Imagine a group of rhinos rampaging through a restaurant, while we concentrate on adjusting the napkins, filling a glass, and brushing up some crumbs. So it seems on land, we focus on our house lots, our housing developments, sometimes our towns, while giant forces are degrading, even transforming, our valuable land. These are new giants, unseen in history. We notice their fingers, an ear, a heel, but rarely see them. Who are they? What's happening to the land? Should we keep fixing the little pieces and hand our land to the giants? Or could we raise our vision … and do something?

This leadoff chapter provides a set of unusual regional and land lenses through which to view urban regions, a key analytic foundation for later chapters. Chapters 2 to 4 add the other major foundations: land planning, socio-economics, and natural systems. The resulting synthesis uses three motifs: (1) urban regions; (2) natural systems; and (3) human uses of nature, to open windows and to pinpoint ecological and planning insights ready for use.

A framework

As a student and insatiable traveler, my idealism colored problems and offered ready solutions. But also as a budding scientist I learned to look more deeply, analyze the internal elements of a problem, and try to expunge opinions from my science. Generally, problems were narrow, at my scale of vision. Those were exciting times.

Big pictures were all around, but as solvable problems I missed them. Big wars were leaving scarred lands and people.