God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Genesis 1:31

Sometimes, especially in the big-picture world of ideological give and take, it’s easy to get caught up in heady ideas and forget the lives of real people on ground level. So we get lost in wide themes such as green politics, environmental justice, climate change, corporate greed, global warming, developers who clear-cut, and corruption in local government.

Meanwhile, good folk like our friends the Cobbs, who have poured more than three decades of love and landscaping and cultivation and imagination and resources and hard work into their gorgeous North Raleigh garden, are about to see much of it destroyed because of – well – all of the above.

A drainage easement runs through their property. And, over the years, the drain has proved increasingly inadequate to handle the runoff. Businesses, and churches, and developers, and even homeowners continue to circumnavigate best practices such as drainage ponds and ground-cover and porous surfaces and saving trees and – most of all – common sense.

So now the city is coming in and, in order to access the overwhelmed drainage easement and prevent street flooding, they are literally destroying our friends’ beautiful gardens by plowing through the shrubs and flowerbeds, removing gorgeous trees, traversing and parking and maneuvering their heavy equipment on a “temporary easement” all the way to the garage on the north side of the house, and – essentially – creating a desolation.

So our friends invited us to come over and rescue some of the beautiful plants that may have a chance over at Maul-Hall.

So avoidable!

My point here is that so much trouble and pain is avoidable if we simply do the right thing to begin with. Not just the politics and the public policy, but the implementation of common sense by developers who ride roughshod to save themselves a little money on the front end… but at great expense to any number of people on the other.

I’m going to try and get back and take a few pictures of the carnage once the heavy equipment moves in. Again, most of the environmental trouble we find ourselves in is avoidable. It always has been and it always will be.

I know I am taking a Bible verse out of context, but I like this as a response from God when we make a mess of this beautiful world: “The Lord is slow to anger but great in power; the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished” (Nahum 1:3).

Regardless, let’s all strive to be better stewards of all we have been given – DEREK