RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

To control nature you’ll need more than a chemical spray

Years ago, I wrote fake product reviews for epinions.com. Eventually I was banned from the site, but I stand by my work. This is my review for “Ropel Animal, Rodent and Bird Repellent.”

What excited me most about my new house in suburban Philadelphia was my 3½ acre yard. The yard in fact, sold me on the house. Sure it needed a little work, but it would be a calming activity to cultivate the land to my liking. The overgrown lush greenery and chaotic flowerbeds stretched across the rolling yardscape, before dropping suddenly into a small valley cut by a rushing creek full of crawdads and tiny speckled fish. In the evenings deer would emerge from the nearby woods and graze on my lawn. Occasionally a groundhog would stick his head from an underground den, or go lumbering clumsily across my yard.

The place obviously needed work. Before my new yard could be arranged to a simple state of subtle beauty I found that it would be necessary to repel nature with an abrasive chemical spray. I purchased several industrial drums of Ropel Animal, Rodent and Bird Repellent on the advice of a friend. It advertised a repellent force to nearly every creature disturbing the desired order of my yard. Pesky squirrels, groundhogs, deer, rabbits, cats, dogs, mice, moles, songbirds, doves, raccoons and possums would no longer be a problem. I immediately went to work. I sprayed the trees to repel the birds. I coated every plant and inch of lawn to deal with the larger mammals. Through a homemade siphon, I pumped the chemical liquid into the ground. I even poured some into the babbling brook which ran through my property to see if it would repel fish as well. The fish were not repelled, but instead, died.

I am an admirer of nature and had no intention of killing the local marine life. Instead of continuing with lethal water treatments, I dammed up the river with concrete blocks at the property line and salted the riverbed to rid the earth of worms and parasites. On land, the repellent worked, but was not all and entirely effective. Often I would wake to the sounds of birds in my yard. Still, a squirrel could be spotted scurrying across my lawn, or a rabbit nibbling on a length of grass. High frequency sound machines, air rifle surveillance and even chemical sprays proved only to be a “band-aid solution” to the overall problem of free-roaming nature. Taking the tactics I had learned from the “creek solution” and aesthetic sensibilities drawn from local, suburban commercial districts, I leveled the yard, flattened the land and finished it with the permanence and strength of 6-inch layer of concrete.

The concrete did the trick and I learned a valuable lesson. Nature begets nature. Particular elements of the natural world cannot be removed. To remove nature - as became my ultimate goal - nature must be conquered and obliterated; paved, fenced in and dammed off. As I said, I have nothing against the natural world, in fact I quite enjoy “getting back to nature” from time to time. Just not at home, during the work week. Nature should be allowed to thrive in an allotted space, like in our many great National Parks. Everything has its place. Nature should, like in my yard, be isolated and cordoned into a planned field of existence, while the rest of the world should be allowed to thrive as to the dictation and planning of Earth’s ultimate masters; mankind.

I love my new yard. Ropel Animal, Rodent and Bird Repellant may serve as a temporary and attractive solution, but you will learn, just as I did, that if you wish to control nature, it’s all or nothing. Nature must be obliterated.