I remember feeling something of the same dislocation—of sadness, even—when the Texas panhandle, the great range where my father and my uncles used to go dashing in their days as cowboys, began to be plowed, irrigated, and turned into cotton fields. I wanted those prairies to be left alone, though for no better reason than that my family had been formed on them. But we’re a grasping species; nothing of value is likely to be left alone. If the land can be changed so as to be made to yield more money, it will be; though eventually, when it no longer yields money, it may slowly go back to being
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