Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
my family and me, this property is much more than a mere commodity. As
Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife science, articulated so eloquently, my
land is a community.
On a recent airplane l ight I saw cities and their suburbs from a wider per-
spective. As we climbed out of Kansas City, Missouri, skyscrapers towered
above the eastern deciduous forest. Below me the forest had been tamed, but
not demolished. Dense stringers of trees connected seamlessly with city
parks, streets, and subdivisions to outline big, lazy rivers. I saw an urban for-
est as a green quilt that sheltered two million people from the city's cold con-
crete and steel.
As we continued west, I could feel the exhaustion in the land below me. In
contrast to the urban forest, the mosaic of land I viewed had been forced to con-
form to our mechanized world. Square ponds, rectangular i elds, and crop cir-
cles dei ned this part of Earth. Massive irrigation projects held back and tamed
the greatest of western rivers. Our replumbing of these aquifers endangers i sh
but enables crops to l ourish where they could not naturally. The energy that
once carved great canyons now energizes a power grid that cuts at right angles
across the landscape and converges on cities and farms. Prairie and sagebrush
have been pulled, scraped, and burned from the arid lands of western Kan-
sas, Nebraska, and eastern Washington. Dark soils were fully plowed,
planted, and starting to develop a ragged beard of green. These actions
have made refugees of our native grouse, larks, sparrows, and buntings.
The depression I felt from seeing wall-to-wall agriculture eased as we met
the jumble of western mountains. A lightly falling snow added mystery to a
wild landscape. Most valleys were farmed or settled. And I could see where
patches of timber had been downed and fossil fuels exploited. But there was
