I read an article the other day about a group of US billionaires who have been buying up farmland and what was called “empty land”, in order to build themselves a solar punk community.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/26/silicon-valley-elites-buy-800m-land-new-city?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail

I’d probably need to be in a more reflective, less “eat the uber-rich” mood, to offer some thoughtful analysis of this. But I found I couldn’t get emotionally past the second sentence, in which the land was described as “$800m (£635m) worth of agricultural and empty land.”

Oh dear humans. Just because land doesn’t have humans or human-centred buildings or concrete or human things on it, doesn’t make it empty.

But don’t rely on me. Ask science.

Literally. Ask the Bioblitzers, who have just completed their 17th survey of the region, centring Whistler, but sometimes venturing further afield. In their 17 years, they have grown the number of documented species in Whistler from 435 to 4846.

This feels like a good baseline assumption we could begin to carry… that there’s definitely 10 times as much marvel out there as you could probably name with a group of your smartest friends. At the least.

There is no such thing as empty land. There might be abandoned land, desecrated land, unimpacted land, unreachable land, but anything that is in material form, like this organic material Earth, is not emptiness. It is, in fact, the opposite.

I love the joyfulness of these Bioblitzers, and want to give a huge shout out to Kristine Swerhun and Bob Brett, who instigated this project and have given 17 years of their love and energy to it.

As shared in their website at https://www.whistlernaturalists.ca/bioblitz-2023, this year they shared hands-on presentations with 750 students in 38 classes at Spring Creek (12), Myrtle Philip (15), École la Passerelle (3), Waldorf (4) and Whistler Secondary (4). (The high school students were lucky enough to witness in-person wildlife necropsies (autopsies performed on animals). Volunteers also documented species in field trips at Loggers Lake, the Emerald Forest Wildlife Refuge and the Brandywine area in June, and Black Tusk, on Blackcomb and Whistler Mountains, as well as Beaver Pond and other valley bottom locations in July.

I feel so much appreciation for this initiative and its efforts to expand our tiny anthropocentric mindsets that consistently centre humans to the exclusion of so much other wonderfulness. Empty. Pffft.