Nature Provides, Industry Develops...Really?

Walking past Peterborough's City Hall this evening I happened to see a flag raised with the logo of Vancouver's Winter Olympics. I decided to peruse the event's website and found out that the Olympic Torch will be coming through Peterborough on December 15th & 16th. This is kind of cool, but I also noticed something else on the site. It listed Peterborough's city motto: "Dat Natura, Elaborant Artes". 

In English, this translates to "Nature Provides, Industry Develops".

So maybe I'm simply a jaded Trent student that sees things through a certain lens, but even so, this is completely ridiculous. Peterborough repeatedly touts itself as the "Gateway to Cottage Country" and a wonderfully green city. Indeed, it was recently listed as one of Canada's most walkable cities. But such a city motto emanates everything that is wrong with how we approach our relationship with nature.

I decided to look it up on Wikipedia and found that the motto -- also titled on its Coat of Arms -- is supposed to mean "Nature gives bountifully and the crafts and energy of the people elaborate nature's gift". Forgive me, but that's a load of BS.

What it really means (and is very much reflective of) is the belief that nature has provided us with wonderful things that we can develop and exploit at our will. We can take from nature, but we don't care too much about giving back, or at least not taking too quickly.

Now before you roll your eyes and ride this off as simply a broken-recordesque hippie rant against "the establishment", I have nothing against development as a whole. But there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. For the large part, we've been doing it the wrong way. And such a simplistic view that is very much reflected in the Peterborough motto only perpetualizes this.

I understand that such a motto might be traditional and untouchable in the eyes of some, but going with what is traditional has left us with a lot of problems to deal with. 

Let's take a second look at our official mottos and rethink how we really want to represent ourselves.