8 Comments

I love this post because it tells a never-ending tale common to my neighborhood. It has become less walkable and bikeable, but due to never-ending streams of noise, also less liveable. The never-ending stream of smoke creates another problem. When the never-ending stream of people comes, suffocation fills me, and I tell myself, if this is growth and development, I don't want growth and development.

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Hi Adetokunbo. I would just invite you to consider that growth and development are not synonymous. Development means getting better while growth just means getting bigger. Not all human construction and expansion is development, and in fact, it is often just the opposite. Thanks so much for posting.

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I love this post. I am so sad to see all the development happening off Shevlin Pines right now. All the trees that have been razed. The way fewer number of jays visiting our feeders.

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Thanks for sharing your feelings. As I have noted before, not everything we call "development" is actually development. Development means gaining in quality not just quantity. In human arrogance we call all human expansion "development" but that is a misnomer.

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I might have had a heart attack if I had come upon seeing all those trees down like that.

I think of taking down trees like that as the outward manifestation of the inner pruning of all the branches our minds used to take before they were trimmed of anything other than the ability to look at the capital, as in the "head" (Latin is "capitas") where all the money flows.

"Growth" is an obsession of people without much imagination, because they are so entrained to look up only at profit, not the bigger picture of a life cycle.

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Beautifully said. It was a terrible site. I went by several times and offered gratitude and remembrance to the place. Since then, I have changed my route so as not to go by there.

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I am sorry. That sounds depressing. And infuriating.

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Bend Oregon is one of the fastest growing in the country. There are some good things happening AND we are losing a lot of green space, urban trees and wildlife. As I noted in the piece, overall, we have to start reducing the human footprint on out planet.

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