We live full-time in our cottage up the remote BC coast.  It is a wonderful lifestyle in a spectacular setting and I am doing it with a wonderful partner.  It doesn’t get any better.

But life has a way of encroaching now and then and it did so a few winters back.  A friend of mine supports a small school for poor kids in China and the students needed help.  He is a great guy, doing good work and so we went.  Our job was to assist the students to learn English.  He also wanted the children exposed to western thoughts, ideas and lifestyles.

To say that we had fun is an understatement.  We had a great time.  The children were delightful.  It was also rewarding, interesting and challenging.  But it was also scary.

As most people know, China is polluted.  How polluted is hard to imagine.  So, try to imagine this: Sally and I went on what was billed as a nature walk.  It was a couple of miles over a small offshore island ‘park’.  The trail was a sidewalk.  Concrete.  On that path walked thousands of people.  It was more crowded than Robson Street at Christmas.  In any fifty foot section of the walk there were at least one hundred people.  At the end of the ‘trail’ there was the largest coal-burning power generation plant I had ever seen.  I would estimate that I saw five to six thousand people on that walkway and the same number again at the terminus.  It was not a nature walk by any definition I am familiar with.

Another day we simply went as far away from the city as we could in four hours and then we returned by a different route.  The eventual destination turned out to be an ocean-side park about the size of a small city park in Vancouver.  We took a ferry back.  During our eight hours away, we saw one waterbug, Sal claimed to have seen a gull in the distance and I saw a moth under a streetlight when we got back.  That’s it.  Eight hours spent looking and millions of people seen and yet only three natural life forms in the wild. 

What we have in BC and the western provinces is nothing short of priceless.  And, tragically, it is becoming even more rare and valuable in a world gone consumer-mad.  Those poor people paved paradise and put in a coal-burning plant.  In the process, they eliminated nature except for the rocks and dirt.  The air is thick with pollutants.  Most days you can’t see two kilometres for the smog.  They can’t imagine standing in a grove of trees that are fresh and clean.  They can’t imagine free and diverse forms of wildlife.  They haven’t got a clue.

But they will.  They will see the devastation eventually for what it is: a deadly trade off for throw-away consumables.  I guess the question is this: will we? 

The government of BC calls our provincial resources ‘SuperNatural’.  They are right.  Sadly, they are mostly content with the description for marketing purposes.  They don’t seem too inclined to promote it except to logging companies, mining companies and now river-buyers who will sell out our heritage by way of BC Hydro.  This province is a jewel in a tarnished world and our government is selling the rivers!  We have more economic opportunity simply by sharing our natural wonders, not having to sell them by the board foot, kilowatt or the metric ton. 

I don’t believe that government leads.  They are instead led by pollsters, advisors, cronies and lobbyists.  And our current governments are following the old economic models of those perpetual advocates of self-interest and greed.  If you want to see how that works, go to Detroit.  Go to Philadelphia.  Go to Hong Kong.  Life sustaining nature is traded for one-time feel-good purchases and a pocket full of cash.  It looks like the beads and trinkets trade for Manhattan Island only worse. 

Don’t count on government.  The Federal government has already overseen the demise of what they are supposed to protect.  See: Fisheries and Oceans. See over-fishing and fish-farm pollution.  Try to see wild fish!  They will sell out our heritage as fast as they can.   Saving our natural world is a fatiguing prospect for anyone but the options are simply not there.  Don’t save it and you will breathe the air I breathed in China.  

By economic forces, more and more people are being encouraged, if not subtly forced ,to live in cities.  And, of course, the price of entry to the city is rising while the value of small-town Canada is diminishing even more rapidly.  Small towns are dying in droves.  Already 80% of the Canadian population lives in urban settings – mostly miserably.  Sixty percent live in the five largest cities.  It would appear that we are headed in the direction Orwell predicted, Big Industry is wanting and Big Government is achieving.  If you want a sneak preview of things to come, go visit China.    

Buying a cabin may not be much of a show of resistance.  Even full-time, off-the-grid living in one is not.  But, right now, I see this place as a refuge from the madding crowd.  I see it as a respite from the rat race.  I see it as a statement for how we could live.  I see it as being contrary to the way things seem to be heading.  And I see Hong Kong as the eventual lifestyle model for us all if we don’t embrace, value and protect what we have.