Musings: Wrought From Devastation

Smoke from a forest fire to the north tinted the crescent moon an eerie orange last night, turned today's dawn sky into a blazing palette of scarlet, yellow, pumpkin, pink. Though wrought from devastation, the spectacle was no less beautiful.

I was watching the sky as I walked through the narrow, sometimes unpaved, streets of old Santa Fe, the original part of an ancient town that had its roots in agriculture and trade, and now wholeheartedly embraces upscale tourism.

City regulations require building permits and redevelopment proposals (with the dates of the associated decision-making meetings) to be prominently posted in front of each structure, making it easy for neighbors to know what's happening and discouraging unpermitted projects.

The signs, both construction and real estate, tell a story I learned well on Kauai — a story of gentrification, of taking old, low-cost houses and gutting them, expanding them, buffing them out, so that they suit the tastes and requirements of the transient well-heeled.

They will never be affordable again, and the middle class and poor who used to live here have been pushed south, to the edges of town, or completely out of it. I encounter them on my morning walks, driving their pick up trucks and worn cars to the luxurious houses where they perform construction, landscaping, cleaning, yard care, alarm system maintenance for the owners, many of them absentee.

They do not look happy, or content, and neither do the owners. It is an achingly familiar scene, changed only by the high-desert setting.

Sometimes I catch a glimpse, through open gates, of the lavish compounds hidden behind the thick stucco or adobe walls that allow private residences to function as a gated community of one. And I am reminded anew of the great wealth that is spurring this transformation in so many places across the globe. But to what good purpose, what righteous end?

I follow a road that borders an ancient acequia, a communal irrigation ditch that today is running briskly, fed perhaps by a mountain cloudburst. It is all that remains of the robust agriculture that long-ago sustained the inhabitants of this town. Once an essential component of desert agriculture, it now functions more like a water feature, adding quaint charm to a neighborhood of expensive art galleries, shops, homes.

Later, listening to the car radio, I hear a report about economic indicators, mixed messages that suggest the ongoing recovery from the 2008 recession is less-than-robust. An economist opines: “Going forward, the biggest challenge is to sustain the rise in income growth which will drive consumption.”

In truth, our system is based not just on consumption, but over-consumption, a mindset that is inherently unsustainable, and thus destined/doomed eventually to fail. And then what? Agricultural lands that once supported much smaller local populations have been developed, paved over. They cannot be resurrected any more easily than the farmers who once tended them, the rivers that once nourished them.

Through our frenzy of consumption we have made ourselves increasingly vulnerable — communities disrupted and demoralized, agriculture relinquished to the factory farms and corporations that serve up food cheap, irreplaceable resources squandered to supply another quick fix.

I have watched this scenario play out repeatedly in America, and now Asia, India and Africa are adopting the same perverse values, making the same mistakes, sacrificing land, people, ecosystems on the altar of consumerism.

It may be a different flavor there, but it's definitely the same Kool-Aid, with its lure of “ever-more” hiding a reality of bondage — to debt, to the haves, to the market, to wars inevitably waged to feed the greed.

Meanwhile, the fire keeps burning, makes a run to the southeast, fueled by dead wood, brush piles, live trees. When it's finally extinguished by firefighters, or more likely rain, it will have opened the forest for new growth, ushered in a new cycle of life.

Will the same be true for the human race as it rages unchecked, out of control, consuming everything in its path, all the while lulling us into complacency with the beautiful/ugly things wrought from devastation?