It’s honestly not something I ever thought to be grateful for, which in hindsight strikes me as odd, for how could I write a nature blog in a country with very little nature? 

Don’t get me wrong, England has many green spaces; I grew up on them. I lived right in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, and every day I would watch them race past the car window of whoever was dropping me at school that day.

They were vast and unending – a sea of green that stretched out into the horizon and was demarcated by walls built during the Roman conquest.

I loved them in summer when the burning sun would cast a golden glow upon them and make them shimmer; I loved them in winter when frost, thin as paper, would lace itself over their rolling bodies and they’d fill with mist. 

And it wasn’t just the Dales. I remember forested parkland that you could get lost in; I remember playing capture the flag in woods and attending forest camps.

I remember dancing around ancient Oak trees and hopping from foot to foot on their impressive, lifted roots. I look back on those days of splashing in streams, swimming in rivers, and pretending to be the heroine of my own story as I dived under waves, with a smile.

I wasn’t always happy during that time, enough that it stands out to me, but I was happy whenever I was outside, whenever I was swimming in the ocean or sprawled out on a field watching the sky. 

I left it all behind when I moved to London for uni. Suddenly, there were no more fields that ran into the horizon, no more Oaks to dance around, no more Badgers in the garden, or Red Kites in the sky.

Instead, it was concrete pavements that bordered concrete roads that sat beneath concrete buildings that made up London’s ‘iconic’ concrete skyline.

The stars disappeared from view and were replaced with the twinkling lights of planes, high-rise apartments, and offices. But why should it have mattered? Why should I have cared? It was London, after all, city of dreams and possibilities. 

And I didn’t care, not at first anyway. I made do with the canal and the parks fragmented by buildings; I was happy to forsake fields that seemed endless for noise that was endless, grew used to the sirens and bore the honking horns from congested traffic with only a little grumbling. 

It’s fine, I would tell people; besides, it will help my career much more than if I were at home. Home, where giants planted centuries ago, greeted you with a gentle rustle; home, where the world grew quiet at 6 pm and allowed the dusk chorus to take centre stage; home, where the stars were bright, and you could trace the lines of constellations. 

But it was fine, because it had to be fine, because I got to live in the capital, a pillar of industry, modern and exciting, even though that modernisation brought on by the industrial revolution is partly the reason England has lost nearly 50% of its wilderness and places in the bottom 10% of the world for biodiversity.

But no matter, right? I suppose in the end it didn’t matter; I left England after graduation for a country ranked second in the world for wilderness.

Canada is one of five countries that remains a stronghold for nature, as much of the country is undeveloped, and whilst moving here has been difficult, it has been made easier by the surplus of wilderness, true wilderness, around me.

Lakes a hair’s breadth away, rivers upon rivers, and streams upon streams. There are forests everywhere, teeming with life such as Deer, Moose, Bobcats, and Lynxes. The stars are bright and fill the sky, and I can trace the constellations amongst them. 

I can see, a little, the England I grew up in, in Canada, and it is comforting. And so, I am grateful to be in a wild land because no matter how foreign a country may feel when I am outside and surrounded by the natural world, I feel that I am exactly where I’m meant to be.