The other night I was driving home from work.

Jim ’N Nick’s is usually slow on weekdays, especially now that the novelty has worn off. It isn’t new to Clarksville anymore. Normally, on a drive like this, I’d have my music turned all the way up—my way of unwinding after a long night of assembling plate after plate of food. The noise of the kitchen would still be ringing in my ears. When I finally stepped outside and sank into the comfort of my car, being able to hear a sound I chose felt like relief.

Yet the other night, I kept the volume low. Not silent—I wouldn’t dare drive without at least a soft, lyrical hum. I think if I were to do such a thing, I’d go insane. My thoughts that night were capturing my attention far more than usual, though, so I figured I might as well let them continue to do so.

I pass four or five different gas stations on my drive home. I drive through a residential area, two bustling commercial areas, and, unforgettably and frustratingly, the interstate. Normally, I think nothing of it, but that night, it filled me with a deep sense of sadness.

North America has one of the most diverse landscapes and climates in the entire world. Perhaps, unobstructed, the most beautiful too. This region—Middle Tennessee—was once a land of unbroken deciduous forests speckled with cedar glades and open prairies. Now, it is just… roads. Seas of asphalt pavement suffocating the life once below it. Death disguised as “progress,” ripping forests in half, then into fourths, eighths, sixteenths—smaller and smaller—until it can hardly be called a median, let alone a forest. Eventually, it is a lone tree, and then a stump, and then another road. Another road taking and taking, but giving nothing back. Stealing space that once belonged to trees and native flowers and wildlife, until nothing else fits there anymore.

We have built a country that mostly exists to move cars through it. It never had to be this way.

Trains were never perfect. They weren’t quite as mobile or luxurious as cars. Commuting would have taken longer. But the trains were gentler. Kinder. Smaller. They allowed us to follow paths that already existed instead of carving new ones and decimating everything in our way. A train can cut through land without shattering it beyond recognition. Trains would have left room for forests, for fields, for streams to flow as they always had. They would have centered culture on community over isolation, sustainability over convenience, connection over consumption. Trains could have been the arteries of a society that actually cared.

Instead, we chose cars. A system that cannot exist without constantly demanding more: more land, more lanes, more parking, more pavement. Animals are displaced. Streams are dammed or drained. Soils are poisoned. The land itself is exhausted, asked to give more than it ever could.

I pondered this on my drive home, feeling disgusted with my own participation in the system. I was driving a car, after all, on a road. I realized then, too, that I was born into this lifeless society. I had no alternative. The system we rely on is likely irreversible.

America will die like this. Exhausted. The land driven to its knees, squeezed of every last drop of what we, for some odd reason, thought was infinite. This is a country paved until it cannot breathe. It will suffocate. Humanity itself will not outlast the land that sustains it. When the water flows an unrecognizable color and reeks of poison, when the soil fails to sustain our genetically altered crops, when the air grows too polluted to safely inhale, no amount of convenience will save us.

The forests that once hummed with life are gone. The fields that fed your mother’s favorite bird are gone. Why do you think they flock to her backyard? Do you think the cardinals want to rely on her birdfeeder, surrounded by the relentless scream of construction? The deer that once frolicked in the forest now called “Madison Street” are forced to roam an alien landscape. Perhaps a fawn watches as his mother is mangled beyond recognition by our monstrous steel machinery pummeling through her in some sicker, realer version of Disney’s Bambi. Bunny rabbits have nothing to feed on but asphalt and concrete. Salamanders that once shimmered under cool logs and danced through creeks are forced to retreat or die. Snakes that once safely slithered through fields flee to homes and backyards, where they are brutally killed, their heads cut off with shovels and their bodies tossed to the wind as if they never mattered.

If you drive intentionally enough, you can almost imagine what it looked like. You can imagine the swaying grass and leaves, the singing creeks, the deer, the rabbits, the salamanders, the snakes. But then your eyes meet the road again, and it all fades away. The absence of life is deafening once you notice it.

We failed the Earth that God entrusted to us. We were meant to tend the land, to steward it for generations to come. We took a perfect creation and ushered in a world that eats itself. Greed, gain, profit, convenience, and ownership govern our society. We worship asphalt. We pray to money. We make unwilling disciples out of the disadvantaged. Every mile of concrete, every parking lot, every strip mall is a monument to what we have failed to protect.

And nobody cares.

The people in charge drive through the same dying scenes and choose to do nothing to save them.

I got home from my drive. I turned off the engine and sat there, the car still warm beneath me, the world outside unchanged. The roads were still there. The concrete still stretched on. Nothing I had thought had altered a single thing.

I wanted, briefly, to believe there was something I could do—that effort alone might absolve me, that care might be enough. But the truth is harsher. Individual concern does not undo collective destruction. Caring quietly does not resurrect forests. Wanting better does not dismantle highways.

So I, like many other tortured minds, will try. I will try to bring back a little bit of life. I will try to leave behind some evidence that says:

“Hey, I was here. I cared. I promise I cared.”

And that evidence, I hope, by the grace of God, will blossom into something real, alive, and restorative. But if enough people do not care—truly care—then none of this will matter. A handful of voices cannot outshout a civilization built on extraction and indifference. Nature will not wait for us to grow compassionate. It will simply collapse under the weight of our decisions.

There will be no reckoning. No apology. No moment where we realize we went too far and turn back. There will be nobody left to witness it, and nothing left to remember it by.

We built this society knowing exactly what it would cost. We drive through its ruins every day. And we keep going.

Whatever comes next is deserved.