Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 6
Few people have had so productive, so passionate, or so reckless a relationship with the land as we Americans. And we are what we are in good part because of that experience.
In the beginning the land was about all we had. It tested our courage and endurance, and gave scale to our ambitions. For a long time it provided nearly everyone with what used to be called elbow room, and men are alive still who remember when there were blank places on the map, spaces marked “unexplored.” What that meant in terms of the human spirit on this continent we may never fully appreciate.
But the land has also housed us, clothed us, and fed us better than any people in history. And it has given us power. If at times we fell to thinking of ourselves as a people specially blessed, perhaps we were not being altogether unrealistic, when one considers the natural heritage we had to work with.
In return we have celebrated our feelings for the land in countless songs and stories. We have drenched it with our blood and with the blood of those who had it and loved it in their way before we came along. We have raised institutions in its name. We have endowed its rivers and mountains, its lakes and plains and forests, with our most powerful myths, our most treasured values, and with the ghosts of our heroes. Huck Finn’s kind of freedom is forever part of the Mississippi. Lincoln forever haunts the prairie.
But of course that is only part of the story. For again and again, out of greed or indifference or plain stupidity, we have squandered resources, defiled and destroyed, and moved on. The land was so rich, so abundant, so very good, we believed, that there was just no end to its capacity to produce or to recover from our mistakes. “There’s always more where that came from,” we said, about almost everything. And often we were right, or so it seemed in any one man’s lifetime.
Now, however, in the last third of the twentieth century, we are thinking differently. Our prodigal waste, our burning and bulldozing, our poisoning of air and water, our mindless interference with the vital life cycles of plants and animals, are catching up with us. While our productivity and prosperity grow steadily, scientists keep warning of a terrible day of reckoning. Time is running out, they say, unless we mend our ways. But those of us who live and work in cities, which means a vast majority of us now, need do little more than take a deep breath to be reminded that things are not as they should be. As any thoughtful person realizes, we Americans and our land have reached a stage of crisis.
And it is with this in mind that AMERICAN HERITAGE has decided to add a special new department, to appear