The apocalyptic environmental doomsters are running a lucrative racket. From Elizabeth Nickson at elizabethnickson.substack.com:
When I moved to the country at the age of 48 I was exhausted and sick. I spent most afternoons in bed, reading and resting and watching bad TV. I’d grown up in the country, but at 17, moved to the cities for education, and lived in Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, New York and London, about 6 years in each, adding Paris because I worked there so often, I almost rented an apartment. More like a closet with a bed in Le Marais.
“Some of us are bound to the earth,” a friend writes from her five acres in Ireland, which she is trying to rewild. I never felt completely well in the cities, I was trading youth and strength for enough knowledge to get out and make a living, a life, before I got cancer or heart disease, which is essentially how I thought of it. Another year, I’d say to myself, stick it out for one more year.
I live now embedded in nature. My first house had a spectacular view, but I sold it to live deeper, in a house on two creeks, surrounded by forest. It is hidden and spectacular. I’ve traded fancy restaurants and fancy people and things for my own park. City people have to have views says James Ackerman, the Harvard architectural historian, and author of The Form and Ideology of Country Houses. They still see themselves as separate and above nature. Environmentalists are almost all city people trying to impose their will on nature. Real country people live immersed, in fields, and meadows, forests and gardens.
I’ve covenanted in perpetuity my ravine and creeks, and in that ravine every summer owls hoot and call and breed. The first time I went down into it, five owls flew in and landed in the trees circling myself and my terrier, and just….stared at us. We stared back, in wonder. My land had never been lived on. It had been logged fifty years prior, but I still have a grove of old growth Douglas Fir they didn’t bother with. We have two blue-listed species in our forest, a sharp-tailed snake and a red-legged frog. The past two winters, we’ve played host to the American Dipper, who sits on rocks in the creek, bobbing up and down hunting water bugs. It is very exciting and people visit us to visit him.
