A tour of Europe and the future of the U.S.A.

Sometimes out of curiosity I like to go into the street view of Google Maps and then “drive” around. Basically follow a street and look around at the scenery along a route.

Yesterday I was looking at a village in Sicily. The village was very pretty. I like the way it was laid out – all the houses together, here and there little shops and storefronts on the lower level beneath the residences. Patches of green here and there.

Then, as you get outside the village and the road winds up a hill, you see more what appear to be farms with olive trees, grapevines, etc. In the distance you see the rolling hills which distinctly remind me of somewhere like Napa.

But to me, when I look out at that scenery, there’s something really wrong. Where are the trees? Where are the forests? As far as the eye can see its the same thing over and over. Residence after residence. Farm after farm. There are no forests. Only isolated trees here and there.

When I was in Ireland I witnessed the same thing and I had the same sad feeling. For a person who grew up in the Eastern Woodlands part of North America, surrounded by forest, seeing places in the world where there are no forests where presumably they should be is just sad.

When you consider that Ireland and especially Sicily have been inhabited for millennia, that humans have been living there, reproducing, spreading, chopping down trees for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, eventually it adds up and you get a place like that.

And that is exactly where the United States is headed. With the rushing in of tens of millions of people over the past couple decades, the United States is headed on an eco-rapacious path of destruction that is heartbreaking and that everyone who cares about Earth should be angry about.

That the detestable public officials creating this horrible invasion of the United States have the gall to claim it is out of humanitarian concern is an outrage. Raping Earth in the name of humanitarianism. Yeah. OK.