« You'd think school had started or something - but no! | Main | The Modern Parallel to the Rotten Borough »
August 26, 2008
Stands of Big Pines as a Museums
I read an interesting article on controlled burning in Canadian national parks this morning (via the ever interesting Mirabilis.ca). This passage caught my eye:
There are two photos on the office wall of Dave Smith, fire and vegetation specialist in Jasper National Park. The first was taken by the box camera of surveyor Morrison Parsons Bridgland in the early 20th century, part of the Dominion Land Survey, which created the first detailed topographical map of the Rocky Mountains. The second was taken nearly 90 years later from the precise spot where Bridgland snapped his shutter.Where Bridgland captured in the Athabasca valley an image of lush wide-open grasslands, in the modern photograph the savannah is gone, overrun by a thicket of tall pines-- as Mr. Smith calls it "a homogenous carpet of fuels."
What was once a fiery, dynamic landscape that burned every five to 25 years, there stands today what might be described as a museum.
The comparison of an over-preserved forest to a museum works well - and one could also compare the stand of big pines to a well-enforced historic district. One of the things I always like to point out when I'm walking people around Geneva, like I did for the new faculty yesterday, is that buildings sometimes show signs of major overhauls and refittings. Geneva has a both Greek Revival houses and buildings with grand front porticoes and late Federal houses that were fitted up with grand front porticoes to fit the fashion of the 1840s.
We preserve them all more or less as they were in the 1960s. We tell each other that we encourage people to restore them, but we don't - we hold on to some buildings as they were retrofitted.
Likewise, there's great struggling still going on about a really decrepit gas station on Main Street - I should go take a picture. It has a certain 1930s charm, but not even a lot of that. But the forces of Preservation would like to put it back to something it never quite was and keep it that way - rather like folks from Calgary who like to think about the pine trees massed there in splendor.
Preservation, collection, restoration, conservation - sometimes these all seem like mildly unbalanced responses to a world we can't control - a refusal to participate in change. I love the charm of Geneva's stretch of row houses - after all, I haven't lived anywhere else in town! - but I try to fight through the fog of charm to see the layering of events that have left what we too often see as homogenous.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 26, 2008 8:55 AM