Very few of the natural places in my city are untrafficked -- by which I don't mean pure wild, since we have only one or two places that were not chopped down at least once or twice in the last two hundred years -- but places that are not managed as official parks with roads and signs. They are not wilderness spaces: they are more like delinquent spaces (from the Latin, delinquo, meaning to do wrong, with an associated reference to linquo, meaning to leave home, to abandon the world of laws and boundaries), or, well, less poetically, abandoned sites, neglected ravines, patches of scrub under noisy overpasses. In March they are especially bleak and empty: but I go there and wander, just to see what is happening out along the margins. The beaten-up rivers flow through them too, and a day ago I went to check on one particularly deranged space, where the continuing impacts of a chemical spill that happened further north a few weeks ago have been fouling the downstream rivers ever since. The whole area is a horrible tangled mess of weeds and rubble; and this winter has been very dry, so the soils and grasses are in terrible shape, stained in multi coloured blotches of purple and lime green.

Yet there are faint flags waving above the ravaged battlefield. And there are tiny wrapped messages of new green working their way along battered boughs of slashed trees along the edges of the site. Birds are beginning to stake out the greybrown terrain, like survivors from the aftermath of some wartime clash picking out where their farms used to be. And the sun, just beginning to take on some warmth, peeks out from behind the grey gloomy afternoon. I find a dry piece of rubble, sit down and stretch out my legs in the sun. A student of mine said in a class the other day: "Global climate warming is an attack on spring." Interesting thought: we are now expanding the human enterprise into the smearing of the seasons. We are polluting the wellsprings of spring.

Well, I guess it is all true. But I can also see that if you sit gazing around in a junk littered landscape, your mind begins to twist, rust and corrode to match. To despair about the future of spring even as it begins to unfold in the present is just too grim to be sustained. Spring hope springs eternal that there will be spring. We have to take the spring as we find it, where we find it, as long as we find it. All we can do is rally under the faint flags, unwrap the little messages from headquarters, regroup, and whistle our ragtag way over the sundappled, greenmisted, birdvoiced wreckage to wherever it is the struggle to save spring is unfolding tomorrow.