By Dr. Robert Thorson
Memorial Day honored those human beings who gave their lives in service to our country. With no disrespect to veterans and their families, I recommend that we duplicate this idea for landscapes that have fallen in service to our nation.
The idea of a memorial day for dead landscapes came to me while pondering our recent national holiday. “For what purpose,” I asked myself, “did Americans give up their lives in service?” The normal answer is that freedom isn’t free. But from my point of view, the phrase “Land of Liberty” translates as land first, liberty second. Territory comes before its defense. America the tangible place of cities, wooded suburbs, farms, parks, and preserved natural places comes before America the ideological abstraction. Land first, everything else later.
This was true at Concord’s North Bridge in 1775 when the Minutemen defended themselves against British intrusion. Within the span of a few minutes, Colonial militias were prepared to drop their plows, scythes and manure forks, pick up their muskets and assemble. It was farms first, their defense second. Even our national anthem captures this order. “Land of the free” crescendos to a culminating high note held for three full beats before the anticlimatic “home of the brave.” Musically, it’s land first, ideas later.
Ever since the dawn of civilization, the necessities of human habitat have come at the price of landscape conversion: woodlands to farms, farms to airports, meadows to landfills, and waterfalls to dams. As with fallen soldiers, each fallen landscape is a unique individual, and should be honored as such. I do not suggest that Nature has a consciousness, as some deep ecologists, tree huggers and mystics do. What I suggest is that each place had a spirit that expired when development took place.
Our nation’s most famous case of landscape loss is the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California’s Sierra Nevada. What had been a valley as beautiful as nearby Yosemite gave its life to become a reservoir for central California. Almost as famous is Quabbin Reservoir, the water supply for Boston. Submerged beneath it is the Yankee village and farm landscape of the Swift River. On both west and east coasts, local historians and environmentalists sometimes gather to commemorate these losses, though on different local anniversaries. What I propose is a single national day of remembrance on which every place in the nation can honor the sacrifice of lost landscapes in order that we may be a free and independent nation.
Bridge abutments are wonderful things, but they do destroy some of the most beautiful and archaeologically significant patches of ground. San Francisco has its magnificent suspension of cable and steel, the Golden Gate Bridge. Hartford has a monumental stone arch built across the narrows of the Connecticut River, the Bulkeley Bridge, last of its era. Fertile marshland gave its life for the San Francisco International Airport. A dune-capped glacial delta gave up its life for Bradley International Airport between Hartford and Springfield.
The most painful losses in war are those given unnecessarily. Likewise, the most painful loss of landscapes are those that died in vain, whether wasted beneath unplanned strip malls or brownfields arising from neglect.
Each Memorial Day, I hear solemn prayers of remembrance, gun salutes, and Taps, which never fails to strike a chord in my heart. Perhaps on some other nationally designated day, we could hear prayers of remembrance for landscapes lost. Perhaps we would hear a salute to some obliterated landform and the mellifluous notes of flowing streams, swashing waves or fluttering breezes.
America would be a better place with a day to honor what Nature has given up so that we may live, work and travel. Earth Day is too joyful, too celebratory and too political. A more solemn occasion is needed.