Sometimes, it’s our loved ones who are the strongest reminder of why we environmentalists do what we do.

As the eldest of twelve siblings, I have a lot of nieces and nephews. A few weeks ago, a couple of my nieces and a nephew, ranging in age from nine to twelve, joined us on an extended visit to our farm in the Potomac Highlands. The girls hadn’t been out to our place before, so it was a real joy to see their reactions to the open meadows and adjoining forest.

We had a great time, canoeing on the pond and hiking in the woods, collecting unusual rocks down in the creek, and visiting our next door neighbor’s free-ranging cows and turkeys. We went swimming in a nearby river. The children live in the DC suburbs, where there’s not much opportunity anymore for kids to experience the freedom of the rural lifestyle.

It’s a lot different there now than when I was growing up. When I was seven, we lived just ten miles south of the city, on a little one-and-a-half lane rural road where our next door neighbor was a pig farmer. Today, although our old house is still there, the road is a six-lane divided highway, lined with townhouses and subdivisions. To widen that road, they had to cut down a fine old oak tree, in whose comfortable arms I had spent many happy hours daydreaming. It broke my heart on the Easter Sunday morning a few years ago when I came across my old friend, laying there cut up and dismembered on the ground.

When I was twelve, we moved to a little neighborhood within walking distance of the church and school we attended. Although the area was more suburbanized, our backyard was adjacent to several acres of woods, and it was just a short walk up the road to my friend Ralph’s house. Ralph lived next door to his grandparents’ sizeable farm, where our gang (in the innocent sense of the term) would wander around every day after school, and explore the fields and forest and try to stay out of the path of the herd of horses that would occasionally break into a thundering gallop across the meadow, sending us boys diving in panic under the barbed wire fence.

That second house is also still there. But the woods behind it have been replaced by more houses; and the farm up the road is now a big subdivision.

When my partner and I moved into this old farmhouse in West Virginia seven years ago, it took me awhile to realize that the familiar feeling I got walking our dogs around the local countryside was actually a resurrection of those childhood memories. It was kind of a giddy realization at the moment it happened, and I’ll never forget that sudden heartwarming sense of a life circle being completed, like I had finally, after all these years, arrived back home.

It wasn’t long after that moment that I also realized that the development that had trampled all over my childhood memories was following me here. West Virginia now tops the nation in urban sprawl, and this region is one of the fastest growing areas in the country. Hampshire County, where I live, was the third-fastest growing county in the state over the past decade.

Had we been aware of this trend when we were looking for a place in the country to spend the rest of our lives, we probably would have looked farther away from the city. But we were enchanted by the bucolic beauty of the local environment, and thus blinded to the subdivisions hidden away behind the trees. It took a while for our romantic pastoral vision to clear. But now that we’re here, seeing things in all their stark reality, we’re trying to save our little corner of the planet from further degradation.

The problem here stems from the same source as the problems of exploitation in other parts of the state: human greed, and a local political system that has abandoned the Jeffersonian ideal. As I’ve noted before, Thomas Jefferson thought that the primary purpose of government is to "curb the excesses of the monied interests." But we have a government that, at every level, seems intent upon indulging those excesses.

This thought was never far from my mind as I shepherded my nieces and nephew around on their visit to the country. I couldn’t help but wonder, even while basking in their delight at discovering a world of relatively unspoiled nature: will they come back here when they’re my age, only to find their childhood memories also despoiled by rampant, unplanned urbanization?

If you’re open to it, the most wonderful thing about children, especially when they’re your blood relatives, is that you can’t hang around them very long without thinking about the future and the consequences of the present. This is the element at the heart of the sense of parental responsibility. For most people, this usually comes down to simple matters of personal responsibility: securing food and shelter, paying bills, meeting the teacher, going to work every day.

But most people also have at least a residual sense of the larger forces affecting their offspring – which is why, despite a corporate propaganda system designed to distract citizens from the more destructive effects of the consumer economy, solid majorities of Americans nevertheless identify themselves as environmentalists, and agree with us about keeping the air and water clean, and wanting to do something about global climate change. They’re thinking about the future.

I read an article the other day that said most environmentalists the author knew were "deeply pessimistic" about the future. The author considered this view more realistic than the "Pollyanna" vision of the future usually found among the pro-business, Chamber of Commerce types who dominate our political economy (and see themselves, without irony, as the "realists").

I agree with the author’s assessment. Personally, I’m engaged in a daily battle with despair about the fate of the Earth. But thinking about my little nieces and nephews, I know this is a battle I cannot lose. Pessimism may be the appropriate response to the situation as it exists today. But there’s no reason it can’t coexist with hope. Life is nothing if not ambiguous.

And who really knows what the future holds?