Off they went, expensive, floppy cases. Bubble wrapped, anointed with hope, splattered in broad Sharpie strokes, addresses so carefully reviewed I soon knew them by memory. School applications. My part is now officially done, aside from some nail-biting and further existential ruminating.

Anyway, I'm on a reading blitz these days. There are times in my life where I've decided I can't possibly know enough about the world and feel a desperate hunger that can only be satiated by reading everything within my grasp. I'm especially interested in books about the environment or the wilderness or about our relationship to nature. It's an aspect of humanity I've rarely given much thought to and was never all that concerned about what havoc my existence was reaping on our seemingly fragile ecosystem. I would often balk at any activity beyond basic recycling (I grew up in a household where we not only kept the water running to wash dishes, my mom would actually leave the room, taps on full blast, convinced this was the only way to make grease budge).

I never really saw nature. I have never spent more than four or five days away from a major city. Dump me in some dusty vast metropolis where no one speaks a lick of English with a map and a cup of coffee and I'll be absolutely fine. Five minutes outside a city, at a truck stop (where concrete is still visible) and I feel utterly lost. I'm lost in, like, Longueuil. That's my wilderness.The closest I have come to camping invariably involves a cabin and a shower, or in one particularly interesting case a tower on the Great Wall. I fear butterflies because of their unpredictable flight trajectory.

And then, and please don't laugh, David Attenborough walked into my life. The first episode I saw was seasonal forests and I actually cried. I was particularly moved because these giant sentinels were older than the Rocky Mountains and right in my own fucking country (a place I often rolled my eyes at ever exploring. I could never understand spending $600 on a plane ticket to, sigh, Vancouver, when I could spend just as much and suffer an equally long flight to France.) The polar bear, the poster martyr for climate change, became far less a cliche when observed in action. Even locusts, whose 17-year long story, have a purpose, and they certainly provide more nourishment than we do.

So all that to say, I started with Walden's Pond and now I am simultaneously ploughing through Cradle to Cradle (an obviously much faster, smoother read). What I like about the former is an awakening to the uselessness of stuff and a reconceptualization of what we actually need and what we're lacking in modern society in terms of a relationship to nature. The latter is something everyone must read. I have only a few of its glossy, waterproof, tree-less pages left and it's already changed the way I look at the world. It's full of optimism. It sees the current state of economics and environmentalism as a challenge, not a hopeless stalemate. The authors, an architect and a chemist, both seek a collaborative approach and alternatives that aren't less-bad but actually provide nourishment to the environment, as well as for the people who use and inhabit the products and spaces they design. I like their light-hearted, pro-active, realistic, and (most importantly) guilt-free approach. I like the fact that I could read their book in the bathtub and it didn't get warped or moldy (though my bookmark met a far uglier fate).

So what's next? I've thought about Silent Spring but I'm not sure if I have the stomach for it yet. Rather, I think I want to explore some Canadian literature that uses our wilderness as the backdrop to a fictional story. I want to transport myself to the natural spaces here, at least, conceptually, because for now I'm stuck in a beige cubicle, with a beige telephone, and a beige computer. At least we have broad windows and a lot of natural light.