I turned the corner today, just as I've done probably one thousand times before over the past twenty years, and noticed, for the first time, the tiny triangle of corn stalks. This is in an area of once-fertile farm land that is slowly and inexorably being overtaken by suburban sprawl. The tip of the triangle borders a busy, four-lane highway-type road and one side borders yet another busy road, this one a four-lane thoroughfare. Nestled in this maybe one-acre section is what appears to be corn stubble from a corn field. It looks so out-of-place there, surrounded by other non-farm-type structures and land. I was surprised that I had never taken note of the micro-field before. Just as I began to think about the person that cultivated, planted and harvested that little field, I observed yet another reminder of urban sprawl, not more than eighty feet from the tip of the triangle........a tree or scrub brush, dormant for the winter, that had grown between the edge of the corn field and the concrete curb......literally right there. The tree/bush has grown in an impossibly inconvenient place yet is still thriving, even leaning out into the traffic lane, probably because that is the primary direction from which the sun's rays stream.
Two reminders of how we humans have overtaken acre after acre of land that was once devoted to farming of some type, whether cash crops or livestock. We truly are plowing up ground and putting up parking lots, housing tracts, multi-family developments, shopping centers, retail malls.....anything related to accommodating our human tastes for population-dense land use. True, our preference for development sprawl is fed by the willingness of farm-land owners to sell their properties and so it becomes a vicious cycle, kind of like, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Developers wouldn't have plenty of family-farm property from which to chose to buy if there weren't dozens of developers waiting in the weeds to entice willing farm-land owners to sell.
What is the answer? Where can we find a workable solution? This reminds me of the song from the musical,
"Oklahoma", that has the line, "the farmers and the cowboys can be friends." Can we inhabitants of this world find a way to fit everyone into their one little corn field yet curb our insatiable urge to develop, develop, develop?
Our shoes are over-sized and leave footprints on this earth that are way too big for the path on which we've been guided to walk. If we all went barefoot, as our ancestors did, we'd naturally prefer walking upon lush, green grass, rather than hard, cold concrete.
No answers here.....only another thought on which to ponder.
Ancora imparo
