I finally got to it. My friend and i were talking about this the other day, he said he literally felt suffocated each time he drove into Sydney from Canberra. Then he saw my garden – I think its a choice. If you decide to sit in an office all day, sure – you’ll drown. But everyone can surround themselves with greenery, even just to remind themselves that there are tall trees not far away.

In reading this I’m reminded of a guest speaker at a community faith gathering I attended a little while back. The focus of the evening was on what we could, as a community, do for the environment.

One of the presentations was on protecting our waterways. The presenter (I’ve forgotten his name) showed the local (Glebe) waterway from above – demonstrating how the natural flow had gradually been transformed into an artificial one. What was once a creek now was concrete pipes.

Experiencing nature in our urban space is so difficult when all the natural features have been covered up and co-opted by our unnatural approach to the world.

I do hope that the move towards biomimicry – design inspired by nature – will provide us with far more opportunities to experience nature in urban environments, by avoiding the “heat, beat and treat” mentality and instead start to engage natural systems in our urban and city planning.

But in the meantime, I agree it’s worthwhile to look up occasionally and enjoy the natural wonder of the atmosphere…

http://tmwilson.org/blog/

I think I put more value in the lens of science to view the natural world through than yourself… I’ve written a lot about the value of the two approaches to nature, the poetic lens of Romanticism and the reductive lens of science in my book The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles.

Where is Kangaroo valley by the way?