm is now a wide highway, with the city extending all the way to the village of Byron. My grandparents’ farm is occupied by a cluster of high-rise apartments, and the creek has been tamed to run through culverts. My beloved swamp is covered by an immense shopping mall and parking lot, and the woods beside it have given way to a huge housing complex. Along the Thames River and all around the city, once productive agricultural land has been converted to housing subdivisions.
Within my lifetime, the ecological devastation has been massive. But when my grandparents immigrated to North America, the real holocaust had already occurred. Only two hundred years ago, Ontario was covered by a dense, ancient forest, the plains of the Midwest reverberated under the hooves of 60 million bison, and the skies were darkened for days on end when billions of passenger pigeons passed by. By the beginning of the twentieth century, they were all gone, yet we have learned little from that unprecedented ecological annihilation and continue our destructive rampage; we can see the destruction going on before our eyes.
In the topsy-turvy world of economics, farmland, swamps, woods, rivers, and ponds adjacent to expanding cities acquire value that makes it inevitable for them to be developed. So the animals and plants that belong there disappear, leaving our children to grow up in an increasingly sterile human-created environment. And with diminished opportunities to experience nature, our future generations become all the more estranged from the real systems that support their lives.
My hometown of London is a microcosm of what has been happening around the planet, but especially in the New World and especially since World War II. Seen from a plane above Canada today, the country is crisscrossed by geometric straight lines of highways and rectangles of clear-cuts and agricultural fields. Everywhere the imprint of human beings has been stamped on the land with a mathematical precision that pays no attention to geographic and biological realities. We act as if our political subdivisions of the land are meaningful and fail to observe the realities of “bioregions,” ecosystems and watersheds to which living things have evolved and fit.
Our alienation from the land is so great that we have no sense that it is sacred or that our ability to exploit it is a great privilege accompanied by responsibility. Impelled by our faith in our technological prowess and scientific knowledge, we assault the planet as if it is limitless and endlessly self-renewing. Like an exotic species introduced to a new environment, we feel no natural restraints, only the deadly belief that all of nature is there for us to use as a resource in any way we wish.
This story has been repeated in different parts of the world. Driven by a profound disconnection from the land, newcomers have sought to tame it and its human and nonhuman occupants. The combination of technological power and the Western attitude of rightful dominion over nature has been unstoppable. That has been the legacy passed on to the present time.
Seen from another perspective, beginning with respect for the unique flora and fauna of the continent and extending to the indigenous people whose cultures were so exquisitely evolved to live in rich harmony with the land, the technological optimism and economic greed of the invaders become a policy that is shortsighted and arrogant.
It can be argued that one of the great tragedies that led to the current crisis in wilderness destruction was the attempt by colonizing peoples to recreate their familiar European surroundings in alien lands. In Canada and Australia, forests, grassy plains, and swamps were forced to resemble bits of home. And the introductions of species such as sparrows, foxes, and rabbits were ecological catastrophes.
Each visit to my childhood roots becomes a bittersweet mix of memories that remind me of the price we have paid for the way we now live