Commentary: Our planet is often cast in the role of damsel-in-distress, a victim of her humanity's short-sightedness and slovenly ways. Yet today I want us to recognize that the Earth is much harder on herself than we could ever be on her.

Just take the fact that she plays an endless game of bumper cars with her continents. Or her skin cracking open and out pouring molten pools of lava which harden into the vast basalt plateaux of Idaho, East Africa, central India, Patagonia. It is fairly frequent that mountains explode and darken skies for years. Floods clog valleys and great rivers change course radically, such as the Huang He, the Ganges, and the Mississippi. Deserts shift and spread their dunes in new places. And every once in a while a winter's snow does not melt in summertime around Hudson's Bay - it gets a bit deeper each year and slowly its pack hardens and widens - locally temperatures drop and winter ice-ups become perennial - and soon enough another continental glaciation has begun its advance.

I'd like to make a facile calculation here. Assume each of us lives 70 years, and we are measuring time by joining our lives end to end. Then we can say that this town and its colleges will be swept clean from these slopes by another glacier within 100 of our lives.

The Earth has been beating herself up for four billion years, and she wears many layers of scar tissue. Yet visible marks are not regarded as the blemishes of advanced age, but instead we consider them sublime - they form some our central concepts of beauty. The delicate curves of moraines, the branchings of upper valleys, the meander scars in mature floodplains, the upthrust mountains (especially if carved down to rock faces by ice) these we see as nearly magical in their form.

In the late 70s I lived in East Africa with my young family, and discovered a set of landscape concepts which have changed my views ever since. A British engineering group was charged with the task of remaking the rural road network of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. They came up with a set of mapped land systems, each of which enclosed a series of components whose repeating patterns differed markedly from its neighbors. These components were each studied as individual facets, and I learned from all this that the different parts of a landscape were each important, and that to understand the integrated behavior of land we needed to consider its entirety. The zeal to reach a specific place, a spot where views could be had, became less of an obsession for me after this.

A decade later I used these concepts in Ethiopia, to predict where runoff was first produced at the onset of the rainy season, so that irrigation schedules could be lengthened by a week or two - it was like writing a check knowing your deposit was already in the system.

Jump forward another decade into the mid 90s, and we find a technical revolution in the U.S. - in the manner of making basemaps. The revered mid-century topo sheets (they of brown contours on white and green patchwork) were 30-40 years old, and embarrassingly obsolete. Labor costs and cartographic teamwork had all changed drastically in the intervening decades, so the government decided to use automated procedures for generating a new kind of photomap. Briefly each airphoto pair was corrected for its relief distortions into a map-true orthophoto, and in doing so a byproduct elevation surface was produced. These are accurate and enormously flexible pixel arrays containing heights.

Similarly, in the second month of our new millennium, the space shuttle carried a radar mission which in twelve days documented the height of every 30m by 30m patch in the world, between 60 d north and 55 d south. It took four years to optimize the products, to reconcile the multiple passes into a best fit. As of mid 2005 we have been able to make unprecedented views of the reality of our planet.

What you see around the room has in almost all cases a fundamental layer of elevation surface (the only exceptions are the two far northern pieces) - about half are just elevation, with a color gradient and an imposed sun shadow, the other half include a draped Landsat image overlay (always in natural color), which has been rendered semi-transparent so that the shadowed elevation will show through.

The prints are large so that the viewer will feel small, and scales are just broader than would be the view from a jetliner. Each piece has no annotation, because I wanted them to be as unmarked as the ground itself. They take a little work to orient and begin to find one’s way within, but that effort will hopefully pay off in new personal recognitions, and maybe a fresh respect for the places that we inhabit.

Are there any questions??

EarthPattern.com / jhart@lightlink.com / 607-387-4880 / Jay Hart / Clearwater Graphics LLC / 336 Pennsylvania Avenue / Trumansburg NY 14886