17 books
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3 voters
“
By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more “natural” than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.
”
― Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
― Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
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The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation—immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutio
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― Dams, parks & politics;: Resource development & preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower era
― Dams, parks & politics;: Resource development & preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower era