Ken:

You are correct.

However, the fault lies with badly designed laws that encourage people
to do stupid things when developing land.  The fault lies in stupid
choices that are made about where to place roads and which vehicles if
any to own.  Stupidity and bad design...probably bad construction too.
Maybe even bad philosophy, and perhaps bad vibes.

Americans and American communities do not universally make bad choices.
We have quite conciously chosen not to preserve everything that gets
old.  I think that's okay if we equally conciously choose to preserve
and care a few very good things, very well.  I think some communities
have chosen to do just that.

You are however, correct.  You should not breath anything that you can
see. And since it is apparent to me that the majority of communities do
in fact provide their residents with reasonably clean air and water,
reasonably good education for children, reasonably good roads and so
forth, I must disagree with your pessimism in Poland.

We are blind men looking at the elephant.  We cannot prevent ourselves
from understanding the elephant from the parts we have touched.  We have
done some very stupid things in our country.  We have also done some
miraculous things.  I like to turn to our own mythology now and then.  I
suspect that the hope for our environment comes from how the western
movies (real old ones) tell us about the kind of villany it takes to
poisen a water hole.  I think many of us are concluding that there's not
much difference between the character of the guy who would poisen a
water hole and the guys who build unnecessary strip malls, belch crap
into the air or water, etc.

Okay, the 4-runner looks like its some kind of macho statement, but look
who's driving it!  Its my 4'-11" wife!  (they must have based that
commercial about how awkward it is for a woman in a tight skirt to get
out of one of those things on her...not the tight skirt...at least in
this decade...but on the distance from grade to running board!)  Why?
Cause no matter what else goes wrong, if that school bus can get those
kids home, I want her there with them.  That's why I drive the little
econombox...so I got an excuse to stay in some fancy chain hotel and
watch HBO!  I'm comfortable with that...I'm not comfortable with the
sprawl of minimals throughout my township...when the township itself has
no commercial, social or political focal point.  That's bad design.  Bad
design is very expensive.

I do agree with most of what you said.  It may not be obvious, so I
thought I'd be more direct.

-jc