"Where are our priorities? Stroh and Mumford also point to what I feel is a fatal misdirection in our society: the unbending rush toward ‘progress.’ " I really get riled up about the type of transformation depicted here. Our society is structured economically so that the towering skyscrapers are most often seen as more valuable than the forest below. I think that we should stop and take a deep breath and concentrate on what it is we are doing, as Beck, Hanh (and, interestingly, the text of the previous Mont Blanc ad) suggest. If we did so, wouldn't we rather stop cutting down forests to pave the way for skyscrapers, as Stroh alludes to? The whole picture is much more complicated of course, and it is not possible for all of us to live and work in the forest, but I point here to the need to include the forests in any definition of where we want to go with our society. Stroh makes the buildings seem very alien, while the trees seem rooted, stable and pleasant. This is partly artifice, but in many ways, our culture (and by this I chiefly mean the US, though the criticism is applicable to other countries) is not rooted in the land enough. We need to recognize that our human economy is part of, as Wendell Berry puts it, the Great Economy, or ‘the biosphere’."

–Josh Knox