The first: For the 3 years we lived in Connecticut we'd take long drives in the jeep and on each ride he'd inevitably loudly exclaim, "What is with these rock walls in the middle of the forest? Who put them there? Why would you go through the effort in a forest?!" and then as time marched on his inquiries would become more forceful, "What the hell is up with these freaking rock walls in the middle of the damn forest?"
Jonah linked to this 2002 Wall Street Journal article explaining:
"...The great Eastern forest has been coming back since the middle of the 19th century. It's not all back and it's not the same forest. But about 70% of the land that was forested in 1600 is forest again today, says Douglas W. MacCleery, a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Forest Service. That's about 737 million acres — nearly two-thirds of it in the eastern third of the nation. While some replanting was done, especially in the South, most of the Eastern forest grew back naturally.Some states in the Northeast have been regaining their forest since the Erie Canal opened up the Midwest and farmers moved to better cropland there. Left untended, abandoned farmland reverts to forests in a matter of decades. Massachusetts and Connecticut — once a virtually unbroken sea of trees — had lost 70% of their forests by the Civil War. Today, nearly two-thirds of their land is covered with trees. Similarly deforested, Vermont is now 80% woods, New Hampshire 90%. New York, only 25% forest in 1880, is 66% forest today."
When he read that post, he yelled, yes, yelled, "THEY WERE FARMS!" Of course I had no idea what he was talking about, but he sighed and visibly relaxed and smiled as he closed his eyes and nodded. And then he explained it to me. I was then even more disheartened to realize that the 700 acres of virgin forest the Mashantucket Pequots plowed under for the new golf course at their casino really were probably the last of their kind. Like the Last of the Mohegans (Sun).
Second, there is no more sure fire way to get Kris enraged than to talk about this decade without properly naming it, or mentioning that you don't know what it's called, and why hasn't the media addressed this?
Well thanks to Jonah, it has:
The ‘Ought’ Decade
We lack a theme.
By Jonah Goldberg
Does anyone know what we’re supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We’re coming up on the last year of it and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the “oughts,” as in, “Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting.”But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn’t feel that way.
"...The great Eastern forest has been coming back since the middle of the 19th century. It's not all back and it's not the same forest. But about 70% of the land that was forested in 1600 is forest again today, says Douglas W. MacCleery, a senior policy analyst with the U.S. Forest Service. That's about 737 million acres — nearly two-thirds of it in the eastern third of the nation. While some replanting was done, especially in the South, most of the Eastern forest grew back naturally.Some states in the Northeast have been regaining their forest since the Erie Canal opened up the Midwest and farmers moved to better cropland there. Left untended, abandoned farmland reverts to forests in a matter of decades. Massachusetts and Connecticut — once a virtually unbroken sea of trees — had lost 70% of their forests by the Civil War. Today, nearly two-thirds of their land is covered with trees. Similarly deforested, Vermont is now 80% woods, New Hampshire 90%. New York, only 25% forest in 1880, is 66% forest today."
When he read that post, he yelled, yes, yelled, "THEY WERE FARMS!" Of course I had no idea what he was talking about, but he sighed and visibly relaxed and smiled as he closed his eyes and nodded. And then he explained it to me. I was then even more disheartened to realize that the 700 acres of virgin forest the Mashantucket Pequots plowed under for the new golf course at their casino really were probably the last of their kind. Like the Last of the Mohegans (Sun).
Second, there is no more sure fire way to get Kris enraged than to talk about this decade without properly naming it, or mentioning that you don't know what it's called, and why hasn't the media addressed this?
Well thanks to Jonah, it has:
The ‘Ought’ Decade
We lack a theme.
By Jonah Goldberg
Does anyone know what we’re supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We’re coming up on the last year of it and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the “oughts,” as in, “Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting.”But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn’t feel that way.
As flawed as the American habit of dividing our history into decades may be (the ’60s didn’t get started until the ’50s ended around 1964), it’s always made at least some intuitive sense. For instance, the popular conception of the ’70s — self-indulgent, tacky, kind of gross — closely jibes with my memory of it, even thought it didn’t begin until the end of the Vietnam War and died soon thereafter. The fatal blow was probably the “Disco Demolition Night” riot in Chicago’s Comiskey Park in the summer of 1979 (even staunch law-and-order types have to admire anti-disco riots), and it ultimately staggered to its death about the time of Ronald Reagan’s election.
Likewise, the 1980s and 1990s felt like real decades, whether you hated them or not. Reagan and Bill Clinton, through force of personality alone, helped give the ’80s and ’90s a coherence.But it doesn’t feel like we can say the same thing about George W. Bush’s oughts, in no small part because Bush showed neither the interest nor the ability to dominate the culture.
Neither the pro-Bush nor anti-Bush segments of society seemed to control the commanding heights of the popular culture. After 9/11, the Bushian forces seemed to dominate — freedom fries, 24, the Dixie Chicks’ implosion — but that didn’t last long. And, with the exception of a brief counter-Bush surge led by the lefty blogosphere, Jon Stewart and the re-imagined coffeehouse rock version of the Dixie Chicks, the battle for decade dominance has been between a fizzle and a deadlock.
Neither the pro-Bush nor anti-Bush segments of society seemed to control the commanding heights of the popular culture. After 9/11, the Bushian forces seemed to dominate — freedom fries, 24, the Dixie Chicks’ implosion — but that didn’t last long. And, with the exception of a brief counter-Bush surge led by the lefty blogosphere, Jon Stewart and the re-imagined coffeehouse rock version of the Dixie Chicks, the battle for decade dominance has been between a fizzle and a deadlock.
The war on terrorism doesn’t define young peoples’ lives, but neither does Bush-hatred. Virtually all of the antiwar or anti-Bush screeds put out by Hollywood over the last year, including Oliver Stone’s latest doggerel, have bombed.
It was during the oughts that Americans started drinking more bottled water than beer. As Susan McWilliams of Pomona College observes, you can tell something about a society that chooses clever water over humble beer. Bottled water is personal, inward-driven. Beer is social, outward-driven. Beer gets the party started. Water is the thirst quencher of choice for the solitary fitness addict, marching to the beat of his or her own drummer, digitally remastered for the iPod.
And the iPod hastened a trend toward the personalization of music, and entertainment generally. Turn on a “rock” radio station today and you’ll find most of the fare is somewhere between 10 and 40 years old, appealing mostly to those who are nostalgic for a time when music had the power to define an era. YouTube, the natural extension of iPod culture, is a mix of self-promotion and atomization; broadcast yourself, indeed. The digital abattoir of the Internet is taking apart old media dinosaurs at the joints, finally delivering the long prophesied (and, perhaps, lamentable) demise of the post-World War II mainstream media. Time magazine’s 2006 decision to declare “you” the person of the year will likely be remembered as a capitulation to the trend.
Meanwhile, many of the most popular and defining TV shows of the last decade have been about me, myself, and I. Survivor premiered in 2000, launching a parade of reality shows that rewarded will-to-power, ambition and self-centeredness. The Sopranos was nominally about the Mafia, but it was really a biting commentary on bourgeois life, centered on a narcissistic sociopath who nonetheless won our sympathy. Series such as Dexter, House, and countless others have elevated egomania, self-absorption, and narcissism to admirable character traits.
This may sound like the usual conservative caterwauling about social unraveling and balkanization. But it isn’t. I don’t know that society is any less healthy because it lacks a theme, and I’m certain I don’t want Washington to invent one for us.
Still, I do think society craves a theme, which is one reason why Barack Obama’s airy rhetoric of unity appealed to so many people, particularly recent college grads, the wealthy, journalists, and others most directly immersed in, and responsible for, the self-indulgence of recent years.The interesting question is whether Obama can — with the aid of his accomplices — impose a meaning on our age, or whether the age of meaning itself is over."
So there, Kris is much relieved.
So there, Kris is much relieved.
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