I am hoping someone can enlighten me. I read recently in The Columbian about successful efforts to plant trees in Clark County and all the benefits trees provide to people, animals, and other plants. A few days later, on 112th Avenue, I passed what a few weeks ago had been a small apple orchard that helped provide fresh fruit to many for multiple generations. The land also included decades-old tall, healthy evergreen trees that provided all of the benefits outlined in the article about tree planting. That lovely, fruitful, and beneficial land is now scraped bare: no orchard. Just an ugly pile of cut evergreen tree trunks and plowed dirt.
This treatment of our land puzzles me. Productive land with beneficial flora is destroyed so a developer can erect yet another three-story monstrosity of an apartment complex or packed-together townhomes with acres of pavement and a few, tiny trees and bushes planted to fulfill some permit requirement? Am I the only one who finds these scenarios odd at best and disturbing at most? Have we truly reached the “paved paradise and put up a parking lot” era of our civilization?
