Why can’t humans leave things alone?

Lava bed destruction

In this instance, I’m talking about the never-ending building that’s going on here.  We have many houses in the area that are still sitting vacant from the 2004-2006 building boom. These homes have never sold.  Why are they building more residences?  It makes no sense to me, especially when they’re destroying the lava beds to make it happen.

It’s true they take some of the lava rock they blast out to make nice walls around these developments, but it burns me up that they can destroy something that we’ll never get back.  The volcanoes around us are dormant cinder cones now.  These old lava flows are thousands of years old.  They are a beautiful thing to see, the pitch black against the red sand and rocks.

So we’re going from this to this.

Before picture

 After picture

The whole landscape is changing so the developers can make bundles of money by asking exorbitant prices for these new homes.  The natural beauty of the land is slowly disappearing, along with the natural habitat for the quail, jackrabbits, chipmunks and other critters that call this home.  It makes me grateful that we have many parks here where the land is protected from all this destruction.

But I wonder if this will always be the case because the state park, about two miles from us, now has homes along the upper rim.  The homes in this development sell for several million dollars each because they have a nice view of the park below.  This developer is another one who has since gone bankrupt and there are few homes sold in that development and quite a few vacant ones along with vacant lots.

Lava bed destruction

Of course, I’m only one person and I can’t do much about any of this, although I suspect a few people here feel this way.  You can’t stop progress and I wouldn’t want to, but I don’t think humankind should destroy things for the sake of building either.  That’s my two cents.  What do you think about such matters?