Ecotone: Writing About Place: ProtectingPlace

My husband and I own one hundred acres of pine woods in Florida’s panhandle. It’s primarily an old growth longleaf pine forest, with some scrub oak, yaupon, wild blueberry, and a series of springs that make up into a meandering stream.

The unusual aspect of this is how close we are to the City of Pensacola. Our land is prime development acreage. Realtors call. We don’t call back. Instead, we call Meeks Farms and order more longleaf pine to plant. About 13,000 went in the ground last spring; another 8,500 will be planted in 2004.

Simply put, we made a decision: keep the land intact. Forego the monetary enticements which might allow us to do what? Buy condos in Santa Fe, Reno and Hilton Head? Nope. We are planting slow growing, commercially non-viable longleaf pine trees and other native plants, nurturing the pitcher plant prairie, and digging out a fish pond.

We have grandchildren whose idea of wilderness is a mall without a floor plan guide. Who throw up their hands in frustration with visions of terminal boredom when the batteries quit on their game boys.

Grandchildren who take a walk on our soft dirt roads tentatively, the great outdoors being a little too open to be comfortable in their experience and say to one another, “Look! A pine cone. In nature.”

When we die, this land will go into a family trust, protected for generations. During the rest of my life, my plan is to enhance it with plantings of more native plants, and to work with the grandkids so at least one among them develops a fire in the belly for this unique and beautiful place in the world, and seeks to preserve it when one of their cousins becomes a sharp lawyer and tries to bust the trust!

  -Beth W. at http://longleaf.typepad.com/switched_at_birth/ Switched At Birth

Bless you. And bless the Nature Conservancy and all who preserve some breathing space, or maybe space where one can learn to breathe!

Myself, I want to celebrate the work of generations gone by, who worked and sometimes fought to keep a pretty, if much changed, and historic spot in the midst of a great city.

[Place/Holders] -- P.

I write this from my house, from my second floor desk, at the front of the 1893 Italianate I have lived in for the past five years. Protecting my place has a different meaning tonight, as my car sits in its garage, at the back of the house, with a bullet hole through the garage door and through the front bumper and through the radiator and possibly beyond.

[Continue...] - John.

[Fragments from Floyd] On this small plot of Earth-- our rough sheltered valley in the Blue Ridge of Virginia-- I am the steward, the temporary "owner". For a time, uncertain and finite, this place will be the tableau of my life. Decades from now, I'd like to imagine that my love for and intimacy with this place will live on-- not in the abstract but in the very particulars of the view out my window, in the same footsteps I tread in my day's walk. I have left a record of these days in what I have written to my children, and ultimately, to their children from and about this place-- a field guide of sorts to its natural history and to mine. If they in future years should care to know what our lives have been like here, they will need to know this place-- to sit where I have sat, see what I have seen. And so the importance of protecting place is a matter very close to home.

[prairie point] Sometimes you can't stop change no matter how hard you try.

[CassandraPages] For many years I’ve puzzled over the fact that some of us seem to bond with certain places, almost as if a certain landscape, certain paths, certain moments we experience within a place become imprinted upon us forever. Like parents and children, some of us bond fast, and some not at all, and some of us bond to a particular place while others are more egalitarian, spreading their affection and care evenly over all of nature...

[Laughing Knees] With Russia's official declaration earlier today that it would not ratify the Kyoto Treaty, because the treaty would limit its economic growth, a confirmation of the blindness and madness of the human world seems to have taken root and the shoots of the consequences will hereby officially make its first, introductory cough.

[London and the North] This weekend, a neighbour made a bonfire on the common land opposite my house. We live in a conservation area. It's a shared space and has heathers, ferns, gorse and many wild flowers (not at this time of year) growing on it. We avoided eye contact when I walked past and pretended not to see each other.