excerpt from The De-Greening of America
 
     III:  Earth
 
-The Great Mother,
who provided food from her bounty,
who provided the materials to build shelter,
who provided the soul-sustaining scenic beauty
necessary to those enmeshed in economic endeavors
(even if those endeavors were destroying such beauty
as fast as it could be appreciated,
or even faster than that),
                                    and
who went largely unrewarded for such provisioning----
 
 
 
 
one last example of someone having taken that bad advice:
 
a man named E.L. Trouvelot
had ambitions in the silk industry,
                                                  but
the silk-producing moths in New England kept dying
so he had the bright idea of importing the gypsy moth
with the intent of cross-breeding them with the locals
to create a disease-resistant hybrid
                                                        But
the wily gypsy moth escaped into the surrounding trees
and,
        since that happened in 1869,
has spread several hundred miles further,
                                                             defoliating
maple,
            elm,
                    oak,
                            apple,
                                      poplar,
                                                  willow,
also attacking some kinds of pines and spruces,
damaging them over and over again,
rendering them vulnerable to other diseases and pests,
                                                                               and
sometimes provoking attempted cures
worse than the disease itself---
 
 
 
 
"I do not believe
that there is either a moral or any other claim upon me
to postpone the use of what nature has given me
so that the next generation or generations yet unborn
may have an opportunity to get
what I myself ought to get"
                                           so said someone
who was a nobody even for a politician
yet whose remark captured the zeitgeist
for the century before,
                                 and the century after,
he made it
                     Thus,
                                the earth
was stabbed,
                     shot,
                              bombed,
                                             burnt,
                                                        etc.
                                                                because
"Industry is always to be preferred to scenic beauty"  :
 
strip mining and mountaintop removal;
 
more miles of logging roads built in National Forests
than there are in the Interstate Highway System
in order to facilitate frenzied tree murder;
                                                              and
a great American tragedy-----
 
 
 
 
 
The burial mounds of modern America
do not have religious significance,
                                                  and
will tell future generations who uncover them
not what was highly esteemed,
                                               but rather
what was easily discarded as disposable----
 


© Michael Ceraolo