I know that a lot of people are going to be hurt by the crashing housing market and the waves that is creating in the stock market. I feel for them, nor do I mock them. But it occurs to me that there is some small consolation in all this, perhaps something that could be the flintstrike behind a growing moment of new environmental awareness. Lord GreyStock, Abroad notes that housing starts are down 6.1% for July, and the chatter I’m getting says this is likely to continue. Having done a great deal of work in the last two years on home improvement projects, some of my guilt as a consumer is assuaged to know that fewer of us will be buying a lot of environmentally destructive junk at Home Depot and the like.

I’ve got to run off for some Progressive Action today, so I don’t have time to research all the ways in which the big box stores do damage to the environment. But I know they do, from forest-clearing lumber to slave-labor produced widgets to chemicals and poisons that go into our water systems. Sure, it’s fun to keep up with the Joneses, but after a while, even the densest of us are going to have to be shown the real costs to that. I guess many folks in the country will find out the Hard Way.

I hope that, in the spirit of Sarah’s many calls for the rebuilding of communities by grassroots neighboring, that people forced off the teat of endless home “improvement” consumption will rethink the benefits and values they perceive from those habits. It’s all in the way one perceives the property, no? I was looking at a run down little brick house on the way to a friend’s yesterday, and all I could think of was that a coat of paint and a mess of planned gardens would turn it into the most adorable little cottage property. I suspect this is in great contrast with many other people, who would look at the lot as at best an opportunity to bigfoot an “underdeveloped” space.

But that’s all changing today, the money is running out and the party of endless, mindless consumption at low, low prices is coming to its end. I’d listen to advice on ways in which to have this discussion with people who perhaps haven’t thought about property this way before.

Short version: wouldn’t it be nice if people viewed their properties as places to regrow the nature we all depend upon? Instead of places to heap with the dead remains of scorched earth, slave-extraced resources stolen from brown people to enrich our overlords.