Abstract
The land is changing; the land always changed. But the parameters that limit the working of observable change are also mutable, and they appear to be changing now. As a society, we may be entering a period when the range of changes we experience in the land around us becomes unbounded, and the changes themselves become harder to predict, harder to live with, and, for many of us, harder to accept. In the summer of 1903 Vernon O. Bailey, a wiry, owlish Midwesterner of 39 years, stood atop 12,529-foot Pecos Baldy in what is today the Pecos Wilderness northeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He looked out over a turbulent mountain sea of craggy peaks and high-altitude forest and judged that the forest has been sadly thinned by burning, fully three fourths of it having been burned over and a large part of the coniferous forest replaced by poplars [aspens] or kept open by repeated burning for grazing land.1 He made similar observations in the Taos Mountains:
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