Termites chewing, chewing

The news reporter stood at the edge of a subdivision last night and pointed at a forest just beyond.

"Soon," he said, "this wooded area will be cleared for 80 new homes, the first application in this part of the county in over a year ...."

The whole story was presented as a great thing, a sign that the economy is turning around.

I shook my head in sorrow for the box turtles, deer, wild pogonia, oaks, maples, pines, bluets, wild azalea, butterflies, black snakes, birds, tree frogs and countless other wild things that will not be consulted in the developers' plans.

And I wondered again: When every last acre of the United States outside of our national parks has been plundered, raped and paved over, when our insatiable greed has spread a dreary shroud of "development" from sea to oil-slicked sea, when Los Angeles borders Boston, when no more "development" is possible because nothing outside of our national parks is left to destroy, how will we keep our sacred economy afloat?

Sharing our space

It hurts my heart every time I pass the dried-up remains of a certain turtle, on the shoulder of a certain stretch of I-95 that I traverse daily on my way home.

It takes a long time for a turtle to grow to large size. I wonder how long this one had lived before it met its demise on this unforgiving freeway. I wonder, too, if its ill-fated decision to try to cross the freeway was motivated by the recent obliteration of the adjacent forest to create yet another useless new development to put money in somebody's pocket.

I read a bittersweet column today by a resident of my city, offering ways that we can -- having stolen so much from nature -- give a little back. Poignant was her depiction of the annihilation of a large meadow near her home where killdeer birds once nested. It is now eye-sore sprawl and roadways.

We have claimed so much of the earth as our own -- cleared it, paved it, spread buildings across it. We never consult the previous occupants, whether plant or beast, as to their opinions in the matter. In some cases, we don't even regard the feelings of the human occupants. Ask any Native American, or the Bikini islanders, or the descendants of the Appalachian mountain folk driven out by 20th-century government decree, or the victims of that pernicious evil called "eminent domain."

Can we ever say enough is enough? Can we please just assess what we already claim as ours and clean it up and deal with it more efficiently? Can we accept as a fait accompli what we have done in the past and have the decency to wreak no more misery upon our beleagured world?

Can we end our addiction to destruction,and once and for all declare that what little we have left in a natural state should stay that way? There are thousands, perhaps millions of acres of so-called brownfields, homes standing empty, poorly planned industrial complexes. Those are ours. Let's clean them up and make no more.

If I ruled the world, the bulldozers would grow cobwebs and rust away, damn them all! No bloated developer would ever again waddle onto the edge of a woodland with his golden shovel and his Jabba-the-Hutt grin, announcing yet another gas station to go up where birds once sang, unless and until we had fixed the messes we have already made.

And even then, the lousy ogre would have to move every single plant on the site to another location at his own expense, even if he had to get down on his hands and knees with a trowel to do it. And if a single birdnest or rabbit burrow were found it's sorry Charlie, take your blueprints and stick em where the sun don't shine.

Where bad folk go when they die -- the developer's hell

If I were Dante, author of the famous "Inferno," I would add a chapter on the fate of the loathsome wretches who will someday have to stand before whatever Being created this planet and explain why they spent their lives trying to destroy it.

That would include terrorists, dictators and land developers.

The latter is my subject this morning.

Hell for such loathsome souls will not be a realm of flames guarded by shrieking demons. Flames and noise accompanied their work on earth and would simply bring them undeserved joy.

No, instead they will wander eternally through verdant valleys and lush forests -- without the power to destroy them. They will have to listen to the songs of birds and watch deer nibbling the grass, frogs and turtles luxuriating in wetlands and there won't be a damn thing they can do to them anymore.

Imagine their misery: all that prime, wooded acreage, all that luscious waterfront land, just crying out to be cleared and graded and sold -- but nobody's posting "For Sale signs, nobody's holding rezoning hearings, no farcical county governments are pretending to listen to the concerns of citizenry while secretly salivating over the bribes the developer's lawyers have ready for them in the back room -- and nobody has the key to the bulldozers.