I was reimagining the front yard of the rental next door. It would be a transformation from a very crapped-out almost-lawn with random shrubby bits on the edges, to an orderly group of segments: an eco-lawn and a tree-and-shade-plant portion attractively separated by a walkway with a few right angles in it. I sketched it out to Anna, who lives there. “And here we’d have a nice concrete path going from the garbage cans to the street,” I said, but I hadn’t gotten to the other parts of the plan before she winced in horror.

“Concrete?” she said. “Can’t it be, like, bark dust or something?” Her beautiful eyes brimmed with images of orphaned whale calves and felled redwoods and bleached coral. Bless her heart, Anna wants me to be a better person.

I tilted my head in sympathy. Dang, she’s sweet.

“Hell no,” I said. “Concrete all the way. You don’t want to roll your garbage can over bark dust. And we’re not about to be weeding your walk for all eternity. Nuh-uh.”

I’d like to be a better person too. Theoretically. It usually comes down to education. Once you find out how much convenience costs, for instance, you eschew plastic as much as you can. A friend was excited to show me the latest from Costco: pre-peeled hardboiled eggs. Now that was a serious improvement over worrying those eggshells off in nano-flakes and weeping into the mayonnaise. I appreciated that as much as she did. But I could no more purchase a gigantic slab of single-use plastic egg-carton clamshell than I could club a baby seal. You might as well ask me to grind it up and stuff it down an albatross with a gavage tube. I couldn’t imagine buying such a thing with impunity, and I hate peeling eggs.

I’m far from perfect about avoiding plastic but I’m probably better than most. But concrete seems so inert and harmless: almost friendly, even. I’ve tried to ignore the rumors. You hear things. Concrete production is responsible for 65% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Another 65% is fossil fuels, farming claims another 65%, your own personal jet travel chips in 33%, and nearly 90% is cow farts. Look it up. It doesn’t add up normal, but that’s how severe the climate crisis is.

So I decided to look up the concrete deal. My father railed against it in the ‘60s. It galled him no end to see concrete paving over perfectly good spotted salamander habitat. Or expanding highways, which, he claimed, created traffic rather than solving it. There was a lot of new concrete happening in the ‘60s and he didn’t approve of much of it. I had no reason to doubt my dad, who was pretty reliable as long as we weren’t talking about homosexuality, but the fact was my dad did a lot of railing against things, and you could only absorb so much before you started trying to change the station on Radio Dad. My dad was the king of eloquent grumpiness.

Turns out that, as usual, except for the gay thing, he was right. The creation of cement itself contributes 8% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide. If it was just a matter of a few long-dead Romans funneling water to thirsty mouths, soiled centurions, and vacated bowels, it would be seen as a very good thing. Efficient. New, directed rock. The problem is, concrete is now used so obsessively that it is fast replacing the far more efficient natural world. You can’t pave over wide swaths of a country without displacing the environment that could have sustained us. The water still needs to go somewhere. The topsoil should ideally stay put. And as much as concrete has its advantages as a building material, there’s a limit to its usefulness versus the landscape it obliterates, in a closed system like our planet under its spare mantilla of atmosphere.

And what drives the concrete construction comes down to politics. Concrete means construction. Concrete means jobs. Concrete means higher GDP. Concrete means kickbacks. Concrete makes politicians their bitches, and makes their puppetmasters lots of profit. As long as someone’s getting rich, and plenty are, there will be more concrete made and laid. It doesn’t matter if we’ve stranded fancy empty stadiums, unsold office space, massive doomed seawalls. It doesn’t matter if Japan is virtually paved over and residents can’t see the ocean anymore. Money is driving this ship into the iceberg. Money’s got a fleet of such ships and we’ll sink along with them.

Any fool can understand we can’t keep growing forever. We’re just one little planet. But we’re not being steered by any old fool.

So yes, Anna. I hear you. I see you. I appreciate you.

Your sidewalk will, however, be concrete.