19 June 2006
♥ fern gully
Lately I've been thinking that maybe cartoons are the only movies worth watching. Everything else is full of violence and exploitation, things which - by principal - I'm against. Animated features, on the other end, tend to have at least a couple of morally upstanding characters, a relatively conceivable plot, and, in the end, a meaningful lesson to be taught.
Imagine my dismay, then, when I stood atop a hill in what used to be miles and miles of open space and saw that where there used to be a quiet creekside trail, there was now a sidewalk. What used to be home to dozens of cute furry creatures is now the site of million-dollar homes, the likes of which would house eight or more families in any country but America.
It was pretty disheartening, in the middle of my run, to discover that Fern Gully - a favorite cartoon of mine - was unfolding right in my middle-of-nowhere backyard. Okay, there were no fairies or smog monsters named Hexxus, but the principle remains: suburbia is coming to BFE.
A few workers on their lunch break waved at me genially, unaware that they were destroying what was once a pristine wildlife habitat in the name of growth and expansion. Other than that and a few awkward glances from supervisors whose job it probably was to tell me to stay away (I was running with my rather gigantic doberman, who, even with his floppy ears, causes the idea of approaching me to be unappealing at best), no one noticed as I stood, breathless, in the middle of the constuction site.
Where do Westerners - no, people - get off? Who do we think we are, ravaging a beautiful landscape to make way for more Burger Kings and swimming pools? No one's living there, they said, let's build some houses.
But they didn't stop to think that someone was living there.
An entire ecosystem was living there, complete with a pond teeming with aquatic creatures, a thickly wooded area virtually overflowing with wildlife, and a skyfull of endangered predatory birds. They were here first. They've been here for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. You think your grandparents worked hard? Try being an endangered species of jackrabbit or a colony of rare beetles. House payments are the least of your worries, as you're struggling to survive.
Call me a hippie, a treehugger, a hopelessly naive idealist. Call me whatever you want, say I'm exaggerating or being melodramatic, but this matters. We don't need another mundane suburban community just like all the others before it. We don't need any more urban sprawl. We don't need to be supersized, we don't need to live in little boxes made of ticky tacky (points for you if you are now humming that song to yourself), we don't need all this stuff. We all have too much stuff.
We need to stop thinking so much about whether we can, and start thinking a hell of a lot more about whether we should.
Imagine my dismay, then, when I stood atop a hill in what used to be miles and miles of open space and saw that where there used to be a quiet creekside trail, there was now a sidewalk. What used to be home to dozens of cute furry creatures is now the site of million-dollar homes, the likes of which would house eight or more families in any country but America.
It was pretty disheartening, in the middle of my run, to discover that Fern Gully - a favorite cartoon of mine - was unfolding right in my middle-of-nowhere backyard. Okay, there were no fairies or smog monsters named Hexxus, but the principle remains: suburbia is coming to BFE.
A few workers on their lunch break waved at me genially, unaware that they were destroying what was once a pristine wildlife habitat in the name of growth and expansion. Other than that and a few awkward glances from supervisors whose job it probably was to tell me to stay away (I was running with my rather gigantic doberman, who, even with his floppy ears, causes the idea of approaching me to be unappealing at best), no one noticed as I stood, breathless, in the middle of the constuction site.
Where do Westerners - no, people - get off? Who do we think we are, ravaging a beautiful landscape to make way for more Burger Kings and swimming pools? No one's living there, they said, let's build some houses.
But they didn't stop to think that someone was living there.
An entire ecosystem was living there, complete with a pond teeming with aquatic creatures, a thickly wooded area virtually overflowing with wildlife, and a skyfull of endangered predatory birds. They were here first. They've been here for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. You think your grandparents worked hard? Try being an endangered species of jackrabbit or a colony of rare beetles. House payments are the least of your worries, as you're struggling to survive.
Call me a hippie, a treehugger, a hopelessly naive idealist. Call me whatever you want, say I'm exaggerating or being melodramatic, but this matters. We don't need another mundane suburban community just like all the others before it. We don't need any more urban sprawl. We don't need to be supersized, we don't need to live in little boxes made of ticky tacky (points for you if you are now humming that song to yourself), we don't need all this stuff. We all have too much stuff.
We need to stop thinking so much about whether we can, and start thinking a hell of a lot more about whether we should.
6/19/2006
