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Below Jim Wark's plane, southwestern New Mexico lies encased in a grid. The surveyor's transit and the Caterpillar D8, the shock troops that precede the houses, have transformed the natural landscape into a bizarre, oversized Etch-A-Sketch. These human layers are not simple palimpsests, painted atop the nonhuman world; one cannot scrape away an asphalt highway or a well-groomed field of wheat and hope to find the earth below in its original form.
Wark, a photographer, retired geologist, and pilot, has logged more than 4,500 hours in his Aviat Husky. The pictures he sees and the pictures he takes are of two earths: the untouched and the forever altered. They show a particular geometry marked upon a natural world that has little to do with such linearity. Humans crave simplicity-- and we have imposed it everywhere.
A few far-seeing thinkers have pleaded for more congruous ways. Best known for his historic run down the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell observed that ecosystems develop and survive because of the natural limits and opportunities available, that flora and fauna migrate and reproduce based on the natural boundaries confronting them, and...