05/23/2025
Beautifully written : brings some perspective for organic farming and living natural without destroying habitat and living with it .
I live in a place most people only visit to escape. All around me I have caves, cliffs, waterfalls, thick forests, and water so clear it’s like staring through time. People drive up from the city, exhale for the first time in months, and say, “Wow, I feel like myself again.” Then they head back to their glass boxes and concrete routines, recharged but disconnected from why.
It’s funny. People flock to places like this to get away from the noise, the pace, the grind.
But once they arrive, they start dragging the city behind them like a rolling suitcase full of light pollution, convenience, and expectation.
They want to be in nature without being of it. They install motion lights to scare off the dark. They carve out driveways, cut down trees, and flatten everything wild into something “manageable.”
It’s not about jealousy. I don’t care if you’ve got money or a mansion. What gets me is the blindness - the irony of escaping the city only to replicate it here. Of craving something raw and real, then taming it into a mirror image of the very thing you claimed to need a break from.
And now it’s not just happening house by house.
It's baked into policy.
Bill 5, for example, is marketed like it's about "streamlining" housing and cutting red tape. Sounds harmless enough, until you realize that “red tape” is often code for the last thread of protection standing between a piece of land and permanent damage.
Wetlands, woodlands, even areas around waterways - once guarded, now up for grabs. It hands over the keys to developers under the illusion of efficiency, while quietly gutting what little environmental oversight was left.
And here's the kicker: it's not obvious at first.
You won’t see a bulldozer in the forest tomorrow.
You’ll see more driveways, more glowing porch lights, more no trespassing signs where trails used to be.It'll be gradual. Quiet. Legal.
Until one day, the silence is gone.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about pattern recognition.
When we make it easier to destroy the wild in favor of “growth,” we’re not just changing the view - we’re rewriting the rules of what we’re allowed to love.
You can’t legislate peace.
You can’t commodify stillness.
You either protect the spaces that give you breath, or you pave over them and wonder why everything feels harder to breathe in.
The Bruce, the forests, the cliffs, the stars - they don’t need to be modernized. They need to be left the hell alone.
Because if we keep doing this, if we keep sanding down every edge of the natural world to make it more "accessible," more "efficient," more “livable,” there won’t be anything left to escape to.
We’ll have won the right to live anywhere and lost the reason to go.
