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A Celebration of Old Growth
by Miles Lowry
I have been a conservationist, teacher and artist my whole adult life. This current collection of images entitled "A Celebration of Old Growth" is a result of four years of travel throughout the eastern US.
Old growth forests and savannas are the remnants of our forested past. They are the genetic banks from which our forests' futures will be drawn. They are indeed the last echoes of a forested landscape that once dominated eastern North America.
These survivors can be found in almost every state in the East but the most significant ones are in Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, the Smoky Mountains, Southern Illinois, Upper Michigan, Minnesota and North and South Carolina. These pictures represent about half of those sites.
Even more rare are savannas. These isolated stands of open-grown oaks and hickory served as buffers between the forests of the East and the tallgrass prairies of the plains. The more striking graphic images of the oak savannas are from the western and northern Chicago counties.
Visually, most of us see American natural grandeur as defined by grand vistas from the West. My collection of images is an attempt to add to that iconic Western definition of grandeur an element of eastern subtle complexity and species diversity found only here.
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