rip of oak woods reaching almost to Kansas, was planted by their droppings;So many prairie dogs that a single dog town covering much of the Texas Panhandle is believed to have harbored more than 400 million of them;Old-growth giants, firs and redwoods and sequoias in the Pacific Northwest and the Sierra, parklands of fat, yellow-bellied ponderosas from the San Francisco Range in Arizona to the Flathead Valley in Montana.And prairie, of course, the only apt metaphor for which is still today, oceans. Great seas of prairie lay across most of the basins and benches and foothills everywhere in the West - tallgrasses, from switchgrass to bluebunch, mid-height gramas and bluestems and fescues, and high plains carpeted with buffalograss so velvety that Meriwether Lewis described it, as it appeared in North Dakota in the spring of 1805, as resembling a huge "bowling green in fine order." Such was the West 200 to 400 years ago, now eaten away to the point that, to illustrate, among too many examples, there are not 25 million bison but only a quarter million, not 100,000 grizzlies but fewer than 1,000, not billions of passenger pigeons, but now only stuffed ones in a diorama in Philadelphia.The West-That-Was has long gone by a name that is a worship word, holiest of the holies, for us parishioners of the environment. Aldo Leopold enshrined "wilderness' in essays such as his 1933 piece, "The Virgin Southwest," and since then we've not only made it sacred, we've deeply internalized an ideology of its meaning.The Romantic Age and America's cultural need had already made the primeval continent into a metaphor for the Divine - if not actually God, then the best and freshest example of His handiwork. In seminal essays like "Pioneers and Gullies' Aldo Leopold coupled that idea with a conviction that the presence of humans, or at least northern European humans, could only detract from or despoil the perfection of that wilderness. The emphasis on that desp...
