Subdivisions are the new trees

Everywhere I go, I am beseiged by the sight of "development." They are "developing" nature into suburbia. Just today, I drove by a driveway with an old house at the end of it, bulldozers knocking on the door. Its neighbors were six-figure cookie cutters arranged eighteen inches apart on a couple of dozen acres. Shit, they could fit five houses on the generous lot of the farm house. Did someone really build and care for this house only to have it demolished because it was a square peg in a round hole?

I live in a rural area, where agriculture is the primary means of support. Families have been farming and raising livestock in this area for over two hundred years, passing their land and possessions down through the generations. Now, with agriculture in the slump that it is, big-time developers are coming forward and offering farmers and their families crazy amounts of money for their prime farm land. They buy thousands of acres of forest, forest that is just beginning to recover from massive logging trauma in the late 19th century, then tear down the trees, build a million houses, and plant trees. Why? Those trees will take at least a decade to be of any use to the owners. Wouldn't one or two of those trees be useful, or God forbid, asthetically pleasing?

If you can't agree with anything else, agree with this: if you pay six figures for a house, your yard should be at least as big as the square footage of your home. Burn suburbia!