…Precisely because we are bringing the land into accordance with the savannah land-type we’re programmed for, we lose the ability to see what the land itself wants to be — its original and most natural shape. Walking through the residential sections of Crawfordsville and Lebanon, Indiana, it takes education and hard mental work to see past the lawns to what the land would look like if we hadn’t interfered.

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It took me twenty more years to realize that I’d seen the destruction of an entire biosystem underway — the biosystem of woods, fields, and marshes that had occupied the coastline of southeastern Michigan since the glaciers retreated and the local climate turned temperate. But the scale of the destruction had an impact on me even as an uncomprehending kid. It was just too colossal to ignore. In ten years of childhood, I saw the wild destroyed to a distance of ten miles.

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This might perhaps be a good place to bring the Judæo-Christian idea of the “covenanting community” into our discussion. My friend the steak-eater, and my friend who doesn’t brake for animals, and I myself, might all be people who consciously identify ourselves with some such community. But the community I identify with includes the cattle and the wild animals on the road in a way that other people’s communities do not. Mine makes the cattle and the wild animals a little bit more like citizens —

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The bodies were just left there. There was never a skid mark, no sign whatsoever that the killer had slowed. The deer had been heaved off the side of the road to rot, as fallen boulders are heaved off the road in Colorado, without any sign of human feeling.

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