Some mornings I sit on a bench in front of the local coffee roastery and watch the world drive by. I often try and picture and feel what this spot looked and was like in the recent past, say 175 years ago, when it was likely a grassy creekside area, as it was for thousands and thousands of years before that. The land is still here, underneath our madness. The landscape of our world is almost unrecognizable today, from even 50 years ago.

This change both worries and scares me.

Today at 8:20 a.m., as on most school mornings, it is a tangled mass of all of us being propelled by our needlessly overlarge and environmentally deadly masses of metal and plastic. Some of us have smaller, more reasonable beasts, but they are all excessive in terms of actual resources per person and the dead environments which created and keeps them rolling. Most of us look like we would really rather be doing something else, and almost no one is really present where they are.

What an interesting system of "ownership" has created all this: my land, my house, my money, my car, etc, and it is all built upon the bounty of NATURE. Hmm, and my, my, my. We then exclude others as less than, those who do not "own."

Do we really own the earth? Does anything have any value or rights, beyond what humans devise, or is it possible that all life and all environments have their own right to exist, unmolested? We appear to be pretty terrible stewards.

We rarely slow down or stop, as we rush along, out the door, on the phone. We have tons of time saving devices, and no time. Our children seem to get driven everywhere, as well as having their time plotted out by homework, activities, and the rest of the world seems to be about money, money, and more money.

We appear to be all about consuming here folks. I wonder, are we giving anything back?

That is worth repeating a few times, and thinking about, a lot. Are we giving anything back?

Do we really need to drive everywhere? Do we really need to buy more badly made, all the same, lifeless junk, from China or other "elsewheres," stuff, which goes almost straight to landfill?

All of our money, and all of our entitlements to consume, to drive, to fly everywhere for all of our ever important events...

When did conservation go out of style, and how do we rebuild and repair our natural environments? My head spins at the amount of waste we create. Almost any corner seems to have piles of free "stuff" sitting out for the taking. We have a material glut.

What an interesting world we gots here folks.

Lets take care of it, and each other? And what ARE we giving back?

Time for a drive.

Gotta fly.