As Santa Cruz develops, almost completely unregulated, I've seen its green bamboo beauty turned to dust. One misty morning, standing at my kitchen window, my eyes clouded as I saw the forest on the hill in front of me being torn down. The sound of trees cracking as they fall is surely identical to a heart breaking. Besides their whispering with the wind, that crashing cry is the only and last sound those giants make. My joints hurt as I heard them splinter.
I thought of the birds who spent many days and nights in those trees, and who were watching their habitat fall to its knees. Above the tractor, I couldn't hear their songs or their alarmed calls to each other, but if I felt helpless in the face of such harm, surely so did they.
I have power, though. I could help build the movement to regulate development so that we learn better co-existence with the ecosystems around us. I could pursue changed processes and rules, and increase public commitment to different possibilities. Some trees will fall, but many could be saved even while we erect our own barren forests of asphalt and concrete.
It's a matter of choosing to challenge an unnecessary injustice to other species who have just as much claim as we do, and to do so right to the very end, sacrificing whatever is necessary as an act true, deep care. It's a matter of vision. Not only what I felt as I watched those trees die, not only what alternative I could imagine, but what I pictured as my own responsibility for our image of development.
In Mon Desir a few hours later, a kindly man whose home is facing the same fate as the trees gave me a neem sapling from his garden. If the Government has its way, that little sprout, now given soil in Santa Cruz, will become a living memory of a habitat soon completely erased.
Those tiny leaves made me reflect on how many days and nights it took to build a house, wait to reap from a plum tree, bury a baby's navel string, cultivate a garden, grow children in the backyard, and give meaning to a landscape through generations of love. What will be lost when there is nothing but a highway extension, and what is our role in making development responsible to the souls and spaces it will irrevocably change?
Just as abundant wildlife are facing oncoming tractors, so too are families in Mon Desir. They are connected. For example, when mountains are quarried to build a roadway for future tar sand mining, both ecosystems and communities will be razed, leaving me feeling I should be doing more even after a long, long day.
Those families in Mon Desir have a right to due process, to promises kept, to transparency and truth. That highway extension is taking down whole communities, too few of us hearing their calls of alarm, too few defending yet another site from being leveled by the same governance issues: gaps in public planning, institutional lethargy, too few necessary state protections, and too little mix of development, community and sustainability. As I left Mon Desir's spirit of resistance, I wondered how to protect those lives nested in Santa Cruz's trees before me.
A neem plant, from a Mon Desir backyard threatened with extinction, will survive in Santa Cruz while the tree cover of Santa Cruz, similarly threatened, will slowly be clear-cut and paved? There is a vision and responsibility to wield more powerfully for such beloved homes to be defended and saved.