permaculture

[Marimike6@cs.com]

Rain--

It's certainly the case that some times it's nature, not man, who opens up a 
niche. The tsunami is a good example. But if we want to see who's doing most 
of the job, it's private developers and the highway department.

The American economy depends on expansion. If we don't keep cutting new roads 
to put in new subdivisions, employment slumps and we enter a recession. So 
all those bulldozers have to stay busy. Plus they're making more of them. I 
live 
down the road from the Caterpillar plant. They have about 400 new units on 
the lot now. As soon as they ship them, they'll make 400 more. And jobs are 
so 
bad down here we don't want the Caterpillar plant to close.

What does a Cat do? It creates new ecosystems. It creates space for what I 
call opportunistic wildflowers and my wife calls weeds, to sprout.

We were on vacation last year and decided to come home through the back way 
in rural Pennsylvania. It was about the loveliest farm country you could 
imagine, until we got to a place where the road ended and there were detour 
signs 
routing us through a moonscape of upended earth.

The topsoil was on the bottom and there were mountains of red dirt piled 
everywhere, cutting across an original landscape of red barn Pennsylvania 
farms. 
Here and there you'd see sections of cloverleaf and interchanges half begun. 
It 
went on for several miles. At the heart of it was a whole new city, complete 
with its own community college, with busy little shopping centers already 
full 
of people, even before the interchange with the Interstate was completed. It 
was progress.

We make so damn many babies we have to do this all over the country. And 
people love it. They want the new stuff. Where I live, you can't sell a 
second 
hand house. They sit there abandoned until the road is widened and someone 
takes 
them down. This is the way we do business.

This means adventitious plants have the advantage... among other things. 

Here's a good web site to watch the process in action: Road to Ruin.

http://www.taxpayer.net/road2ruin/map.htm