The Aching Soul

Have you ever watched something happening that affects you so deeply it feels like your soul hurts? It might be seeing an animal suffering, or humans in the aftermath of a disaster, or a wildfire burning out of control. For me it’s watching the needless destruction of the fragile ecology of this planet we call home. Some areas recover quickly from destruction, like Spirit Lake in the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption. Others, such as the desert can take decades, even centuries, to recover after a wildfire. Recovery is relative, of course. To say that Spirit Lake recovered quickly must take into account the ten-year process that scientists thought would actually take centuries, if ever.

So what makes my soul ache in my local area? The needless and continuing bulldozing of the earth to make shallow terraced housing developments. “It’s progress” many like to say. Sure. And I’m not against that per se. It’s the method that needs re-evaluation. The manner in which the local developers choose to prepare a site for development involves scraping everything flat in order to pack in as many houses as possible into the smallest space. And it's cheap. Working with existing contours and preserving native vegetation would require more money and quite a bit of intelligent thought; things the greedy developers are not willing to invest in. They obviously care nothing about the ecology of the area and I suspect they figure they won’t be here long enough to see any long term effects of their decisions. Once the land is all devoured by houses, they will move on to the next rapid growth area.

Why should any of us care? Let’s start at the bottom, the soil. Loss of topsoil worldwide is a crisis and one of the primary causes of desertification. Yes, deserts are the fastest growing ecosystem on the planet. Some areas can afford to lose more topsoil than others because it may be hundreds of feet deep. Others, such as the Southwest United States, have only inches of topsoil to lose. Parts of the desert may only have fractions of an inch of what can only barely be classified as topsoil. Below that is a subsoil layer that can support life with some amendments. Below that layer is basically sterile ground, virtually devoid of biological life. Interestingly, plant life requires a living soil to thrive. Without the biological life in the soil, plants cannot get the nutrients they need to grow. Topsoil has this magic sauce. Soil amendments help, provided they are sourced properly and hopefully include living compost.

So, what’s the problem? Have you watched a development be constructed? What’s the first thing they do? Bulldoze everything! They scrape the land relentlessly, often hauling away the spoils that get in the way. They pile up the now dead vegetation and proceed to burn it. They dig big trenches and put in pipes and cables. Then curbing and pavement appear. Soon after, the homes with their driveways and rooftops. All these impervious surfaces and we wonder why we have flooding problems. Sometimes there are detention ponds to slow the runoff and allow some percolation, but the damage has already been done.

Next, we have a Homeowner’s Association that instructs the new owner that landscaping must be installed within a certain time limit and sometimes provides a list of acceptable plant material. Seems reasonable, right? Sure. Only now, the happy new homeowner must plant, irrigate, and control weeds on a substrate that no longer supports plant life! The topsoil is GONE. The natural biological life is GONE. The ecology is forever changed, and not necessarily for the better. And now we cover the soil with weed control fabric and rocks, further limiting the ability of the natural life to rebuild in the soil. We scratch our heads wondering why nothing seems to grow very well in our new landscape. (Don’t lose all hope. Things usually start to do a little better at the three-year mark.)

Awareness of this problem doesn’t do a thing to save the local ecology or world hunger unless something is done to change the process. I don’t have the answer, but I know if things don’t change, our ultimate demise is certain. Converting waste materials into food can never be adequate. Trying to save a species by keeping it in a zoo or preserve where we feed it artificially won’t work long term. We need to start working with the natural ecology, not against it. Species go extinct every day, including some we have never seen or recorded. Why? Destruction of habitat. It’s that simple. Some cannot be saved. That’s part of life, but as humans we have a responsibility to take care of the house we live in. We should also do what we can to preserve the neighborhood, don’t you think?

The event that triggered this tirade was watching earthmoving equipment in my neighborhood bulldoze half of a small acreage, just to build up a platform to put a house on. For what it cost in dollars to run graders, scrapers, and dozers for a week, the property owner could have brought in fill dirt from off-site, disturbed far less of the grassland ecology, and saved more than dollars in future costs. This homeowner will now use weed killing chemicals and non-native landscaping to repair the damage on acres of land that could have been left natural, requiring virtually no costly inputs to look acceptable or be functional. That’s what makes my soul ache.

See you in the natural landscape,

The Horticoach