Did you ever see the episode of Mad Men in which Don Draper and his family are having a picnic in a park? When they get up to leave, Betty Draper shakes the tablecloth over the lawn, and they all walk off to Don’s new Cadillac, as the breeze starts picking up the paper plates and napkins and whisking them away.

Now, we are appalled by such behavior. But Mad Men was quite faithful in its depiction of real events and attitudes, so that kind of mindless trashing of the landscape must been common.

I reflected on this transformation during my recent 9,800-mile road trip across the country for my new book, Fierce  Consciousness. The highways and parks were very clean and unlittered. And I thought: What if society’s attention to wounded places were to transform so radically? What if, every time we came upon a place that had been clearcut, poisoned, broken, drained, paved, burned, or in some other way damaged or destroyed, we paused to make a simple gift of beauty for it out of materials the place itself offered?

I did this a few times on my trip. Once was for a horribly sere and unappealing campsite in Holbrook, Arizona. After I had packed the following morning, I thought, “This place needs a bird.” So I made a RadJoy Bird for it out of dry brush and sticks. Instantly something happened inside me. The place came alive. I stopped disliking it so intensely. Indeed, I felt compassion for it. Later, I made a bird for my father’s family’s homestead in east Texas that has been turned into a water park. The same sense of compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance instantly, inexplicably arose.

Again: What if we paused to make a gift of beauty for every wounded place we encountered?