We Couldn't Have Colonized This Country in a Worse Way

We could have colonized this country—and this part of it—way, way better than we did. In fact I can’t imagine any way we could have done it worse in so short a time.

And even now we are busily repeating and even magnifying our worst mistakes, etching them on the landscape in streets and property lines in such a fixed way that it will take either long, long millennia or a great, great, biblical-scale upheaval to clean the slate enough to allow us to put a more organic, sensible, sensitive kind of picture on it.

The only certainty is that things will continue to change as they always have, whether faster or slower, for better or worse, and as long as the dubious likes of us are to have a part in it, it would be to our credit to do our best to make sure the trends we have foolishly set in motion get reversed and set right before we have made such a monstrous hash of the whole business—and such a hell out of the heaven we were handed—that it will take millions, not thousands, of years for Ma Nature to put back in decent order.