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Module 3 • Natural Resources: Tundra Farming
Student Page 3-5a
The American Geographies
Americans are fast becoming strangers in a strange land, where one roiling river, one
scarred patch of desert, is as good as another. America the beautiful exists—a select few
still know it intimately—but many of us are settling for a homogenized national geography.
– Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez has written The Rediscovery of few artifacts of human life. The animals are
North America (Vintage), and his most recent all beautiful, diligent, one might even say well
book is Field Notes (Knopf). behaved. Nature’s unruliness, the power of riv-
ers and skies to intimidate, and any evidence of
It has become commonplace to observe that
disastrous human land management practices are
Americans know little of the geography of
all but invisible. It is, in short, a magnificent gar-
their country, that they are innocent of it as a
den, a colonial vision of paradise imposed on a
landscape of rivers, mountains, and towns. They
real place that is, at best, only selectively known.
do not know, supposedly, the location of the
Delaware Water Gap, the Olympic Mountains, The real American landscape is a face of almost
or the Piedmont Plateau; and, the indictment incomprehensible depth and complexity. If one
continues, they have little conception of the were to sit for a few days, for example, among
way the individual components of this landscape the ponderosa pine forests and black lava fields
are imperiled, from a human perspective, by of the Cascade Mountains in western Oregon,
modern farming practices or industrial pollution. inhaling the pines’ sweet balm on an evening
breeze from some point on the barren rock, and
I do not know how true this is, but it is easy to
then were to step off to the Olympic Peninsula
believe that it is truer than most of us would
in Washington, to those rain forests with sphagnum
wish. A recent Gallup Organization and National
moss floors soft as fleece underfoot and Douglas
Geographic Society survey found Americans
firs too big around for five people to hug, and
woefully ignorant of world geography. Three
then head south to walk the ephemeral creeks
out of four couldn’t locate the Persian Gulf.
and sun-blistered playas of the Mojave Desert in
The implication was that we knew no more
southern California, one would be reeling under
about our own homeland, and that this igno-
the sensations. The contrast is not only one of
rance undermined the integrity of our political
plants and soils, a different array, say, of bril-
processes and the efficiency of our business
liantly colored beetles. The shock to the senses
enterprises.
comes from a different shape to the silence,
As Americans, we profess a sincere and fierce
a difference in the very quality of light, in the
love for the American landscape, for our roll-
weight of the air. And this relatively short jour-
ing prairies, free-flowing rivers, and “purple
ney down the West Coast would still leave the
mountains’ majesty”; but it is hard to imagine,
traveler with all that lay to the east to explore—
actually, where this particular landscape is. It is
the anomalous sand hills of Nebraska, the heat
not just that a nostalgic landscape has passed
and frog voices of Okefenokee Swamp, the
away—Mark Twain’s Mississippi is now dammed
fetch of Chesapeake Bay, the hardwood copses
from Illinois to Louisiana and the prairies have
and black bears of the Ozark Mountains.
all been sold and fenced. It is that it’s always
No one of these places, of course, can be entirely
been a romantic’s landscape. In the attenuated
fathomed, biologically or aesthetically. They
form in which it is presented on television today,
are mysteries upon which we impose names.
in magazine articles, and in calendar photo-
Enchantments. We tick the names off glibly but
graphs, the essential wildness of the American
lovingly. We mean no disrespect. Our genuine
landscape is reduced to attractive scenery. We
desire, though we may be skeptical about the
look out on a familiar, memorized landscape
time it would take and uncertain of its practical
that portends adventure and promises enrich-
value to us, is to actually know these places.
ment. There are no distracting people in it and
As deeply ingrained in the American psyche as
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