All The Leaves Are Brown (Mickey Z.)

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Mickey Z. -- World News Trust

Nov. 7, 2006 -- Each fall, even the most nature-oblivious humans can't help but notice -- and likely marvel -- as the leaves turn. Here in New York City, many folks will go as far as driving up north to New England solely to witness the spectacular shades of ginger, auburn, gold, and crimson. This annual phase of nature presages both the colder weather and the shopping day countdown that lurk in our not-so-distant future.

Speaking of rampant holiday season consumerism, as you try to remember where you parked your SUV in that crowded shopping mall parking lot, gaze upward. Take a good long look at the leaves that have changed color and are now breaking from the trees and wafting slowly downward to finish their life's mission... on the friggin' pavement. Imagine the shock those nutrient laden leaves experience when they land not on sodden, inviting soil but instead on the unforgiving, oil stained asphalt we all know and loathe.

More than two million acres of parks, farms, and open space are destroyed each year in the name of a little something called sprawl. During the twentieth century, an area equal to all the arable land in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania was paved in the United States. This swath of terra firma requires maintenance costing over $200 million a day and the surreptitious cost of our car culture totals nearly $500 billion a year in the United States alone (much of that going to the sustentation of waging perpetual war to keep the world safe for petroleum).

Besides the global warming, greenhouse effect, unchecked militarism, and other sinister side effects of a society beholden to the internal combustion engine, all that concrete severely impinges upon those multi-hued falling leaves-which are, by design, supposed to be introduced to microorganisms in the soil where they should theoretically land. Since we humans have seen fit to pave the planet, the rhythms of the natural world are habitually and imprudently ignored.

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