A draft of a personal story for Games We Play which will be a sidebar for an illustration titled “Why? Eaarth/the Anthropocene. The mess we have made and are in.”:
It Was Far from Being Perfect. But What Happened
to My Wonderful Home Just East of Devine, Texas?? #
The Warm & Fuzzy Feel* and Sustainability of Nature and the Land …
Has Yielded to the Rampant & Cold** Artificialization of Asphalt,
Concrete, and the Built-Environment (and “Yes!”, even Walmart!)
(*But also, with plenty of heat, drought, and stickers, goatheads & thorns!!
**“Cold” Even if It Is Giving Us Global Warming!)
paul bain martin
In my formative years just outside the city limits of Devine in the 1950s & 60s, my Alton and Louise Martin-family owned less than five acres there (on which at any point in that general time period we were raising hogs, a milk cow and calf, and chickens and maybe a few guineas, and were tending to a large garden area). However, we never felt restricted to these five acres.
From an age of about five or six years my five siblings and I had the freedom to roam, hunt, run and swim (in my uncle’s reservoir) on over one hundred acres of native pasture (under secondary succession) immediately around us, tracts of which belonged to our Uncle Peggy Martin, Mr. Pete Gutierrez, Mr. Fritz Schroeter, and Mr. Fred Bowman. … From our common ages of 6-8 years, in those pastures Esteban and Alejandro Peña taught me uses of wild plants and Spanish names for wild animals. Their Dad gave us gallons of honey which the busy social critters from the Old World had made from the abundant horsemint growing on Mr. Gutierrez’s and Mr. Bowman’s land.
We truly loved that Land … and holistically learned and dreamed on it. Moreover, it was an environment in which to positively deal with: our challenges of family, school, and the local human population; melancholy; or the craziness of a very crowded non-airconditioned household (two bedrooms, a very small bathroom, and eight people).
A kid of 2020 being raised in that same locale wouldn’t be able to realize the freedom and good life we were provided. What happened?
- Neo-liberal capitalism, fast-paced commerce and development, and Eagle Ford Shale fossil energy activity has changed the area from savanna pasture and small farming/relatively low-input agriculture to Interstate 35; big air-conditioned pick-up trucks, semis, and other automobiles laden with electronic devices; businesses; air-conditioned housing with virtual realities from electronic devices; fossil-energy-produced foodstuffs which are mostly brought-in-from-afar … and lots of it!; and considerable built-environment of asphalt, concrete, and imported materials that comprise artificial structures there in Devine.
……………………………..
However, thorough explanations for “truths”/realities are not easy, are always complex, and must always involve a sort of chicken and egg cycle. And it was largely changing mindsets and behaviors in conjunction with dramatic landscape deterioration towards the artificial and more built-environment which happened to my home in Devine, mostly in the first seventy years of the twentieth century and especially immediately after World War II:
- Dads and Moms are both working to have more, More, More!, More!!, MORE!!! and they oftentimes leave their kids to the care of others in settings not as conducive to real freedom for these youth.
- Play, recreation, and learning has increasingly become a plastic indoor world of Legos and other toys, and virtual realities of televisions, computers, and small handheld electronic information gadgets which focus on the artificial and virtual rather than the natural and real.
- Many parents have become “helicopters”.
- We are all very artificial and unnatural, and we are distant from each other in our local ecological communities. We have lost a sense of place, ecological community, and natural spirituality. Families, neighbors and local human demes or populations have lost intra- and inter-connectiveness and commonalities, and don’t have empathy and compassion for and don’t know, respect, trust, and truly love each other.
……………………………..
Kids are not as able to be free, become little ecologists, and develop critical thinking skills anymore! … But who really cares about our progeny and Nature when we have air-conditioning, Triple-C steaks, lots of wonderful plastic and new technology, … and Walmart!?!
7Ss / VV->^^
pbm
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# Of course there are more stories like this in my 74+ year-old head which lived through a time on Eaarth of much artificialization. For instance the anticipated joy of returning late one night with a student and camping in Oasis State Park, Portales, New Mexico in the middle of a high plains/shortgrass prairie ecoregion thirty years after my wife and I had visited what was a relatively pristine area, turned to disappointment the next morning as we woke to the smell and landscape of the large Holstein Friesian-dairies which had fled regulation in California and which had settled around this lovely site. And my wife’s grandfather’s Hoffmann Ranch, west of San Antonio where several of the Texas ecoregions come together and where my wife enjoyed her early years of growth, is now covered with houses of the Alamo Ranch subdivision.
