Our Natural Heritage: Largely Unappreciated

We so often don’t appreciate what we have until we start to lose it.

Alexis DeTocqueville, French political thinker and traveler, on a trip to America in 1831, said this:

In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight, the . . . march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature.

Fortunately for him, DeTocqueville couldn’t have imagined a chain saw.

We can turn our attitude, of which DeTocqueville spoke, around. It’s imperative that we do so.

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