The World Without Us by science writer Alan Weisman is shaping up to be one of the huge non-fiction bestsellers of the season.
The book describes how the ecosphere would take back the world if humanity weren't around: how a Conradian riot of vegetation would obliterate mankind's footprint. Subways flooding, streets collapsing and becoming rivers. Wapiti roaming the boulevards, etc.
I suppose the popularity of ecological apocalypse porn is not so difficult to understand. Self-loathing is in the cultural breeze these days, a sense that Homo sapiens as a species has hopelessly messed things up.
Perhaps it's no surprise that people harbour longings for the greener branches of our evolutionary tree.
On a microscopic local scale, you could interpret the restoration of Vancouver's Camosun Bog in light of this broader, cultural phenomenon. The restoration - which is happening a couple hundred yards from my house, on the eastern fringes of Pacific Spirit Park - is also about turning back an ecological clock. In this case, to the early 20th century with a view to redressing what project proponents describe as historic threats to the bog.
What this has meant practically to the neighbourhood, over the past 10 years or so, has been the reversion of a zone of the park from the hemlock forest to the bog ecosystem it had been before Westside housing development made necessary the drainage system that lowered the water table in the region.
I tend not to agree that bungalows and storm sewers are best understood as environmental threats, certainly not on balance. Flattening a mosquito on your forearm also represents an environmental threat (to the mosquito, notably), but few would pause long on the cost-benefit analysis.
Justifying bog restoration is more complicated, and mosquitoes figure in this question too. Many area participants in a 2000 survey, while largely supporting some degree of restoration on the site, expressed concern about increased mosquito populations as a result of a new bog.
That was before West Nile virus, two cases of which have been reported in British Columbia this year. They're both thought to be travel related. But check out the B.C. Centre of Disease Control website if you doubt that there are high-level concerns about the imminent arrival of virus-bearing mosquitoes in our province and our city.
Laurence Brown, co-founder of the restoration project, doesn't dispute that mosquitoes breed in the new bog. "Bugs like wet spots," he says. But he doesn't believe the type of mosquitoes found in Camosun Bog are "particularly known for West Nile."
I'm no entomologist, so I'll cede the point.
And I'll certainly hope that he's right, given that my three-year-old is covered in bug bites and my wife and I have never seen as many mosquitoes as we have this year.
But I would like to return to a more in-principle question. Why exactly is an early 20th-century bog ecosystem better than the hemlock forest that superseded it as a product of settlement in the area?
The moral-high-ground answer is biodiversity. We preserve ecological types as a matter of obligation, much as we attempt to prevent the extinction of species. Bogs are rare, this argument runs, hence the legitimacy of restoration.
Setting aside the fact that the same argument might be mounted in favour of selective ice-age restoration, the fact is that it doesn't apply here, strictly speaking.
The cloudberry and arctic starflower in Camosun Bog, as Mr. Brown acknowledges, are actually typical of bogs in more northern regions.
Then there's the small matter of the pine trees. Those have had to be pruned every year using bonsai techniques in order to stunt and gnarl them down to the boggy look desired.
I have no problem with this interventionist approach, particularly. But let's just agree that Camosun Bog has little in common with Alan Weisman's vengeful wilderness, reasserting itself where previously obliterated by the excesses of man. It is much more similar, in fact, to a Chinese scholar's garden or a Victorian-era hedge maze.
This doesn't change the fact that the restoration has lent beauty to the area. Mr. Brown may even be right that it has "spiritual value" to have cleared the hemlock trees, built the boardwalk, to have accommodated tranquillity and contemplation in that part of the park.
But that's less to do with ecology than with gardening: the clearing, the allowance for light, for birds and plants, for a stillness pronounced by the standing trees.
The effect of the Camosun Bog isn't justified in ethical or moral terms, in other words, but according to aesthetic ideals, delivered by human hands. In that way, it is a kind of anti-Weisman site; a world that not only makes no sense, but could not possibly exist Without Us.
Which is why residents should not be shy about demanding that the site meet other pragmatic requirements, such as not contributing to a regional health issue by adding to the neighbourhood mosquito biomass each year as the bog ecosystem grows more robust, and West Nile virus marches down upon us.
Timothy Taylor is a novelist
and journalist based in Vancouver. His latest book is the novel
Story House.
