Michael Ableman, continued:

We all hear stories of the greed that undermines our global environment. Until the bulldozers are idling at your back door, it is an intellectual concept. The pain for us was real. For fifty-eight days, an army of three hundred horsepower caterpillars, carryalls, and dump trucks moved and buried and leveled and graded hundreds of tons of topsoil.
The bone-rattling noise started at seven each morning and didn’t stop until evening. Clouds of dust floated into the farm and covered everything. We complained, and the atmosphere of war seemed only to increase. The line was drawn where the lush green of our avocado orchards met the flags that marked the roads of the new development. But the battle was about more than just dust and noise, and we were losing. With each day the farm was becoming more like an island. All around us, the once fertile agrarian valley had become a sea of tract homes and shopping centers.
The sense of complete isolation was the hardest to take. With this last development, the farm would be completely surrounded by suburbia. We were now completely out of context.