Two Buildings and What They Say

In the Cornish countryside, you get used to passing buildings like the one on the left: hundreds of years of love and maintenance and life and laughter and sorrows and warmth have gone into them, and young families and old folks are still delighted to move into them and make good lives.
Today I happened across the building on the right, so much younger and shorter-lived than most buildings around here, and thought about how so many people are chasing transient, ephemeral money, creating so much misery, to build things like that blight on the landscape. So many men and families lived miserable lives to feed that monster (it's a tin processing plant). And yet more people have lived sustainable and happier lives by, say, farming. Using permaculture methods to create a continually better soil, a continually more valuable and beautiful property instead of just plundering it of all its nutrients. Happier, healthier lives were lived in history without tearing up the land and feeding industrial machines. Is the same true of our modern days?
I struggle to understand who the monsters are behind what has happened on the Dakota pipeline sites. I struggle to understand the people who lost their oil jobs to cry and complain that they "can't" do anything else but that industry. Of course they can. Little by little, each person can decide to do a little better, instead of waiting for all the mines and the industry to collapse.
We can each choose 2017 to be the year that we strive to create a gorgeous legacy behind us. We are all part of the system here. We don't need to contribute to the ugliness on the right.
Contribute to the beauty on the left. You have the power to create something good. No matter how small that good thing is, resolve to create beauty this year.
Some suggestions:
    •    Plant a tree.
    •    Choose to move to a more sustainable industry.
    •    Choose to spend more time with your family.
    •    Hook your house up to sustainable energy forms -- solar, wind, or water.
    •    Teach children.
    •    Teach your peers.
    •    Spend time with senior citizens.
    •    Do one random act of kindness per week in 2017 for a stranger.


Let's create a landscape of gorgeous legacies we'd be proud to see if we came back in 2312, not one of black, wasted hulls.