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In Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape Dana Fritz traces the
evolution of the Bessey Ranger District and Nursery of the Nebraska
National Forest and Grasslands. Fritz’s contemporary photographs
of this unique ecosystem, with provocative environmental essays,
maps, and historical photographs from the U.S. Forest Service
archives, illuminate the complex environmental and natural history
of the site, especially as it relates to built environments, land
use, and climate change. The Nebraska National Forest at Halsey, as
it is known colloquially, is the largest hand-planted forest in the
Western Hemisphere, and formerly in the world. This hybrid
landscape of a conifer forest overlaid onto a semiarid grassland
just west of the one-hundredth meridian was an ambitious late
nineteenth-century idea to create a timber industry, to reclaim a
landscape considered disordered and unproductive, and to change the
local climate in northcentral Nebraska. While the planners seemed
not to appreciate the native grasslands that form the ecosystem of
the Nebraska Sandhills, they did recognize the reliable water from
the Dismal and Middle Loup Rivers that border the site. In 1902 the
first federal nursery was established as part of the Dismal River
Forest Reserve to produce seedlings for plains homesteads and the
adjacent treeless tract of land. At that time tree planting was not
used for carbon sequestration but to mitigate the wind and
evaporation of moisture. The Bessey Nursery now produces
replacement seedlings for burned and beetle-damaged forests in the
Rocky Mountains and for the Nebraska Conservation Trees Program.
This constructed landscape of row-crop trees that were protected
from fire for decades, yet never commercially harvested for timber,
provides a rich metaphor for current environmental predicaments.
The late nineteenth-century effort to reclaim with trees what was
called the Great American Desert has evolved to a focus on
twenty-first-century conservation, grassland restoration, and
reforestation, all of which work to sequester carbon, maintain
natural ecosystem balance, and mitigate large-scale climate change.
Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape offers a visual and critical
examination of this unique managed landscape, which has
implications far beyond its borders.
In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores
the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2,
Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome
at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid
carefully constructed representations of the natural world to
entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific
research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels
stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the
environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature,
humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to
create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands
inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural
and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can
go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight
lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of
natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to
create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires
contemplation of our ecological future.
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