Enjoying, not Destroying

*except for food

Over the weekend our family went to Pine Creek to "the cabin."

It's a little old hunting lodge that my Grandpa and a bunch of his buddies bought back in the 30s. Going to the cabin feels a bit like a pilgrimage. After all, my family has been converging on the spot for almost 100 years.

When they started, Pine Creek was a lumbered out mountainous backwater with trains still steaming up the canyon and small communities of year round residents. Land was cheap.

Over the years it became a fairly mature forest with a tiny year-round population, summer vacationers driving the economy. The trains stopped and narrow roads were the only way to access the place.

Then came the introduction of the rail trail, and a sudden huge influx of vacationers.

Pine Creek is gorgeous, so of course everyone wanted to buy or rent a cabin. Land prices skyrocketed.

Once people bought a cabin, they often proceeded to "clean it up."

One cabin just up the bike trail from ours is probably an AirBNB. The entire five acres is mowed short. The bike trail berm is sprayed with Round Up.

It looks like a suburban backyard around any major city. Oh wait, there is a mountain in the backyard, looking like a boring oversized landscape painting in some boring oversized living room.

The character of Pine Creek is changing, from "wilderness" to "sanitized suburbia." Which is the very place people want to get away from on vacation.

It's odd, isn't it?

Sometimes in pursuing a goal, our actions actually destroy the very thing we are after.

I once read the shocking statement that the healthcare industry is now responsible for more dioxin (a potent cancer causing chemical) than the paper industry (the former dioxin heavyweight) due to all the plastic and paper used for personal protective equipment.

I thought about that for a long time. Here is an industry dedicated to human health and flourishing, but the means of pursuing it are creating toxins which makes human health and flourishing less possible.

It reminded me of agriculture which is all about providing food so people can flourish. And yet depending on how you do it, agriculture can destroy the environment needed to grow food, making it harder to provide food in the future and harder for people to flourish.

It's really ironic.

I don't know entirely the answer to these things.

I think it has something to do with paying attention to the big picture. Getting clear about our goals, our true values, and not destroying the means of attaining them, no matter how easy and common it is to do so.

Loving our neighbors in time (those who come after us) as ourselves and leaving them the means to provide for themselves.

Enjoying something without destroying it.

Well, except for food. You kind of have to destroy food to enjoy it.

But you don't have to destroy the means to grow food. With careful management growing food can leave the land more fertile, the water more clear, and the microbes and fungi more abundant than it was before we grew food.

It's a good goal to strive for.