deathmtn

The Score:

Her grandparents were these gorgeously weird people, with their own peculiar and rambling sense of humor. And they built their sense of humor into their house. There were secret doors, hidden rooms. I remember, after we'd spent a full day camped out in their guest room, my spouse opened up one of the closet doors to reveal a secret entrance to a tunnel, which led to a hidden craft room.

Her grandparents had also carefully and lovingly built, in their modest suburban backyard, this extraordinarily dense garden. They'd spent years tuning the mix of trees and shrubs and vegetable beds into ecological harmony, where all the plants worked together. Tall trees would shade short bushes; short bushes would keep down ero-sion; one plant would take nitrogen from the soil and another would put nitrogen back in. Their garden yielded a shocking amount of delicious food from that little space. The term for this kind of thing, among a certain sect of hardcore gardeners, is a "food forest" - a concentrated and interconnected web of highly diverse plants, supporting each other like a natural ecosystem.

When her grandparents died, I went with my spouse to clean that house and pack up a few mementos that she wanted to keep. And then, because nobody in the family still lived in San Diego, they decided to sell it to some house flippers.

The flippers took the house apart. They removed all the weird old stuff. They took out her grandfather's handmade bookcases and replaced them with Ikea furniture. They removed all the secret doors and hidden tunnels. And they leveled the food forest, cutting down all the trees and shrubs and networks of vegetables, and replaced it with concrete and an ordinary grass lawn.

Absolutely brutal.

You might think there's an easy, neutral way to compare the values of things: Just put them on the market and see what price they bring. But that method is not neutral. It tends to prefer things with highly accessible value. And when we use that method intensively, we'll start to see the world only in terms of those easy values.