DAN HUBIG

WE HAVE ALL HAD THE EXPERIENCE of returning to a landscape we have known for years only to find that it's no longer there--hills, valleys, and towns have been reshaped or obliterated, and the once-familiar place is now noplace. All those new highways, malls, and subdivisions are connected only to the freeway, not to the natural landscape.
As California's population continues to grow, must our communities lose their identities and natural features? If so, who will we be, coming from noplace?
In this issue we tell of citizens who are working for a different future, one in which we protect and treasure the places we inhabit and share them with many other forms of life. We focus on local land trusts, which are growing in California at twice the national rate and challenging forces that many people perceive as too powerful to resist. Land trust members know and love the places they fight to protect, and that knowledge and love, put to work, gives them power. Tina Batt of the Martinez Regional Land Trust took me up to a Contra Costa County ridgetop that her small group is trying to buy and protect. "When I get depressed and don't know what to do, I come up here," she told me.
Edward O. Wilson, professor of science at Harvard University, writes that human beings have an innate need to be connected to nature. He calls this need biophilia, "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." Tina Batt is connected to that ridgetop as John Muir is to Yosemite, Paul Ehrlich to butterflies, Kathleen Goddard Jones to the Nipomo Dunes--to name but a few. In becoming familiar with natural places, some AmeriCorps members are discovering a deeper sense of themselves (see Finding Streams and Finding Oneself). Surfers launched a clean-water education program in ski country after they saw the connection between the mountaintops and the waves they ride offshore (see Clean Snow for Clean Surf). But it isn't always easy to know what to do, as the dolphin-tuna story shows (see Congress Writes a New Act for the Dolphin-Tuna Drama).
Children don't need to be told about biophilia. They often have more affinity for other living creatures than they do for noplace humans. Just look at the poems and pictures created for the River of Words Poetry and Art Contest (see River of Words Poetry and Art).
"We are shaped by the earth," the philosopher René Dubos has written. "The character of the environment in which we develop conditions our biological and mental being and the quality of our life. Were it only for selfish reasons, therefore, we must maintain variety and harmony in nature."

--Rasa Gustaitis

Top of Page | Contents | Next Story | Previous Story | Subscribe