Urban Grasshopper

(For more wordless posts today, visit Wordless Wednesday.)

As development occurs around the area I work, you see an odd juxtaposition of elements. While we’re still suburban, parts of the area and looking more and more urban. In fact, where I work is likely to be the future heart of the urban area around here. So, we’re seeing a transition from a rural-suburban environment to a suburban-urban environment.

A most recent example is an old family farm that is going to become a residential development. The family wanted to keep the farm in the family, but, after the death of the parents, the IRS taxed the land based on what it would sell for as a residential development rather than farmland. So, with the high tax bill, the family had no choice but to sell.

Keep that in mind the next time you want to blame “greedy” developers for developing green space into buildings and housing. It’s the greedy politicians that are more often to blame!

At any rate, so as the world changes around them, nature’s little critters find themselves in unusual places. Thus, you see a grasshopper in an area which appears devoid of vegetation. Now, there is some vegetation by the parking lot, and a field off to the side, but the field is growing smaller as development rages on.

Of course, as we may bemoan the loss of greenspace around us, when it seems that everything is going to be developed and the only place we’ll see nature again is in photos and movies, it is easy to overlook just how much space there really is around us. We complain of urban sprawl, because we see it happening. But, what we don’t see is where the sprawl isn’t happening. We don’t often see the untouched lands, or the lands that just remain vacant of human activity because, for the most part, that’s not where we are!

How many times have you heard someone complain of urban sprawl and over-development and other such things? And, how many times have you heard that same someone complain of long drives being boring because they drove through large areas of nothing? Areas where there were no homes, no buildings, no restaurants, no visible development at all?

They’re out there. We just don’t see them because many of us spend so much time inside environments of steel and concrete.

Development may be painful and confusing for those in the transitional stages, but nature will find her way. The critters will adapt, or move.

That’s why you don’t often see an urban grasshopper. Once he finds there’s little food around, he’ll fly, or hop, to greener pastures.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 9:07 am and is filed under Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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