One thought on the concept of suburbanizing the countryside: Land developers should be held accountable to preserve trees that don't in any way interfere with the construction of their subdivisions. In just about any major town, you can drive to the outskirts and see where bulldozers have flattened several acres of woodlands into one brownish-orange tract of land, just to put in a few dozen cookie-cutter-design houses. After they build them, they put in some grass and plant a single tree in each front yard. They could easily save half of the natural landscape AND build their houses, IF they chose to. But I guess that would require 5% more effort on their part, and time is money, right?