Lost Wealth

Last week whilst walking in Lighthouse Park near Horseshoe Bay, I saw a sign that named all of the species of flora and fauna that had disappeared from the park. Broom was one of them. The sign was entitled "Lost

Wealth". I happen to really enjoy the bright yellow cheer of broom every spring and I have a huge bush growing on the road. It makes me feel happy. Very well meaning people however, have populated our semi-rural roads with signs decrying its very presence and every year folks hack away at it, leaving huge brown piles. Between the signs and the piles of dead shrubberies littering the roadsides, I am at a loss as to how this is environmental conscientiousness. In our parks also, a certain weed is tagged with 3 feet high poles and tape, making not the weed the problem, but the people's interpretation and solution. A perfectly amazing natural landscape is populated with annoying human detritus. I don't get it. It's a mess here. Even going shopping, we can't use plastic bags, vorboten, I come home at times with huge thick paper bags, which to my mind makes matters even worse. People are very militant here about all of this, so clear they are so very correct. Yet in another historical time and context, these issues may be viewed quite differently. It hasn't quite come to me having to guard my shrubbery but sometimes I wonder. It could be the last stand.