Still sick here.
My friend Mark (who is coming out to visit us for a week in October) sent me some photos of him completing an item on his "bucket list". A tandem skydive.
What struck me about the photo is just how fully domesticated the Midwest is. Fly across Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois and this is what you see; miles and miles of farms. No space for anything wild. Nothing wild left.
Give me the wild, wild West. I want to live in a space that still has some wildness left to it. It is getting harder and harder to find such spots on the planet. All the usable space is being mined by humans for our own little dramas. We have crowded out all other relations...
5 comments:
How vividly that picture brings home our loss of wildness! And how grateful I am to live in northeastern NY with our 6 million acres of Adirondack wilderness. Laced with human dramas, no doubt, but still a place where no roads exist for miles and miles, where a person can truly get lost.
Woods,
Bill McKibben starts out his book "Hope,Human and Wild" with the resurrection of wildness in the Northeast. You are lucky to live there.
When I flew across the country a couple weeks ago--flying over the Midwest to land at Ohara--all I could see for miles and miles was farmland. Can't tell you how sad that made me feel to see all that domesticated land.
allan
In general of course I'm in agreement that humans are taking up far too much space, but let's not forget that MN has more wolves than any state but AK with hundreds more in MI and WI. I think there's still some wildness there.
Kia ora Allan,
I consider my fortunate to live where I can disappear into my 'backyard' and not be seen for days should I choose. We have wilderness left here simply as it is inaccessible except by foot, or helicopter and jet boat. I prefer foot. Having written that we have right wingers here making big noise about the "Value" of our conservation estate not in the wildness it provides but rather the mineral wealth beneath it. We have a battle on our hands here as well.
Cheers,
Robb
Green,
Yes, you are correct. I'm referring to the southern part of Minnesota, where I grew up. :)
Robb,
Good luck with your fight to keep the miners out of your National Parks in New Zealand...
allan
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