would not be room for the incredible variety of landscapes that do lie here.

Unfortunately, the existence of a connection between people and this varied land is not as obvious in today's Connecticut as it once was. Ours is a densely populated state with people concentrated in mediumsized cities and suburban centers. We travel from home to work to store on highways and superhighways, which give birth to yet more roads lined with buildings and parking lots. The land has become hard to see. The beauty of the Connecticut River as it flows past by Hartford is obscured by interstates, bridges, and office towers. The shimmering apron of salt marshes along the coast is now a seldom-seen sight, blocked from view by municipal dumps, industrial complexes, residential development, and highway guard rails. Increasingly, the quiet panoramic vistas of Connecticut's countryside are being replaced by 55-mile-an-hour blurs.

During colonial times, when 95 percent of Connecticut residents lived and worked on farms, the bond with land was much clearer. People were in daily contact with soil, rocks, and hills. They could see the land and they knew their lives depended on that vision. Before the network of railroads and highways gave the nation's food supply the security of interconnection, Connecticut lived off the products of its farms, forests, waters, and mines. As the Honorable Thomas Butler, an agricultural reformer, phrased it in an address to the Connecticut State Agricultural Society in 1856, "If our land is rich, we are rich, for abundance is at our control; if poor, we are poor ... "²

Today, fewer than one percent of Connecticut's citizens farm the land, and most of what we eat is imported (although the remaining farms continue to be very productive). This figure reflects the rise of industrial society with all the great advances in living that we now enjoy, but it also represents an increasing isolation of Connecticut's people from their natural heritage. Environmentalist Aldo Leopold put it this way:

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the
danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the
other that heat comes from the furnace.³

2