Each piece of land the world over is different -- the climate and topography and the vegetation all combine to mean that the field over there is particularly vulnerable to erosion or that the deer need that bit of stream or that the groundwater's shallow here and easily depleted. These kinds of lessons -- and the affection needed to implement them -- can be learned only by long observation. From the ridge on Crow I see most of the few dozen houses in my town. They're where they are for some physical reason -- the creek drops there, so it was a natural place for a sawmill; there the valley floor broadens enough for a farm. The sawmill is gone and the pasture is growing in, but there's still some logic to the layout, some information provided by the topography and the soil. But farther in the distance I can see the spot where a new set of luxury vacation condos will be built next year, right on the edge of a gorgeous but tiny pond. The condos are not placed there for any physical reason save proximity to the ski hill and the increased value of "waterfront," and they're going to be pushed in one on another as close as the landscaping will allow. They will tell their inhabitants and their visitors nothing about the land -- they are "machines for living," albeit inefficient ones, and quite possibly they will overwhelm that small pond, filling it with enough nitrogen that it chokes with algae and then dies. Those houses exist only in a brochure and a spiel, not in a place -- they're like the houses advertised ceaselessly on Fairfax's real estate channel, whose locations refer only to the human world -- "near the mall," "on a cul de sac." Such obliviousness to place exists around the developed world.- Bill McKibben
from The Age of Missing Information (1992)
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