Everyone is moving to the city.  The city is growing.  As the cities grow the surrounding rural communities shrink.  these rural communities are the area that feed the cities.  So larger cities equals smaller rural areas and less farms.  the farms that do survive are now having to feed more and more people with less land and other (water) resources.  Same is true for forested areas.  once you plant a building its hard to grow a tree.  when we do plant a tree in an urban area we really need to look at the types we are planting.  Why can we not plant some type of fruit or nut bearing trees in some of these beautification areas.  Most fruit trees have beautiful blooms in the spring and colorful leaves in the fall.  Plus we can also get some food from the trees.  no these beautification areas want feed everyone, but if it does produce a single fruit.  it will make someone happy.  like the story of the kid throwing the starfish back in the ocean after high tide.  young man told boy that throwing the starfish back don't make a difference.  Boy throws another starfish into the ocean and tell older man that it mattered to that one.

We tend to think that waste "goes away" after we discard it but of course that isn't true. Every week I'm proud that there is a lot more in our recycling rolling bin than our landfill rolling bin, but we still have work to do. We need to buy less in the first place. I've helped a lot of family members "downsize" recently and dealing with all that "stuff" makes me hesitant to buy anything else for my house unless we absolutely need it. I'm going to try harder to give "experiences" versus "things" this upcoming holiday season.