There’s a deep hum in the neighborhood these days. The diesel effort slows when another tree is digested. I saw it a few days ago, a device that grinds up trees into mulch and transforms forest into road. The hydro-ax sounds like a monster, and it is.

A man across the street is developing a 160-acre plot that has sat untouched forever, with nothing but a foot trail through it. He is subdividing and planning to sell many home sites in the remaining birch and aspen forest.

I don’t like his decision because his land is uphill from our plot of land, all those trees that were transporting hundreds of gallons of water from the soil to the air every day won’t be there anymore. We might be wetter, and we’re already on a marginal site.

My selfish reasons aside, I always feel sad when a nice patch of woods disappears, and the 160 acres across the street is a nice patch. So many local trails that were remote in the recent past smell today more like Bounce fabric softener than spruce trees.

I can’t really blame the guy for developing the land. Who doesn’t want security? And who doesn’t want nice land? Everybody does. My brothers in New York both live on isolated tracts of land, with no close neighbors, and I was born with the same itch. Our land is bordered on the south by woods owned by the university. No one lives there, though we do hear people chatting as they run down a wood-chip trail nearby.

And nothin’ stays the same, right? People need places to live, and there are more of us every day. The land our house sits on was once fine red-squirrel and grouse habitat, and now it’s a house. I know all these things are true, but I hate to hear the hydro-ax.

In my book, I quoted a gold miner named George who said, “You never want to go out and buy a home and property with the thought that nobody’s ever going to live across the other hill, because they are. Anybody who complains along those lines is probably better off not living in Alaska.”

George’s quote hits with more force now than when I interviewed him. But the more land I see developed makes me thankful that Jimmy Carter locked up so much of Alaska in National Parks in the 1980s. The hydro-ax will never eat there.