Offenses Against Nature

Today, two days into standard (winter) time, is glorious; warm sunshine, temperature was 17 C early this afternoon, but blustery, strong north-west winds. At mid-day joggers were jogging in shorts and T-shirts. I went for a walk, as brisk as I can manage these days, and didn't know whether to laugh or to cry at the sight of two diesel powered little tractors, their cabs encased all around in transparent plastic and glass, their drivers wearing ear protectors. These expensive machines, $50K apiece or possibly more, were scurrying about on the lawns in the little park beside Patterson's Inlet off the Rideau Canal, leaf-blowers working overtime as they tried vainly to blow the yellowing fallen leaves into tidy heaps, while the gusting gales blew the leaves back faster than the machines could tidy them into heaps. Nature is untidy, let's face it. The air pollution from the diesel engines, and the noise pollution from their engines and from the leaf-blowers attached to them, were offensive, disgusting crimes against the environment. I think a few families with teen-aged children equipped with rakes could have had a lot of fun and got this job done more efficiently and more quickly and without the cost, noise and air pollution the National Capital Commission inflicted on this neighbourhood today. I found the entire proceedings a profoundly disturbing metaphor for a lot that is wrong with society today. Here were our tax dollars being squandered on a pointless exercise that was in every way an affront to how nature handles the process of death and renewal. If fallen leaves are allowed to lie where they fall, they nourish the land as they rot away into humus. It's untidy to behold compared to a nice neat lawn, I suppose, as some see it anyway; but if the seasons unfold as they usually do in these parts, the neat lawns will soon be buried under winter snows anyway, so what's the point of it all? These unnecessary diesel powered little tractors were using non-renewable resources and creating unpleasant noise and air pollution - and adding to the atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide - to what end? To tidy an otherwise untidy-looking little bit of parkland for a few days, possibly for a few weeks at most. I wonder whether a society that has such values as this deserves to survive.