Pavement, Shopping Mall, Sub Division, Repeat

I'm riding on the train from New York to Boston today.

Looking out the window, it's hard to miss our absolute mania for pavement. Wherever the smallest cluster of buildings gather around  to form a town, city, or those endless lengths of strip malls, concrete and asphalt vie with each other to smother every piece of earth. Roads, alleys, parking lots, sidewalks, loading bays, gas stations, offices, stores, houses and broad stretches of pavement that serve no discernible purpose whatsoever, all spread like oil across water.

Where pavement does not lie, an obsessive, purposeless monoculture of ceaselessly manicured, herbicide and pesticide soaked, water hungry grass takes its place. Even when these bland expanses of grass obviously require substantial investment for upkeep while offering absolutey no use to anyone, the regime of monoculture is imposed. I'm looking right now at a broad lawn stretching out around an office park. No feet will tread barefoot on that grass, no games will roll across it and no picnic will spread out upon it.

In the smallest "neglected" corner, however, life insistently bursts forward. Life doesn't just tend towards diversity, it strains towards it, hurtles and hurls forward into a profusion of species and variety. That is the way of life. Out of the unmown strip of dirt behind a warehouse sprout dozens of kinds of wildflower and grass, vast colonies of ants, beetles, worms and caterpillars intent on their leaf by leaf journey towards butterfly. Vines grow to cover an abandoned concrete water tank. Pioneering trees risk notice by beginning to stretch up out of the spaces between unused track.

Life must dream of being neglected by us as our attention proves so deadly.

Between the clusters and towns, the occasional woods and wetlands flash their lushness, an acre bursting with more varieties of life than an entire town. Even these, though, are broken and discontinuous, inhospitable to any larger life that needs to range, forage or hunt to survive. The waters are often choked by the unintended monoculture of algae overgrowth, fueled by the runoff from all those lawns and all that pavement.

And always, more roads, parking lots, bridges, buildings, and pavement in all its myriad featureless forms.

How right was the person who said an alien come to earth would think the world was populated by a race of automobiles who had enslaved humans to serve them. In fact, we are a planet full of earthlings who seem intent on obscuring and forgetting the fact that we were born of the earth.