scarring the earth

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I remember as a child being angry at jet planes flying high up drawing their ugly random white lines on an otherwise blue cloudless sky. The memory came to me recently after I read a comic by Kyle Baker about a species of earth people that looked like globes with arms and legs. Another character wanted to use them as a marketing ploy to advertise ecological concerns, and the earth person threw a candy wrapper on the ground. The marketer gasped, saying, "That's pollution!" and the earth being said "So is concrete." I imagined California as it used to be, with small communities that build settlements out of wood and straw (I think the Spaniards introduced the use of mud and brick) What a place this must of been a few centuries ago! Of course it would have taken a while to go from place to place, but that was no priority at that time. Now entire valleys are lined with freeways and roads, partitioned in rectangular areas for various crops or municipal zones for residential, commercial, or industrial use with itty bitty zones for parks which are also meticulously pathed and landscaped with no regard as to how the land was before we invaded. Thank goodness for our national parks that at least save a little of that resemblence, although they have paths and roads cut into them. But as long as one stays on those paths the areas between them are not trampled by the thousands of visitors each year. Of course we can never go back with our existing numbers and lack of hunting skills (and game, of course) The land is forever changed by the first settlers and everyone else who came after them.