 Poets also are recorders of what is happening around us. It's the oldest literary art form. And it's been documenting our lives since antiquity. George Perkin March was a Vermonter. And he was the first person to give the clarion call of what man is doing to the environment. So he pretty much became our first environmentalist. This is song as a bridge thesis of George Perkin's March's Man in Nature. The pendulous branches of the Norway spruce slowly move as though approving our gentle walk and woodstock. And the oak leaves yellowing this morning fall in the parking lot of Marsh Billings Rockefeller. We hear beneath our feet their susirous as the churning of wonder found to in the eyes of a child who has just sprinted toward a paddock of Jersey cows. The fate of the land is the fate of man. Some have never fallen in love with a river of grass or rested in the dignity of the great blue heron standing alone, saint-like in a marshland, nor envied the painted turtle sunning on a log, nor think, as I have, the bobcat for modeling how to navigate dynasties of snow. For he survives in both forests and imaginations, away from the dark hands of developers and myths of prophets. The fate of the land is the fate of man.