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Our Man in America where no buffalo roam
By Wan Lixin |
December 15, 2009, Tuesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
EDITOR'S note: Shanghai Daily writer Wan Lixin is on a three-month study tour in Virginia in the United States. This is the sixth of his casual impressions of the country.
I have heard many extolling the American landscape as being "natural." This is a strange perception of a land from which there is virtually no escape from cars.
In the past month I have traveled far and wide in my neighborhood in hope of finding a secluded trail fairly distant from motor ways - in vain. I gave up when I found that even Aurora Hills has been turned into a sprawling residential area, with postage-stamp-like parcels crossed and recrossed by a wide motorway.
When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, the Republican Party famously promised Americans "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage," and what I saw is probably the American dream come true.
Some weeks ago while driving through a hilly area in Maryland, the rolling, heavily wooded hills inclined me to suspect that this is the natural America, when the driver proudly drew my attention to the rows and rows of home units hidden among the trees.
Home ownership is the essence of the American Dream, and nothing characterizes the American landscape more than the modern suburban sprawl and the tract home. This is privatization of, or insulation from, nature practiced on an enormous scale, deeply rooted in the national instinct to possess.
In this absolute realm of one's own, cars and other powerful machines become the owners' external life-support system, just as in a spaceship.
In an American home one quickly loses touch with the outside world. When the refrigerator is stocked with a week's ration, the thermostat is set, the laundry is dried mechanically, why bother whether it is snowing or raining outside?
There is also no danger of seeing your neighbors sauntering about in pajamas, or not in pajamas, in the neighborhood.
This American-style home ownership has plagued the American continent, and is being exported to the rest of the world, notably China.
"The original habitats are cleared, fragmented, attenuated, or bastardized until little natural diversity remains," thus observes Stawyn Shelter in "Three Faces of Eden," which is included in "Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration." (1991).
This is an excellent book compiled by the National Museum of Natural History, that treats the "discovery" (In 1973 an American Indian tribe chief arrived in Rome and claimed he had discovered Italy and taken possession of it) of the New World by the Old World.
The encounter was tragic. "These new populations (European immigrants), with their intemperate use of American bounty, have squandered the forests and silted and poisoned the waters - and still do so - although native peoples had lived here for centuries modifying but not destroying the natural ecosystems."
Although American Indians had been there for probably 30,000 to 15,000 years, America's true natural beauty still existed in the pre-Columbus era, when America was still in its pristine condition, as the "native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere."
Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie says: "When the first Europeans came to our shores, our virgin forests, stretching from ocean to ocean and from arctic strand to tropic, staggered belief."
Subsequent developments included the decimation of the native Americans by new diseases and war and forcible removal of at least 10 million African people from their home to American plantations, as slaves.
American Indians' legacy for the world: maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, cacao, peppers and squashes. By comparison the new settlers have been since sowing destruction, both in and outside America.
By 1890 nearly 60 to 80 percent of the forests in the Baltimore-Washington corridor had been cleared for agriculture and development.
I was surprised to read the other day that the Potomac River region, where I am now staying, was once home to wolves, elk, cougars, buffalo, and beavers, and the river teemed with fish, crabs, and oysters. A recent issue of the National Geographic magazine reported four confirmed sightings of cougars in Northeast America, but experts believe they are escaped cats. Cougars used to cover the whole continent.
According to Marvin Karp's "America: Land of Many Dreams," "Just over a hundred years ago the North American buffalo still wandered the Great Plains in their millions. Herds stretched from horizon to horizon and could take days to pass by." Hunting and the introduction of cattle had pushed the species to the verge of extinction.
In an article in the September issue of the National Geographic titled "Before New York," which opens with the story of a beaver, the author tried to visualize what Henry Hudson saw when he first looked on Manhattan in 1609: "Manhattan was an extraordinary wilderness of towering chestnut, oak, and hickory trees, of salt marshes and grasslands with turkey, elk, and black bear."
I have heard many extolling the American landscape as being "natural." This is a strange perception of a land from which there is virtually no escape from cars.
In the past month I have traveled far and wide in my neighborhood in hope of finding a secluded trail fairly distant from motor ways - in vain. I gave up when I found that even Aurora Hills has been turned into a sprawling residential area, with postage-stamp-like parcels crossed and recrossed by a wide motorway.
When Herbert Hoover ran for president in 1928, the Republican Party famously promised Americans "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage," and what I saw is probably the American dream come true.
Some weeks ago while driving through a hilly area in Maryland, the rolling, heavily wooded hills inclined me to suspect that this is the natural America, when the driver proudly drew my attention to the rows and rows of home units hidden among the trees.
Home ownership is the essence of the American Dream, and nothing characterizes the American landscape more than the modern suburban sprawl and the tract home. This is privatization of, or insulation from, nature practiced on an enormous scale, deeply rooted in the national instinct to possess.
In this absolute realm of one's own, cars and other powerful machines become the owners' external life-support system, just as in a spaceship.
In an American home one quickly loses touch with the outside world. When the refrigerator is stocked with a week's ration, the thermostat is set, the laundry is dried mechanically, why bother whether it is snowing or raining outside?
There is also no danger of seeing your neighbors sauntering about in pajamas, or not in pajamas, in the neighborhood.
This American-style home ownership has plagued the American continent, and is being exported to the rest of the world, notably China.
"The original habitats are cleared, fragmented, attenuated, or bastardized until little natural diversity remains," thus observes Stawyn Shelter in "Three Faces of Eden," which is included in "Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration." (1991).
This is an excellent book compiled by the National Museum of Natural History, that treats the "discovery" (In 1973 an American Indian tribe chief arrived in Rome and claimed he had discovered Italy and taken possession of it) of the New World by the Old World.
The encounter was tragic. "These new populations (European immigrants), with their intemperate use of American bounty, have squandered the forests and silted and poisoned the waters - and still do so - although native peoples had lived here for centuries modifying but not destroying the natural ecosystems."
Although American Indians had been there for probably 30,000 to 15,000 years, America's true natural beauty still existed in the pre-Columbus era, when America was still in its pristine condition, as the "native people were transparent in the landscape, living as natural elements of the ecosphere."
Naturalist Donald Culross Peattie says: "When the first Europeans came to our shores, our virgin forests, stretching from ocean to ocean and from arctic strand to tropic, staggered belief."
Subsequent developments included the decimation of the native Americans by new diseases and war and forcible removal of at least 10 million African people from their home to American plantations, as slaves.
American Indians' legacy for the world: maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, cacao, peppers and squashes. By comparison the new settlers have been since sowing destruction, both in and outside America.
By 1890 nearly 60 to 80 percent of the forests in the Baltimore-Washington corridor had been cleared for agriculture and development.
I was surprised to read the other day that the Potomac River region, where I am now staying, was once home to wolves, elk, cougars, buffalo, and beavers, and the river teemed with fish, crabs, and oysters. A recent issue of the National Geographic magazine reported four confirmed sightings of cougars in Northeast America, but experts believe they are escaped cats. Cougars used to cover the whole continent.
According to Marvin Karp's "America: Land of Many Dreams," "Just over a hundred years ago the North American buffalo still wandered the Great Plains in their millions. Herds stretched from horizon to horizon and could take days to pass by." Hunting and the introduction of cattle had pushed the species to the verge of extinction.
In an article in the September issue of the National Geographic titled "Before New York," which opens with the story of a beaver, the author tried to visualize what Henry Hudson saw when he first looked on Manhattan in 1609: "Manhattan was an extraordinary wilderness of towering chestnut, oak, and hickory trees, of salt marshes and grasslands with turkey, elk, and black bear."
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