Image via Wikipedia

A few years ago bulldozers came and ripped up the fields and woods around my land.  They chased away the turkeys that nested in the brush at the border of my property and left a mother wren hopping through the remains of a crushed tree looking for her nestlings.

They killed or drove off my wild neighbors, and replaced them with some rather large houses built on very small lots and pointed a drainage pipe towards my pond so it could catch the oily runoff from the development’s streets.  Many of my new neighbors tell me they paid extra for a lot bordering my woods.  They were willing to pay this because they were nature lovers.

I saw two articles a while ago that made me start thinking about that again.  The first one reported in paniced terms that a growth lag could cost Missouri a house seat.

It’s not that Missouri isn’t growing in population.  Its just that we’re not adding new people as fast as other states.  According to the article, “It’s possible that a burst of population growth could save Missouri’s ninth seat…Missouri could keep its seat if it grew by 50,000 to 100,000 people more than expected…That’s a lot of people but it’s not undoable.”

The second article was in an insert called The Lee’s Summit Southland Neighborhood News.  It was a feature entitled “Catching the Next Growth Boom – Peculiar’s City Administrator Oversaw Wyandotte’s Wave”.  The article gushes “Not many years ago cows and corn covered what is now crowded parking lots in what is now bustling Wyandotte County…Peculiar could be in for its own economic boom.”

I don’t know Peculiar or anybody in it but somewhere at the edge of that little city there lives someone who realizes that economic devolopment and quality of life aren’t always interlocked.  He wishes all of  the crowded parking lots and bulldozers and urban sprawl would pass him by and leave him in solitude with his fields and wildlife.

I understand.  I really miss those turkeys.

Image via Wikipedia