Gone not forgotten

In my short life I've seen many natural spaces fall to the bulldozer's blade. I watched helplessly as my hometown was transformed from a sleepy out-of-the-way suburb to an ever expanding strip mall as far as the eye sees. Houses line the cliff's edge of the few remaining greenbelts and shrinking watersheds. This, I am told, is a sign of progress, positive economic growth, something to be heralded as the coming of some wondrous and prosperous age. Why does it so often seem this shortsighted destruction concerns itself only with the pursuit of the dollar? How many times can you stamp the same set of franchises and shopping centers on a different landscape?

My father and I once waged a campaign against city council to petition plans that called for so-called 'improvements' to be made to our neighborhood park. 500 signatures and several disappointing council meetings later and nothing changed. "The money has already been appropriated," they'd claimed, "it has to be spent." Concrete was set and asphalt paved. A young boy learned nothing speaks as loudly as a dollar in hand.

Several years ago I discovered a small patch of wild blackcaps (also called black raspberries) tucked behind the same park in a rapidly disappearing greenbelt. I had stumbled across a rare treasure and knew it; I collected the berries every summer from then on which my mother and I made into delicious jam. Two days ago I returned to find the entire patch decimated. A trail building crew had mindlessly carved a swath of destruction through the heart of the patch. In their ignorance they had destroyed something worth much more than money to me.

"Oh well," I thought after my initial anger subsided. What seems like half a lifetime ago I learned to expect such things will happen as long as there is money to be made. I slowly came to understand that saddest of all, no one walking that future trail would even realize what had been lost so that it could be created. No one would know what wonders had once grown in its place.