Desire for Open Water

While the majority of my days are spent searching wetlands of Island County for plants and soils, we also interact with the people that own the land and informally note their perspectives. Both yesterday and today there has been a commonality in landowner desires – “Give me open water!”

Yesterday we visited a pond filled with a yellow pond lily, and the land lady followed us around, asking”where’s the water? How do I get rid of that plant?” It’s true, the plant’s thick, tuberous roots and fleshy stems dominating the area like ivy on a brick building, but her desire to eradicate it was a little extreme – “we considered just hooking a line to my son’s truck and pulling it out of there!”. Why water? Why not just enjoy the lily?

Today we came across a gem of wetland surrounded by forest. The landowner didn’t live anywhere near the wetland, but complained that the cattails were taking over. He missed seeing open water and the ducks that frequented it, so wanted to pull out the cattails by any means possible.

These two perspectives got me thinking- why is it that people are so against vegetation and so desirous of open water? This same desire leads people to pay millions for ocean-front property, and even if they don’t have a “view” of the water, leads them to cut down trees on their property just to achieve this view. Is it claustrophobia? Desire to achieve a feeling of being out over the water? A prehistoric fear of the forest and the dangers it can bring? Or just a cultivated, Home-and-Garden magazine type aesthetic about what is attractive? No matter what the roots of these desires, they motivate us, and may be the subconscious cause of more land management choices than we realize.