Food, water, and cover are what Mother Nature provides for all living things. There are three tangible necessities that any living creature must have to pass the secrets of its life to the next generation. Each has a chance they might become a meal for some other critter with the same needs of water to drink, food to eat, and a safe place to sleep at night. But humans have one more hurdle to clear. Only humans can save enough of our planet Earth’s remaining natural resources to maintain a sustaining way of life. First, we need to levy a deposit on a good share of our household furnishings like stoves and refrigerators that are left quite frequently alongside our country road, mostly mattresses. I suggest that a hundred dollars per item bought would be a good incentive to start with so if the owner insists on still leaving his old refrigerator by the roadside the deposit fee is big enough for someone else to take it to the dump and collect the one hundred dollar fee. I guess what I’m saying is that whatever you buy you must also pay a return fee that is big enough to entice somebody to pick up your garbage and return it for the fee. I know that what I’m proposing will be a big pain in the neck, to have to pay for our obsessive need for convenience to include a monetary amount to make sure disposing of our garbage with no penalties is no longer legal. So we have to figure out new and different ways to manage our junk before we all collectively drown in it. 

           I don’t think there is one square foot of dry land that man has not put his foot on, from lightly trodden, all the way to desecrated. The question becomes how much more can we change the job description of a square foot of land before Mother Nature says I quit? 

        Thank goodness there are starting to be more people in government and more land trusts being formed to protect land from being further subdivided by using a legal system called conservation easements. This is a program whereby a land owner can sell the subdivision value to a legally established land trust or government entity that will fund the buying of the development rights so that the property can no longer be divided into smaller pieces but must remain as one parcel in perpetuity. This still allows the whole property to be sold with a deed restriction that disallows any subdivision. We have had a conservation easement on our V6 Ranch since 2001 and are very pleased with our easement and the holder, The California Rangeland Trust. Zee and I by placing the easement on the property have also removed a possible family fight over the division of the ranch when we pass. I’ll close with some food for thought. There are no easy answers as to how we care for our home we call Earth but to sweep its problems under the rug with no recognition that there are any will be done at great peril to all life. 

                        See Ya, 

                         Jack