America Turns 250: What Legacy Will We Leave?
- Mike Lewis
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
This summer we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. As we commemorate this with our gatherings of family and friends and community celebrations, many of us will do so while enjoying the beauty of this special landscape we live in – the waterways, the coasts, the forests, and the fields that make the Eastern Shore so special.
It is a celebration – but also a time for reflection, for thinking about our “solemn obligation” to continue to insure, in Lincoln’s immortal words, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Let us also take this time of thinking about our past and our future to think about the landscape that we live in and how it has sustained us and inspired us, and what obligations we might bear to future generations not only for the continuation of democracy, but also to pass on to them a Lower Shore that they can love.
A lot has happened to our Eastern Shore environment since 1776 – forests timbered and regrown multiple times, farm fields expanding and contracting, rivers dammed and some dams removed, changing coastlines, some species gone (Caroline Parakeets, black bears, for instance) and some that have recently grown rare (bobwhite quail, shad, ash trees), some new species that are now plentiful (pelicans, blue catfish), and some that were once lost but have now returned (ospreys, turkey, beaver). Alongside all of this we have seen a steady expansion of human settlement and development on the Eastern Shore.
The geographer Peirce Lewis wrote that the “landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspiration, and even our fears in tangible, visible form.” What autobiography do we want to write in the landscape of the Lower Shore? What legacy for the future will our generation leave?
One hundred years from now when hopefully our descendants gather to celebrate America’s 350th anniversary, we at the Lower Shore Land Trust hope that they will still be able to appreciate the natural beauty and rural character of this special place. If they can, it will be, in part, because of the choices we make now to try to conserve farmland and forests, to restore habitat and degraded streams, and to leave space for nature to surprise us with its regenerative power. The Lower Shore in 2126 will be different than the one we see now, certainly, in ways that we can scarcely imagine, but we hold out hope that our actions can make it more likely that this special place will continue to be an oasis for people and nature.
