President's Message

Why Save the Land?
 

This spring when my husband and I were visiting my daughter and her family in southern New Hampshire where they are remodeling a 100-year-old house, we were the gofers. On one trip to the local Home Depot I told the salesman that we lived in Arizona, and he asked if I had ever heard of the Arizona Teacher’s College in Tempe. He had gone to school there years ago and recalled the unique landscape, particularly the fact that they had to “go through the desert” to get from Tempe to Phoenix. So when his own daughter was attending ASU many years later and he asked her about crossing the desert to get to Phoenix, he was struck by her response. “What desert, Dad?” she said.   

Of course, as someone has said, the world we leave is never the one we were born into, and that desert has been permanently transformed into highways and parking lots. So why devote effort, money and time to saving something that to others apparently seems quite dispensable?  

Well, because it’s not dispensable, not if we hope to survive as a species. Richard Brewer, Professor Emeritus of Biology at Western Michigan University, describes the history and activities of land trusts in great detail in his book “Conservancy: The Land Trust Movement in America,” (available in the DFLT office for lending). He groups the reasons for land conservation into three main categories: aesthetic, practical, and moral, and I’m completely awed by some of his observations that have less to do with beauty or with a sense of spiritual connection to the earth (though these are powerful motivators) and more with an awareness of how completely dependent we are on the goods and services nature provides. Just thinking about the connections between the activities of microorganisms in the ocean and the amount of oxygen in the air, or between the recycling efforts of earthworms and bacteria and the fertility of our soil, should give anyone pause. 

It’s about biology, the stuff of “Planet Earth,” which people do seem to be watching, and that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing that, because of the efforts of DFLT members as well as the conservation activities of the Town of Cave Creek and many other dedicated preservationists in the Foothills, my New Hampshire granddaughters and their offspring, many years hence, should never have reason to say, “What desert?” 

 Sincerely,