Conservation Service. Born on a North Carolina cotton farm, Bennett re-
mained not only the practical agrarian but the outdoorsman and effusive
lover of wildflowers during all his decades in Washington, D.C.^36
tThe most ambitious of nature’s planner-protectors acknowledge that
sudden disaster may occur any time. Consider the enormous New Madrid
earthquake of . Radiating from its epicenter near the Mississippi River
in Missouri’s southeastern ‘‘bootheel,’’ the quake changed the courses of
rivers and creeks, rearranged many square miles of rural ground cover,
and shook shingles and bricks off buildings as far away as Cincinnati. Had
not most of the broad territory along the New Madrid Fault been rural
and thinly populated by humans, the quake’s consequences might have
been bloody indeed. Charleston, South Carolina, suffered major damage
and more than a hundred human fatalities during its earthquake of .
Great storms, too, can make lasting, sometimes permanent changes in
landscapes. The South’s western fringe is subject to tornadoes that carry
away not only buildings, animals, and people but tons of topsoil that hu-
mans have dared to uncover as farmland. Hurricanes have ever been the
bane of the humid South. Arising from the southern Atlantic near West
Africa, hurricanes may sweep over Gulf and South Atlantic beaches, their
tidal surges inundating all before them. Poor Charleston has been regu-
larly flooded and/or flattened throughout recorded weather history. Often
the winds of such storms slacken but nonetheless persist far inland, still
sodden, releasing prodigious loads of rain. Rivers in the piedmont over-
flow and return more punishment to already stricken tidewaters. Inland-
meandering storms have wrought their worst mischief in the mountains,
though. Fast-running streams carry down enormous loads of silt and rock
from above. Farms and towns have been ruined, sometimes buried, by
debris. Bridges are washed away and roads are blocked or undermined,
leaving rural people, especially, isolated and helpless. When such inland
storms occur after industrial-scale clear-cutting of forests, the landscape is
more vulnerable and the damage to nature, people, and their works much
worse.
Then there is fire, every temperate climate’s ancient boon and bane. Hu-
mans have ever employed fire both small and large to accomplish tasks
personally essential and communally ambitious. Most rural fires begin
with lightning, however, so a huge, all-consuming ‘‘wildfire’’ may imply
no human agency or blame at all. Still, human disturbance of landscapes
often leaves behind debris that is potential fuel for fire, inviting holo-