Recent misunderstandings have helped breed a new insight. I've been reluctant to post on the subject as I've looked for ways to write about it that do not remain focused within the drama that incited them. Driving down what passes for the loveliest lane in the area the other day brought to mind the way even the most bucolic road, perhaps especially the most bucolic roads, hold within them implicit the violence all roads do to the world. It does not take a trail of corporate generated trash, beer cans and fast food wrappers; or the recurring punctuation of dead animals flattened as they attempt to traverse this scar on their whole world. The violence is there in the fact of the road. It has torn the land and created barriers and fragments where there had once been interconnection and the fabric of the tapestry of life before such an unraveling. These ribbons of toxic waste, a perverse synchronicity in which the residue of refining motor fuels provides the matrix for spreading their use while hiding in plain sight what would otherwise be recognized as the most potent of poisons…. They never stay bucolic, do they. They attract "development." This is their "reason for being," their "ROI." They are one of the spearheads of the process of ecocide.