Godforsaken

Today I drove to the north of the town and looking on the stony, dried up landscape with it's thin soil, I found myself thinking "What Godforsaken country this is."

I was raised on more fertile land in a higher rainfall area, and not in a time of extended drought, so the sight of the poor, stony soil, the stunted shrubs, dried up waterways and scrubby, struggling trees did not bespeak beauty or prosperity to me. I would find greener, lusher landscapes more pleasing. Fertile valleys blessed with abundant water and tall stout trees - fields, lumber, gardens, irrigation - agriculture and wealth. Of course, such valleys were the first selected and cleared, and are intensively farmed and productive areas now. The little water that remains in the rivers and bores waters crops to feed the cities - cities that have effectively paved over many square miles of good farmland.

It occurred to me as I drove past the barely-viable sheep pasture that such blighted landscapes would have been last cleared and least improved. The first to be given up on and allowed to return to bush. The last bastion of many hardy species of native "weeds" and the wildlife that depend on them. The harder land is to develop, the more likely it is to be left in it's natural state. The areas least compatible with human life have the highest likelihood of maintaining an intact ecosystem.

After all is said and done, what the farmer and colonist in me reflexively rejects as Godforsaken country may be some of the most precious, in the end. Long after humankind and all our blessed valleys have died from toxicity of our own making and decayed to nothing, somewhere, far, far out in a vast desert where a bare human would die in days, a deep-rooted shrub will draw on water from rain that fell many years ago, and produce sap that tiny ants will feed on. A gecko will eat some of those ants and high above, a bird of prey will watch it all...