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Issue Date: September 4, 2005
TAKE A WALK
A stroll may open your eyes to how nature and man coexist.
Wilderness offers us "silence, solitude and darkness."
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Autumn is a terrific time to take a walk and observe the changing landscape of your own environment. Nature writer Bill McKibben documented his own rather ambitious hike in his recent book, "Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks" (Crown, $16). McKibben, who wrote "The End of Nature," the seminal 1989 book about global warming, hiked 200 miles over three weeks between his home in upstate New York and Vermont, where he is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. On foot, he saw the landscape differently: "One sadness of car travel is just how quickly you get through the landscape. You barely notice flipping by in a car."
The region's mix of wilderness and nature is in sharp contrast with most communities, where fewer trees, more homes and greater commercial development constitute modern life. There's a lesson in that observation, McKibben says: "It's time we started figuring out how to take care of the land in more interesting ways."
One idea: Leave undeveloped corridors to allow for animal migration and natural habitats. "You get a sense of how sad it is we separate them so completely in our country, and you get places that are just wild, and people put up fences and say, 'Stay away,' " McKibben says.
"We need wilderness to prove to ourselves we don't have to use every inch of the planet -- that we're able to back off and leave room for the rest," he says. "And I need wilderness, because that's where I sort of think best, and that's true of a lot of people. When you think about the things hardest to come by in our world today, they're silence, solitude and darkness. And these are things the great Adirondack woods offers us for free."
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WANTED: A FAMILY
Celebrity adoptions get such media attention: Take Angelina Jolie, who recently adopted her second child. But what about the half-million children in our nation's foster-care system who get so little press? Enter a network of photographers who are donating their skills to help kids like Edward, Fabian and Davon find permanent homes by capturing their personalities on film. About one-third of the children recorded by photographers (and adoptive parents) Horace and Yvonne Holmes of Macon, Ga. -- through the Bibb County Division of Family and Children Services -- have been adopted. One of the most successful photographic campaigns has been the Heart Gallery network, founded in New Mexico in 2001; more than 60 new Heart Gallery exhibits in 40 states have opened or are being planned. This year, Heart Gallery of New Jersey (heartgallerynj.com) paired with 150 top photographers from publications such as Vanity Fair to photograph foster children legally available for adoption in its state. For more info on adopting children, go to adoptuskids.org or call 888-200-4005.
Contributing: Rachel Dickinson, Evelyn Poitevent
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