Today I took a walk to find a spot to photograph. The prompt for today was landscape and it got me thinking. A few weeks ago I read an article in a national newspaper on how our country slowly is getting built full to the brim. It’s rather ironic actually. We all want to live in a quiet place, surrounded by lots of green. The thing is, all the places that qualify will soon be noisy and fully built, because, well, everybody thinks he needs a house with a bedroom for each child and a substantial garden.
I plead guilty by the way. We live along a rather busy road in a rather quiet village, our house is not big, but it does have a garden with a swimming pool (yeah, we didn’t put it in, but it’s there anyway). Two cars because we need them to go to work. It’s a circle and it’s hard to think out of it. When we bought this house (it’s actually the shed of the neighbor’s house that’s totally renovated as a separate house), we knew that the fields across the street were for sale. They’re still not sold, but one day there will be houses on it. When I took the dog for a walk, I noticed there was a beautiful swampy area totally filled with trucks and drained to make it ‘usable’.
It scared me. Do we really think we can just adapt our environment to our convenience and not pay for it somehow? Were will all that water go? A few heavy rainstorms and many parts of the country are flooded one way or another. That’s not the first time. And it is partly our own fault – filling our world with concrete, the same concrete that we hate if it’s not used for our own purposes.
How are things where you live?
Songs of Home 
That last part especially is so true: concrete is ugly unless we’re using it to build our own houses, then it’s acceptable. It’s a difficult situation though: we all want to preserve some level of greenery around us but aren’t willing to compromise when it comes to building our own dream homes.