By Dr. Robert Thorson

Look carefully at the head of any U.S. nickel. The graven image of Thomas Jefferson is being forced to stare at the words “In God We Trust.”

If Jefferson were with us today and able to inscribe his own coin, I think he would prefer “In Nature We Trust.” This would reflect the third president’s view of the Almighty, and would also be a chance to celebrate the way America’s conservation land trusts are re-creating God’s beauty from the human stain of self-inflicted blight.

This burst of natural evangelism came to me as I was driving through the Southern New England countryside to deliver a speech for the 24th annual Conference of the Connecticut Land Conservation Council, a thriving new organization resulting from the merger of two previous programs at The Nature Conservancy.

Most of those gathered were members of the 116 private, nonprofit land trusts in the state, or specialists who provide the trusts with technical, legal, financial and political assistance. Everyone’s goal was to help each other save God’s good green Earth from certain destruction by free-market materialism, cheap petroleum and poorly constrained private land development.

In the crowd were hundreds of converts to the conservation cause. Each must have had his or her personal moment of epiphany. Usually, this happens not when individuals are enveloped by natural serenity, but when they are overwhelmed by the ugliness and excess of roadside modernity — cars everywhere, colorized plastic cacophony, mind- numbing architectural incompatibilities, super-sized Levittowns … the list goes on. At one time or another, most probably said something like: “My God, look at what we’ve done.”

I said the same thing on my trip that morning. I set out from an island in Narragansett Bay where I’m in hiding while on sabbatical. The view from my leased home office includes a salt marsh, a secluded bay and hillside pastures crisscrossed by stone walls and surrounded by woods. The land is fully “developed” in the traditional sense of the word, and is completely in private hands, yet it remains free of blight.

My trip ended on the Berlin Turnpike leading southwest from Hartford. This is the archetype of massive strip development, an orgy of conspicuous consumption and gas guzzling. It’s a landscape where pharmacies the size of furniture stores compete with run-down hotels for space, an atmosphere where tobacco smoke, auto exhaust and hip-hop booms ooze from traffic jams.

It’s an Armageddon where corporate armies wage war over the wallets of shoppers and grease-seeking gastrointestinal tracts. Above it all looms the cupola of the headquarters for Northeast Utilities, the region’s largest power company. The company had generously offered use of its facilities for the conservation meeting, including use of its nuclear-generated electricity.

In the first century A.D., St. Paul the Apostle experienced a religious epiphany while on the road to Damascus. Two millennia later, I experienced one near the top the access road to the power company’s hilltop cathedral. Blinded by the light reflected off the cupola, I became an immediate convert to the cause of saving Jefferson from having to stare at something he would likely not have approved of.

So, before going inside to deliver my keynote speech on the human ecology of ruburbia — a contraction between rural and suburban — I rewrote the introduction to my PowerPoint presentation in order to plead my new cause about changing the nickel. On a screen nearly 30 feet wide, my first slide highlighted the words “In God We Trust.” The projector clicked to a slide showing the words “In Trust We God.”

Instantly and instinctively my audience understood my semantic intent. But of course, I explained, there is no verb in that phrase. What I really meant was “In Nature We Trust,” which honors both their hard work and the object of their work. One of my sincerest hopes for the next millennia is that circles of architectural and planning sanity will enlarge outwards from their nuclei to reclaim what we have ruined.

I know that Jefferson would have approved of my substitution of the word “Nature” for the word “God” because this is what he had in mind when he helped found this great country. His God — seen in the Declaration of Independence — is providential, divine, judgmental, creative and, more important, is either possessed by nature or is the totality of its natural laws, rather than some external entity. Yet my favorite president was forced to stare at words added nearly a century later, during a surge of Christian fervor associated with the American Civil War.

Let’s do the right thing. Let’s change the nickel to honor both Jefferson and Nature simultaneously.