Certain resources can be exploited without lessening their quantity. The idea is to mine with your eyes, to reap with your nondisruptive presence. What might one of these resources be? The forest comes to mind. No matter the number of times one stands at the edge of a neatly groomed crop field, stealing glimpses through the green veil, those wild woods will remain undisturbed, the mystery of what they conceal tempting a sylvan walk.

The first urban designer to dedicate space for trees and parks must have recognized how powerful the combination of eye-mining with the majesty of chlorophyll-doped species. And yet, for all its promise of great reward, one might wish that this potent pairing had been better camouflaged, so as to evade discovery and thereby postpone the day when began a ceaseless assault on one half of its two-piece construction. When a forest is considered a hindrance to a highway, we can be sure that to describe ourselves as members of the animal kingdom is a generous characterization we don’t deserve. Even the beaver, an epitome of proactive environmental modification, would pause halfway through a gnawed and teetering trunk to regard, perplexed, the scale of deforestation.

The prophetic city planners of yore discovered that leaving untouched for the enjoyment of all a privileged few of the very plants that elsewhere were being extirpated went far towards making palatable the razing of hectares.

Is it so outlandish to accuse the trees themselves of being partly responsible for their destruction at the hands of humans? Adaptive to a fault, they can be plucked and replanted in new soil, artificially spaced and lined up in a linear fashion that agrees with the straight lines of the cityscape. So magnificent are trees that a metropolis of millions requires only several parks scattered throughout in order to engender in urban observers a satisfying sense of connecting with transplanted nature.