Ecology of a Neighbourhood

Neighbourhoods can be fascinating places for that particular brand of life that is not your own demented and deformed kind. Take my own humble neighbourhood for example which looks quite ordinary on the surface, streets full of cars, and rows of sandstone tenements. But between the cars (or gas chambers if you prefer which quite frankly do nothing for neighbourhoods except menace and pollute them) there are little front gardens a few metres wide, walkabout crows, pigeons and gulls, who forage on foot, insects galore feeding from wild garden flowers, and kerbside weeds (which sadly the council and car drivers like to spray with their chemicals). All this ecology stops the neighbourhood from becoming a car park (for many residents now that's all a neighbourhood is: a place to sleep (recover from work) and park your car. A neighbourhood, sadly, is no longer a place to live. In the past poverty stopped people from having cars. Now, even the poor have cars because of dodgy loan and hire purchase schemes and used car salesmen. And so the wildlife becomes even more important, because there's nothing worse than a neighbourhood which has excellent access to public transport (tube, bus, train links are all  within a five/ten minute walk from my door) drowning in gas chambers and toxic boxes that we like to call 'cars'. Car drivers have even taken to parking on the pavements not because there are no spaces on the road but because they think it's cool (to block disabled access and irritate the blind and the hard of seeing). The point of this piece is, in the words of Vincent Derthier whose Ecology of a Summer House I came across many moons ago in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia (!), 'to stimulate readers to an awareness and appreciation of the many and complex manifestations of life in this world and of our participation in that biological wonder'. It is an effort to allow people to see beyond the car park the small minded have made of our neighbourhoods, and to see that fruition and not pollution is the order of the Earth. It is also an effort to stop and pause and consider your neighbourhood as a place for Life and peace and living, and not for death and disease and recovery.