Water is the land's fount of life.Land is but becomes far more than mere terrain; the landscape of life is a complicated historical structure.
Water is the land's fount of life.
The Chama River in northern New Mexico revives these arid regions.
landscape -- Òthe thin layer of soil that forms the patchy covering over the continents controls our own existence and that of every other animal on the land. Without soil, land plants as we know them would not grow, and without plants no animals could survive.Ó Ê
(Carson, p. 55)ÊÊ
geographical regeneration -- the articulation of an idea by George Perkins Marsh (1864) that all
civilizations live only so long as they renew the earth upon which they sustain
themselves.
The concepts of landscape regeneration and restoration are inherently related.
Geographical regeneration was associated by George P. Marsh (1864) with the call for "restoration of disturbed harmonies" that he felt all civilizations must undertake if they were to renew the water, energy, air, and landscape upon which they depend for commercial gain, spiritual inspiration and subsistence.
Copper Canyon in northern Mexico attests to the power of water to sculpt the landscape.
The idea that land is a free good in Marxist and liberal economic theory in the 19th century was finally challenged by Aldo Leopold and community ecologists in the 20th century who argued that the land organism, like any creature required nourishment. Hugh Hammond Bennett capitalized on that idea during the dust bowl, as the landscape of the southern plains literally blew away in a series of droughts that left, once marginal farmland devoid of protective vegetation.
