Deconstructing The World Our Grandparents Created.

Yesterday I helped my mom dismantle a small wooden planter that was dry-rotting next to the side entrance to my grandparents' old house. While removing the dirt and striking the old wood apart, we commented on how the planter's construction was clearly improvised: nails in every which direction, boards on the bottom keeping the dirt raised off the concrete, plastic sheeting to do only God knows what.

It seemed an apt metaphor for the predicament my generation is in. While farmers worldwide have spent decades de-rocking their soil to grow food, building walls out of the small pebbles they extract from their tillage, our civilization, in its wisdom, cuts rubble out of mountains and litters our front yards with them, in the name of aesthetics and "low maintenance gardening."

Our world has not been intelligently designed - at least not the human component of it. It's about time we started to do so.