flying window seat
Posted by herr rhein on November 16, 2008
I fly window seat, incurabely. It doesn’t matter that I’ve been on countless flights over the bast four decades and stared downward over numberless vistas of forest and wetland, prairie and river. When the flight attendants ask for people to lower the window shade so that you can see the movie better, that’s my shade still up, my face pressed against the glass.
I revel in the details of geography and sweep of biology that can be seen from the air. I trace trails into box canyons and along mountain ridges; search tundra for oriented lakes; look at sediment roiling downcoast from a turbulent river mouth; scan bayous for cypress islands; enjoy the dendritic meanderings of channels through a tide flat; discover oxbow lakes along the fringes of a river basin.
Anyone who shares this affliction with me knows, however, that what one sees most of the time along too many common routes is the human footprint: dams and dikes, farmland, shopping malls and roads, hills bulldozed, forests flattened, massive works of civil (and uncivil) engineering.
- Joshua Peterson Myers, from Gretchen C. Daily (ed.), 1997, Nature’s Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems, Island Press
