I was listening to a podcast this morning, Ben Holmes discussing Slinkity for Eleventy (“we’re commanding the Google search results, because slinkity is a made-up word”). Just wanted to mention I like several of the UI choices he makes on his personal blog, especially: 
Last week I was talking to a very bright and inquisitive 4th-grader, born in Africa and now living in Tucson. He was asking about “machines that make machines”, i.e. how factories can make all of the machinery we see around us (cars in particular), and the built-up nature of cities compared to simpler villages. He noted that large cities were springing up in Africa too, next to traditional villages.
Five or six years ago, I was looking forward to an eventual happier and more peaceful world, and I visualized it as like our existing environment–cars, technology, buildings, but distributed evenly and fairly throughout the world, with poverty and materialism eliminated through education and the Bahá’í Faith. The poor areas of the world would become more like us, of course.
Then in October 2017, the UHJ released a film honoring the bicentenary of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), in the form of a survey of Bahá’í life in various areas of the globe. Much of it is what I expected to see–people in elegant cafes discussing the important issues in life, doing projects to help their neighborhoods, the Millennium as a do-it-yourself toolkit rather than a golden city in the clouds of Heaven.
But the opening scene was a “primitive” village, probably in Africa (why don’t videos have footnotes?), where people were preparing food in a very traditional way, and happy in the absence of the comforts I’m used to in the USA. It’s only about 1 minute, but I puzzled for a couple of years about why that scene was placed first, instead of the elegant urban Café of the next section. I didn’t think it could be accidental.
When I was around 4 or 5, I was staying at my grandfather’s in small-town Illinois. Although he was well inside the town, he still had a tractor in the garage, and a fairly large front yard where the grass would be allowed to grow to 6 or 8 inches. In the summer evenings we saw a lot of fireflys, “lightning bugs” as blinking lights throughout the twilight in that yard. It was a connection to the natural world I don’t have in the city now.
Whoso cleaveth to justice, can, under no circumstances, transgress the limits of moderation. … The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, CLXIV)
For another view on the question of having space to live alongside nature, a random news headline today:
Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing
At first glance, the town of Woodside may look more like a sprawl of mansions built on big-tech billions than crucial habitat for threatened California mountain lions.
But town officials might suggest looking again.
The wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb has said it cannot approve the development of new duplexes or fourplexes to ease the statewide housing shortage because it encompasses the habitat of the elusive wildcats. …
Looks like this is not so much about having the natural world nearby as about keeping poor people further away.
I left this post kind of disconnected because I didn’t know just how to tie everything together, and maybe I didn’t need to. But today’s BahaiTeachings post by English custom-furniture maker Philip Koomen better expresses what I was searching for, a balance between modern tech and local natural beauty.