Leave It Alone!

Situated a stone’s throw away from my front doorstep in the town of Mt. Martha is Fairbairn Reserve, a humble semi bush area home to a shamble of native flora and flora that together possess their own unique beauty. With an array of eucalypts, Blackwood’s and wattles (black wattle), combined with a generous ground covering of sword grasses and subshrubs such as smaller species of tee tree, are able to provide suitable habitat for many native fauna such as the sugar glider possum and more commonly the national icon of koala’s. This reserve needs not the help of radical maintenance and constant watering programs (Watering  programs can be individualised to unique area’s using the simple and easy website http://www2.smartgardenwatering.org.au/ [It’s swell.])

With unrelenting competition from common environmental weeds such as Blackberry  and Agapanthus’s, the local flora in theory should be able to remain untouched and a vital landscape in our local community. Unfortunately this is not the case and the reserve has succumbed to the demand for housing and further development. The opportunities for majestic views of Port Phillip Bay and the bright lights of the city of Melbourne has meant Fairbairn reserve has become a mere shadow of the landscape that once dominated the gentle slopes of Mount Martha.
Obviously the local government has successfully gone to great lengths to hide the actual figures on the level of deforestation; the link below vaguely shows the area of Fairbairn bush reserve and the surounding estates.
http://maps.google.com.au/?ie=UTF8&ll=-38.284682,145.020432&spn=0.011285,0.0421&z=15

With attempts to preserve the remaining bushland in the form of preventing the removal of soil, banning motorbikes, camping and littering, combined with annual back burning; the local authorities attempt to preserve both the health of the environment and its participants. Whilst this type of proactivity is beneficial to the landscape it must be accepted that the destruction caused by concrete roads, two storey mansions and general increased carbon emissions (Simply put due to more people  and fewer trees) is irreversible. My eventual opinion and advise would be Leave It Alone! Leave what environmental beauty remains to evolve naturally and simultaneously co-exist with human settlements.