I remember the field behind the bus depot, at the corner of Ontario and Saint Hubert that was like an oasis of smells and sights on the fringes of downtown. It was first paved over to make a parking lot and is now on its way to being the new home of University of Quebec student dorms. I remember the lot that went along Sherbrooke Street just to the west of Saint Denis. Its undecided fate for so many years gave the plants time to grow into a young forest. A friend of mine was hired by the owners of this property to be a custodian. He would tell us stories of its secret life, of squatters and small animals that were trying to live there. Finally the economy picked up enough for the land to be “developed” once again, this time into a wall of prestigious condominiums.

I was attracted to Montreal more for its nature than its urbanity. This is what is strange. Why wouldn’t I just move to somewhere that was close to nature? The answer to this question is mixed up with the confused vanities of youth, but as those shed away what remained was an idealism that told me that the choices I made of where I live and how I lived mattered. The fear that industrialization was threatening the natural equilibrium of the planet was part of my consciousness like everyone else’s as I grew up, even 40 years ago. So I figured if I didn’t buy a car, walked and rode my bike everywhere and lived in dense housing, I would limit my impact on the environment.

But I still craved nature. The empty lots, les terrains vague, with their ambiguous status are quite literally the purest examples of nature in the city. While I watch them disappear I also saw my peers with the same craving for nature one by one purchase cottages outside the city where they would balance themselves on the weekends. This struck me as ironic. Environmentalism is a serpentine complex of Pandora’s boxes: buying bottled water because tap water is polluted creates more pollution, fleeing the pollution and lack of nature to greener spaces beyond the cities in our automobiles creates more pollution.

But it also works the other way around. A neighborhood like the Mile End, relatively speaking, is a model for green living. The number of people who don’t get in a car to live their daily lives is proportionately high, contributing to a better environment. But there’s a price. We are surrounded by a grid of main thoroughfares, in close enough proximity to significantly increase our chances of developing respiratory problems from the many poisons in automobile exhaust. So in the end adding more stress on the environment ends up being healthier for us as individuals. What to choose?

When paradoxes lead us to the depressing and hypocitic dead ends, the response can be disillusionment and cynicism. The last empty lots in Montreal are a glimmer of hope that one day we can organize our settlements so that we don’t have to destroy what we love in order to have access to it: clean water, clean air, wild plants, wild animals. Instead of going to the cottage we could connect to nature right where we live. The work of the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective points us to an appreciation of nature run amok in a lost corner of our city. Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us, worked with biologists, engineers, and other specialists to hypothesize about what would happen if all of a sudden there were no more humans on earth. He describes the fascinating stages of nature establishing itself in our built environments. I hope I live to see the day when the appreciation of the natural processes is widespread enough to see parcels of land all around the city being left to grow, giving us points of reconnection to nature around every corner.