It *was* a native California grassland near my mom, but *will* soon be homes... and I’m thinking about “shifting baseline syndrome”.

Kids growing up here today may never know it as anything other than homes, unless someone cares enough to tell them.

But I know it as the place I’ve walked my dogs around for years—them getting new things to sniff and ground squirrels to bark at, while I got a connection to nature with wildflowers and hawks around the mighty ancient oaks.

My question isn’t *if* we need more housing (we do), it’s *where*.

I’m *not* against progress, but we need to think more holistically, ecologically, about *how* we do it.

Ultimately this is yet another example of my favorite naturalist subject of study: urban ecology.

It’s not just about the “nature” existing in an urban environment, it’s acknowledging people *are* nature and then with that, it’s how we find a reciprocal balance with the rest of nature around us.

Is this development reciprocal? I don’t know.

They bulldozed the hawk and squirrel habitat, but they did create rain catchment basins that can create habitat for water fowl. They’re locking up the land with concrete, but also they also planted a number native plants along the new streets (sages, yarrow, deer grass, sycamore, oaks) and are installing solar on every structure, which is more than 90% of housing tracts I’ve seen.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think, it matters what *WE* LEARN as a society.

It’s not enough to simply care about nature from afar, it’s about admitting we were never separate from it, and therefore everything we do impacts both us AND It.

So how can we leave the smallest trace and live in harmony?

I will miss this space the memories of my boy Rocco tugging into the edges of the grass with dreams of a squirrel chase. But I’ll also give every new Cleveland sage a scratch and sniff as I walk my girl Zuzu there now into the future.

I think it’s important to hold space for nuance… and to keep telling stories of our past, lest the baseline shift us so far off balance we can never find equilibrium again.

#naturalist #deepthoughts #shiftingbaselines #california