Djelloul Marbrook

Sorrow and joy, but not in equal measure, are our lot. Some of it we arrange, some comes unbidden.

In my seventh decade I miss the trees, meadows, fields, streams, hills and vistas I knew and loved. They are gone to the terrorists of greed who will surely do more damage in the end than the religious crackpots.

The noisome beeps of earth-moving equipment are heard more often than birdsong. The breathtaking destructiveness and impracticality of the way we build detached homes is everywhere evident: fleets of pickup trucks running questionable errands, driving up costs, the devastation of an ecology we need to clean our air and provide us with pure water, the choking of the earth with pavement, the corruption of local government by developers…. the destruction of the English countryside demented the poet John Clare (inset).I think of him often as I witness the imposition of this harsh and degrading sameness.

The tacky McMansions we’re building, and the infrastructures needed to serve them, are so devoid of imagination as to make the sighting of a falling barn or even an abandoned gas station welcome. And why is the gas station abandoned? Probably because a leaking tank has irrevocably polluted the ground around it.

In almost every American county you can hardly walk a mile without being in the presence of a fuel spill, a sobering thought when you consider whether we would have gone to Iraq at all if it had been devoid of oil.

In my old age one of my bitterest sorrows is the scraping away of the natural things I have loved by remorseless greed and corruption. Yes, corruption, because thousands of commercial and residential developments would never have come to pass had not local officials been intoxicated by the odor of money.

Instead of educating our children to lead the world in science, medicine and technology, we have hocked ourselves to China to build houses and provide developing nations with markets they refuse us —leaving ourselves with an unsustainable economy.The splendors of the free market economy have been explained to us. But do we understand? Or do we simply hope somebody smarter than we are understands. Should we buy what we don’t understand, what others have either chosen not to explain or to spin? On this footing can a democracy stand?