Driving at night along Interstate 84, through the relic of what was once “the brass capital ofAmerica,” Waterbury, Connecticut, a creamy glow radiates from the top of a hill overlooking the freeway. A bend in the road suddenly reveals the light source as a neon cross, thirty feet tall— virtually all that remains of “HolyLand, USA,” built by a local lawyer in the 1960s. Familiar as we are with reli­gious theme parks, Holy Land seems immediately classifiable as a Catholican swer to Disneyland. But its siting as a hill pilgrimage, its devotional mis­sion, and its conscientious if clumsy attempts to reproduce the topography of the Passion in southern New England mark it as the last sacro monte, the artificial Calvaries whose origins date back to the Italian Franciscans of the fifteenth century.

For what I have tried to show in Landscape and Memory is that the cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature. All our land­scapes, from the city park to the mountain hike, are imprinted with our tena­cious, inescapable obsessions. So that to take the many and several ills of the environment seriously does not, I think, require that we trade in our cultural legacy or its posterity. It asks instead that we simply see it for what it has truly been: not the repudiation, but the veneration, of nature.