Feature Story

This Land Is Your Land....

Lady Liberty
Between a rock and a hard place!
Fogged in!
Heceta Head Light
Gateway to the West
Crater Lake, Oregon
Reflection of Mt. Hood
from French Bridge in western Mass.
A Peek of New England
In the "pink"!
By Nancy Richard
19 Jun 2009

This land is your land, this land is my land, and the song goes on. I have had a number of comments about the many places I've been, reflected strongly in all my photos. (I try to travel as often as possible.) However, I have to say that my favorite places are right here in America.

When I was a youth, we learned all the American songs expounding upon this country's great beauty--not only the Star Spangled Banner, but also, America the Beautiful, This Land Is Your Land, What Is America To Me, etc.. My favorite two are America the Beautiful by Ray Charles, and This Land Is Your Land. (I've provided links to those two.)

I will attempt to provide photos that encompass the best that this country has to offer, knowing that I can never begin to highlight everything. It is an impossible task to include the whole country in a mere 10 photos. Even 50, allowing for one per state, couldn't begin to touch upon the diversity, majesty, and the best that each state has to offer. Then again, I can only offer, with my limited ability, a few of my images.

Alaska with its vast unexplored territory, majestic mountain ranges, and temperate rain forests holds this country's last great wilderness. Unfortunately, that area, with ANWR also holds resources that the extraction industry would love to exploit. As a nation, we have to make the decision as to whether or not we are obligated to save this last wilderness, with its great wildlife migration, for our grandchildren, or serve our own selfish interests now.

The Northwest has already succumbed to chain saws, and even Olympic Ntnl. Park has areas that have been desecrated along its borders. But one can stand upon a craggy cliff and feel the timeless fog "creeping in on cat's feet", and pretend that we live in another time and another world.

The southwest with its red rock country and fragile deserts, high and low, have and are the most vulnerable to mining. The great plains, where the "buffalo" roamed by the thousands, have been fenced in and compromised, so that we can only imagine or look at photographs to know what these great grasslands must have been once.

The northeast, with Maine's Great Woods, which many would like to make into a national park, New Hampshire's White Mountains, and Vermont's Green, have already lost their virgin forests. The beaches of Cape Cod, the shoreline of Rhode Island, I could go on and on.

How can one touch upon this country's beauty without mentioning the Everglades, that great marsh grasslands, teeming with life, that is not even a tenth of what it once was. (On my list of places to go)

The Grand Canyon--the very words evoke a geological timelessness going back millions of years, written as clearly in the striated rock as words in a book--earth's beginnings, its geological history! If I were to try to touch upon everything this wonderful country has to offer, I would need far more words and photographs than I am capable!

From the northwest to the southeast, and the northeast to the southwest, I can truly say that America is really the the LAND OF THE BEAUTIFUL!

(In my feeble attempt to convey my love of this country, I am able to provide you with mere seeds of my thoughts.) I invite others, and the considerable talents of so many of my JPG friends to add to the theme of AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL, and I invite JPG to provide that theme.

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