Where I grew up in suburban Detroit, they razed the trees, flattened the already flat land, and built subdivisions, and I found it terribly ugly, and couldn't run out of the state fast enough.

I watched them develop Florida in the same way – and responded similarly.

The term "soul-killing," which is a bit ripe for my taste, comes to mind.

Amy, have you seen the commercials they're running on t.v.? "Pure Michigan"? Tim Allen does the voiceover. Sure, it's appealing in the vacation and tourism places (Charlevoix? Mackinac, da U.P., the Dunes?) University towns are surviving but not thriving; Kalamazoo/ Portage is the only region in MI to appear to be pulling out of recession.

Jeff Daniels did some commercials two years ago, touting the state as an excellent place for industry/ companies to invest. LOL! Sure, especially since property (residential, industrial and commercial) values have fallen through the basement.

As the saying goes, it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. I lived there for 18 years.....gah.

Youse guys are anti-development snoots. Hey Amy, you didn't complain when they turned part of the pristine Los Angeles County beach into a paradise of rental properties....

PS- The "paradise" in the preceding comment was just a rhetoric device. You know what I was getting at.

Also, Welch has been hanging out with 'Chelle.

Youse guys are anti-development snoots. Hey Amy, you didn't complain when they turned part of the pristine Los Angeles County beach into a paradise of rental properties....

I was too busy writing my book to go to the beach, or it happened before I got here.

I'm not anti-development, but actually, I'm going to post further on this in the next few days, it's about developing places in a way they are appealing places to live.

Razing all the trees and pancake-flattening land makes for an ugly place to live. Can't we agree on that?

No, we cannot. Your perception of what constitutes razing and flattening is demonstrably self-interested. It's a minor variation of the ol' P.J. O'Rourke line about overpopulation: "Just enough of me, Way too much of you".

I will happily buy you that book if you promise to read it.

I don't know about youse guys, but I got stuck in a Macy's a couple weeks age and they were playing Joni Mitchell singing, over and over again, "They paved over paradise, put up a parking lot." I been in a Chuck Pahluniuk mood ever since, like wanting to put a bullet between the eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its own species.

Sorry for this contribution.

Totally off topic: I went to Greenwich Village last night to Le Poisson Rouge (across the street from Kenny's Castaways) to see Ian Hunter and Graham Parker have a chat with Ben Greenman from the New Yorker. Nice night. Great discussion, they each (Ian and Graham) did a solo acoustic set (well, not Ian, he had accompaniment in the form of Steve on percussion and Andy on guitar) and it was a most awesome evening. New York is still way too built up, but at least it smells better now than it did before the advent of the automobile. I can't imagine where they put all the horseshit that was prevelant back then.

I saw a History Channel on that very topic Flynne!

http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/578.html

Isn't this internet thing great?

> I can't imagine where they put
> all the horseshit

Twenty minutes ago I was dead certain the first reply to this was gonna be a one-liner...

"Wall Street!"

"The Times Building!"

"Elaine's!"

I guess it's the same all over, Amy. I grew up in southern Michigan and last year my sister sent me a photograph of the last red maple on our street.

This from an area where they used to give bus tours in the autumn (which is one of the few things I missed about that area, along with cardinals and fireflies).

I was told many or most farmers had the trees removed from the roadsides so they had that much more land. What really pissed me off was that they apparently just buried the trees instead of using them for lumber. All that maple wasted.

Youse guys are anti-development snoots.

Not anti-development. Anti-poor-quality-short-sighted-development. (snooty might be accurate sometimes). Clear-cutting to build condos or tract homes quickly just never made sense to me; a little more time and effort would have allowed for the preservation of shade trees and other good things that probably would have increased property values in the long run, and certainly would have made living in those places more enjoyable.

Yeah yeah, everybody likes a picnic table in a leafy neighborhood park, but nobody wants to sleep on one. People want to sleep in split-levels with snoots on the front and room for a pool in the back....

'Long-view' development can get silly. Should we not have put the car business in Detroit, since a half-century later the design sensibilities would be coming from Cali, and a generation after that, we'd be coining the term "rust-belt"?

And after a few years, the new developments turn into old developments, and a lot of the trees grow back. At least they do in Virginia and Ohio.

And here in Connecticut, old rpm daddy.

Hey Eric, thanks for the link, that was very interesting!

Not up in central CT they don't. The houses are too close together for that.

As it is, the house I bought is less than 20 feet from neighbors on either side, but there's trees in the back yard that pre-date the house.

The new developments they put up, you've got neighbors that close on three sides, no trees, and no space for them.

Why someone would pay a half-mil for that is beyond me.

One thing shady developers are notorious for around here is that before they start a house, they scrape all of the topsoil off the lot and sell it. Then, when the house is done, they just throw sod directly on top of the remaining red clay. Home buyers who aren't savvy don't realize this, and then they are surprised when their yard and trees all die the following year.

(Oh, and I get a kick out of the cable installers' idea of "buried line": just before the sod is laid down, they come out and just run the cable entrance across the bare ground, and let the sod be laid over it. So the cable winds up "buried" about 2 inches down, just waiting for someone to cut it with a shovel when they decide to landscape.)

"The Good Old days, They Were Terrible" was a fun and interesting, if lightweight, read on the topic of horshit in cities.

Here, having a "well-treed lot" is a major selling point. There are also penalties for cutting down Live Oaks over a certain size. That might just be in the city limits of Austin, though. If a tree has to be removed, it has to be replaced with other comparable trees somewhere on the property.

I love the picture. It makes me think of home. While I've been a resident of the subtropical steambath known as Florida for the last ten years, I'm originally from Vermont.

I find I miss it a lot. I don't think I'll live in Florida after I finish school. Seasonal changes just don't occur here. No autumn foliage, which is probably going on right now.

I remember one morning, I had stepped out of the house, and locked the door behind me, then I turned around and when I looked down the street, the trees on the sides of the road had all gone gold. Truly a moment of transcendental beauty, I felt my breath being drawn right out of me.

Another time, when I was still in grade school, I remember December had been terribly disappointing. We had some snow, but then warm weather was turning it all to mud. I had gone to bed on Christmas Eve anticipating a brown Christmas. Then the next morning, it had snowed with a vengeance during the night and was still going. The streets, the trees, the neighbors' houses we're all covered. Like something out of a picture postcard, or a Norman Rockwell painting. I remember how long that day seemed, but it seemed so perfect. We all got new sleds for Christmas and went to the Country Club try them out. There's a big hill on the seventh hole, and it's near our house. We'd be riding down the hill in our sleds and Sparky, our collie shepherd mix would be running beside us, barking frantically. (Never sure what his hang up was about that. Did he think we were moving too fast and was worried we'd get hurt? Or did he just want to share in our fun? I think the former, since he was never too keen on being held in someone's arms while on the sled.)

...sigh. I think it's time I moved.

Florida does not do Christmas well at all. The residents do up the lights, I'll give them that. Some go all out, and must have the electric bill from Hell come January. But lights in a palm tree, with no snow...it just doesn't do it for me. It just looks silly to me.

Santa Claus in the red suit on a snowless lawn? If Santa Claus came to Florida, he'd be wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals and a Hawaiian print shirt. (Santa has NOOOOO fashion sense. He'd probably wear socks with the sandals. Totally gauche. You know why he has a red suit, right? He's a guy. Everything goes in the same washload.)

Patrick, I'll try to send you flannel PJ's, a stack of your favorite movies, hot chocolate with schnapps, and a snow day in about 6-8 weeks.

Juliana, that's so sweet!

I seem to like cooler weather. Not the sub-zero temperatures that hit during January nights in New England which should be reserved only for the polar caps, but a cool autumn day always seems to energize me.

And apparently, my feelings are usual. When I was in the army we had one of those days that was "my kind of weather," and a female soldier, a friend of mine named Sandy, was complaining about the cold.

"Oh, come now," I said. "It's invigorating!"

"Invigorating, my ass!" she snapped.

I gave her a quizzical look. "Sandra, if you find that this weather is truly invigorating your ass, then all I can say is, 'More power to it!'"

Despite her chilly reception of the chilly weather, she giggled.