Essays on Land, Leopold, and Conservation
Curt Meine

Excerpt from Introduction:
Turning the Corner
"Across most of the continental United States west of the Appalachians, federal land surveyors laid out the original grid of township and range lines that have so profoundly shaped American history and the American landscape. The land survey was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow framers of a series of land laws adopted in the 1780s and 1790s. They aimed to bring order to the land, to apply geometric logic to the earth. The surveyors divided the land into the six-mile-square townships and 640-acre parcels of land ('sections') that are so familiar to us now. The resulting patterns on the ground are easily seen: the straight roads, rectangular properities, and city blocks that define our lives; the Midwest's characteristic quilt of pastures and cropfields; the Great Plains' green poker chips of irrigated land; the Northwest's checkerboard of logged and unlogged forest.

"If you have lived within or visited these three million square miles of surveyed American land, you have at one point or another come upon a correction line."

Contents:

• Introduction: Turning the Corner
• Part One: Conservation's Usable Past
  • The Oldest Task in Human History
  • Conservation and the Progressive Movement
  • Conservation Biology and Sustainable Societies
• Part Two: Leopolds Legacy
  • Leopold's Fine Line
  • Emergence of an Idea
  • Giving Voice to Concern
  • Moving Mountains
  • The Secret Leopold
• Part Three: Facing Forward
  • Inherit the Grid
  • The Once and Future Land Ethic
  • Home, Land, Security