This Aspen tree has grown over the previous 32 years since I moved in this neighborhood.  I've watched its bark form the eyes of Egypt, and enjoyed its siblings along the edge of town.
     But now, the city wants to expand, and thus make a wide road where once the farmers raised their cattle.
Like everywhere in America, towns and cities spread out like a parasitic bacteria that destroys life, ecosystems, and environments one road or house at a time.
At 72 years of age, I am not surprised for every year the virus spreads out into the natural environments that were still here when I arrived.
    Orchards mowed down for housing developments.
Supermarkets with gigantic parking lots where a stream and meadow used to be.
An now the wetland once abloom with blue lupines, will become another parking lot, even though its a wetland, so that the city can abandon their historic elementary school, and sell it as it is in the center of town, and then build a new elementary school where this tree now still stands.
    I know planning is against the constitution in America, so farmland isn't necessary any more when we can get our Asparagus from Peru, Our garlic from China, and apples from New Zealand.
     I don't want to sound like an anti-globalist Trump-pet because he's as hypocritical as one can get, but I am sad to see every year how the work of our pioneers, farmers, loggers, cattlemen, and others who struggled for a sustainable self-sufficient life style which once, was the American dream of the west.

Rodin's Thinker - Legion of Honor Museum

     I recently came across this photo I'd taken years ago, and the masculine, muscular sculpture sitting with his hand to his chin, and I had sat in the same posture only minutes before I saw it, pondering the fate of man...

Guilt will do no good, I know, but our generation has certainly not lived up to the promises to make the world a better place...

     Indeed, overpopulation has long been seen as 'the problem', but for America the problem is affluenza, the insatiable urge to replace, recycle, upgrade, with fancier and fancier technology, with a virtual  reality that is really not virtual, but real to a whole new generation.

     And who can blame them, when the daily news is full of the most inhumane events dreamed up by perverted religious fanatics reminiscent of the inquisition.

So, yes, I'm trying to hold up my head, be grateful that I had white male advantages in this life, parents who educated me, and a wonderful life of learning and exploring the human condition.  

     But as I see the children of my friends cope with the frighteningly expensive options of education, without which they'll be virtual lackey 'slaves' working 60 hours a week on minimum wage to support a family, and build debt with their credit cards.  This system reminds me more feudalism than representative democracy.

     I know, I'm saying nothing new, and I'm just venting my pain before I shed more tears.  I had bonded with that tree, in the beginning, it had represented the edge of town, the open sky of fields, the stages of green buds, and golden yellow leaves in fall, like sort of time clock of the seasons.

     I know, get over it, and I will, but the with the elimination of each small living being with which I've bonded, each acre I seen alive with birds and plants, each hill with Pines and Lupines in spring, not to mention the increased sounds of cars, sirens, chainsaws, OSHA beeping also change the aural environment as well...so you go back to the house and hide, a house 100 years old that has little value, except as a old geezer luddite who remembers his own parents saying...

"I'm glad I'm not part of your generation."

 So, I need to withdraw back to nature, at a smaller scale, where the chances of 'extinction' in my lifetime encourages me to appreciate and witness, and share the grandeur of the web of life, in the hopes that I may learn to live with less shame for my lifestyle.