“You know your culture from your trash”- Peter Gabriel, song lyric (Steam)
Random Envy 4
Green with Envy
*******Special Earth Day Edition*******
[Beware: spoilers! “Scathing commentary” alert!]
What are we celebrating on earth day? We honor individuals with birth-days, but how do we honor and show appreciation for our land?
Signs clutter the few remaining open spaces on Louetta Road. “Land for sale!”; “Tattoo artist”; “Tree clearing”. (Or the worst of all, “Rent this sign”.) First we uglify the land with signs,
then we bulldoze all the trees and pave over the grass with concrete. We insult our earth, construct buildings we don’t need to sell services and products we already have, use the building until the business flops, then move down the street, tear down more trees and start another project. (I’ve seen this happen in other locations even when business was booming – are you listening Walmart ?)
This is the legacy we leave for our children. (Exception: the Mormon Church on Champion Forest Drive - at least they built a beautiful building to look at, like the beautiful cathedrals in Europe.)
We don’t need another restaurant or car wash, we need more trees that will produce fresh air for us to breathe.
We don’t need to constantly yearn for vacations to visit scenic places because we have destroyed the very scenery we already had. Be grateful for the zoning and conservation that some towns maintain. Think about it - would you drive all the way to Telluride if it looked like Houston?
How to honor Mother Earth? Support any organization that protects trees by encouraging planting, preservation, etc. Be friends with the Sierra Club. If you have the time, are brave, and have bail money, chain yourself to a 100-year old oak tree that is about to be plowed over to make room for a four-storey apartment complex that will crowd our environment and congest our city even more (they may drag you to the slammer and show your face on the 10:00 news, but you can at least sleep with good conscience). Support zoning – even its opponents would support it if it meant a topless nightclub with open gambling and guns on the street was going up in their neighborhood!
At what cost do we stick out our chests and proclaim, “Look at us – the fourth largest city in the country”? (As we’re dragging the bottom on the “most livable city” list.)
Happy Earth-day.
