Beautiful America [antikvár]

Introduction The Spacious Land We Americans love to do a little occasional self-puffery, preening ourselves on what we have done as a country and expect to do in the future. A sense of optimism pervades our national consciousness and penetrates the manifold activities that we engage in on a daily basis. Our positive attitudes and expansive nature are inspired in some measure by the bountiful land which sustains us. In these days when the natural arrangement of the world seems in some jeopardy from growing populations and human activities, we have turned more of our attention to the care and preservation of our marvelous corner of it. Both our material progress as a nation and our optimistic outlook have been fueled by the wealth of our lands and waters. Being a practical people, we are beginning to see the wisdom of responsible use of our resources. But beyond the practicality is an emotional attachment to the land that draws upon a long tradition. Many generations have dwelt in the land now called the United States. Their consciousness and character have always been changed in some degree by the region they called home. Even today's mobile Americans are usually identifiable by the part of the country they hail from. The New Englander, tough and resourceful, is following in the tradition of his forebearers, who had to be both innovative and hardworking to gain a livelihood from their land-sea environment. The plainsman, under an endless vault of sky reaching to a horizon that is a remote mystery, puts more of his faith in the Divinity than in the works of man, whose scale is dwarfed by his natural setting and whose fate seems wholly captive to the whims of weather. The people of the Plains cluster in small towns and medium-sized cities; they are friendly and open, putting great value on personal relationships, and rarely concentrating in such large numbers that these relationships are lost. The limitless open reaches of the Southwest seem to nurture another kind of individuality. The Texan is not awed by the vastness of his surroundings, possibly because he is less dependent on what grows on them than is the plainsman to the north. Because much of his wealth comes from beneath the surface, he can confront the more unruly moods of nature with confidence. His glittering cities seem an expression of his assurance that everything is possible. Those who find their home in the highlands are likely to be of a still different stripe. The Appalachians have their hill people, from north Georgia, through Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia, and on up the eastern states, who hold the world more at arm's length than do the people of the piedmont and plains. And the one who establishes his sanctuary on the slopes of the Rockies or Cascades is just as likely to put a high value on the relative scarcity of other folks in his neighborhood. The lavish variety of landscapes and weather regimes that occur throughout the land has been a strong magnet to settlement. With the comparatively recent enrollment of Alaska and Hawaii on the roster of states, this diversity has become even more emphatic. The nation now reaches north into the Arctic and south into the Tropics. The riches of the earth are expressed in so many different ways in the United States that when a person stops to consider the abundance and variety of it all, he is at a terrible disadvantage. The bounty of natural forms has outstripped the ability of human language to describe it. Some of the more eloquent among us have immortalized parts of it in novels, plays, and poems, but who has been able to encapsulate the cosmic grandeur of the whole country in a work of literature? There is a kind of majestic orchestration to the primary continental features. The wide, interior valley