ConserveLand Blog

One summer, I rode my bike down a country road, which was lined by assorted levels of development. For five minutes I was zooming by green carpets of lawn, artful landscaping and blacktop driveways, the next five took me past the wild meadows which were left. It was as though someone was standing beside my ear with an on-off switch. Home sites: silence. Meadow: cacophony of insect sounds, bellowing into the air of my passage.

There is a deafening message in that silence of the home sites. It isn’t the silence of the Grand Canyon, where the quiet is so vast that it is a tangible part of the terrain. This is a silence of lack. It’s the silence of the wrong noise; car exhausts, garbage trucks, the occasional bulldozer or hammer. It’s the silence of removal: removal of enough of the ecological cycle to have obliterated it; spaces of true emptiness. It was as though I was speeding past a painting, or a photo. Not a place on earth, and no longer real. Some of these home sites were very pretty. But they were not beautiful. They served as the habitation of several mammals, who may or may not have been at home. But other than that, they did not hold life.

I don’t mean to be so black-and-white about it. Of course some of these yards have a young oak in them, with some caterpillars sequestered in the leaves. Moths may appear; a few loud summer insects may make themselves heard. But on that day of summer, on that bike ride, it was black and white. Birds may pass through. But they are beggars in this landscape. They must go elsewhere for their sustenance.

Indeed Sprawl is a bad thing and good land-use planning would help to maintain some kind of network of biodiversity on the land, but that’s not what this is about. I’m writing this because I know that those green-carpeted, landscaped outposts of emptiness don’t have to be. The removal of ecology certainly takes place under the footprint of the home and driveway, but can’t the rest be part of an ecology, rather than entirely obliterating it? Do we have to shut out the web of life and its riotous music?

And how (you may ask) does this relate to land trusts? Two ways: First, our mission cannot succeed without concomitant education. Why protect something you don’t understand? Are the owners of those quiet yards going to donate for insect habitat? Do they understand how dependent we all are on the contents of a meadow? Why help protect something you haven’t experienced enough to care about? We have work to do. And Second, remember those landowners who called with their 3 or 5 acre parcels, that they wanted to protect, because they love their little piece of ground? Remember how hard it was to tell them that their property wasn’t special enough to preserve? Not enough conservation value? Not enough public benefit? Not enough resources to spend the staff time on? Here is the alternative for those landowners who care so much about their little spot on earth. We can show them how to make the insects sing.