A neighbor family has lived in the same woods on the ravine's eastern rim for forty years. Their back deck has a tree growing through it and raccoons who look in their picture windows. No effort is made to subsidize a yard, so they receive unending solicitations for ground clearing, tree cutting, mowing, trimming, and similar cultural maintenance. Another neighbor keeps only a winding path through shrubs that others think should be a lawn, because she wants to experience the seasonality of natives. A third family grows bluebonnets and other wildflowers in their front yard and foregoes mowing until the city threatens them.

Recently, only a quarter of my suburb's citizens, who completed a questionnaire on community values, rated natural beauty as a reason for living here. They specified the hills, ravines, and wooded aspects, but not the wild lives that help to construct and maintain these living landscapes. Among features of quality of life, they rated natural beauty fourth behind school system, housing, and public safety. Thus do most of my neighbors value cultural creations above nature's, perhaps not knowing or remembering that all are gifts from a world that people did not create.