Not In My Backyard

…or my front yard, or my side yard, or my driveway…

Take a look out your window. What do you see? Is there a big gaping hole in the grass, pavement, sidewalk, gravel, sand, garden, paving stones, or in whatever you count as your stable entourage?

What about your bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, dining room, office, closets, laundry room, basement, library, games room, foyer, home theatre, or whatever rooms make up your homey sanctuary, small or large?

Has a member of your family, your pet, or the laundry basket you keep meaning to fold suddenly disappeared leaving only a deep dark hole as evidence? Hey…more shopping!

Chances are, every day the fundamental structure of your living space remains the same in the morning as it did the previous night. It likely doesn’t change much during the day either. The worst you and I likely suffer is the rat-tat-tat of road or condo construction at 7am on a Sunday morning. And girl oh girl that really tests our Woman Not Waiting resolve. How dare they interfere with our beauty sleep!

But secretly we seek excitement.

We subconsciously yearn for a story we can tell our family and friends that will keep them hanging on our every word as their eyes grow wide and they shudder “OMG! Are you OK? Can I help?” Then we receive the attention that we deeply desire, the unconditional outpouring of affection from our inner circle, and the affirmation that we matter. And while we validate the heartfelt appreciation we have for our family and friends, they quietly think to themselves: “Sure glad it happened to YOU.”

Of course, they don’t mean that they are happy this happened to you, they are just glad it didn’t happened to THEM.

Let’s be honest here and call it like it is. Until we admit to our own innate preservation mechanism, as selfish as we may judge it to be, we are powerless to choose habits that serve others and our planet instead of our own comforts.

So let’s look at a few newsworthy events that might entice you to re-evaluate what your perceive as I-can’t-live-without-this needs.

Here’s the first. (courtesy of National Geographic)

“Holy crap!” you say. “Glad that’s not my street.”

Are you sure it’s not just a glimpse of the future?

If global warming is doing with your city as it is with Tropical Toronto and time is wearing down your neighbourhood’s water infrastructure, you don’t need to be in Central America for another storm like Hurricane Sandy to trigger a little adventure in your backyard.

And this one? (courtesy of the Daily Mail)

“Holy crap!”, you gasp as you run to your kitchen to check that your fridge is still there.

Can you imagine not having immediate access to your organic fair-trade black chocolate bars? After your heart rate drops and the adrenaline rush tapers, you imagine how that person in the picture must feel for a fleeting moment, then return to your busy world. “Glad that’s not my kitchen,” you state.

Well, it’s not their kitchen either but rather a sinkhole under someone’s bed, which leads me to the next one. (courtesy of the Huffington Post)

“Holy Fracking Crap!” You run to the bedroom to make sure that you haven’t been swallowed up by a sinkhole and are in your final moments of half-lucid dreaming as you become one with Gaea. This time you end up with bruises all over your arms from pinching yourself awake.

“Phew!” you exhale. “Glad that’s not ME!”

But what if it were. What if it were someone you care deeply about?

Short of living on granite rock like the Flintstones there isn’t much a Woman Not Waiting can do…or is there?

For the urban sinkhole, the answer lies in urban stresses we individually place on the natural world. We could:

• use less water to put less stress on the sewage system
• lobby city councilors to put a plan in place to systematically test and replace faulty infrastructure
• start rain catching
• implement a grey-water system in our home
• stop buying bottled water which depletes aquifers
• stop pulling water from below the ground to dump on top of the ground
• wean ourselves off fossil fuels to stop global warming induced mega storms

or we can just be thankful it’s not in our backyard (yet) and do nothing.

The choice is yours.