Prologue

Summary

I grew up in one corner of the American West where two events marked my developing environmental sensibility. I had my “machine in the garden” moment in Seattle during the mid-1970s when I was eight years old, the age when geographer Yi Fu Tuan says we begin to develop emotional attachments to places. I remember stopping in my tracks as I passed a window overlooking my elementary school playground. Transfixed, I watched through the frame as a bulldozer chewed aging concrete like a mechanized Cookie Monster. The machine rolled through rusting jungle gyms and tetherball courts and across the painted yellow lines of foursquare courts and hopscotch games. The bulldozer revealed brown dirt just inches below the surface.¹