American pastoral

摘要

Just east of downtown Irvine, in southern California, a bucolic landscape is under construction. Little by little, a former military airport is being dismantled, to be replaced by grass, trees and a canyon 70 feet (21 metres) deep. When it is finished, Orange county's Great Park will cover 1,350 acres (550 hectares), more than one-and-a-half times as much as Central Park in New York. The biggest landscaped municipal park to be built in more than a century, it reveals much about how American attitudes to open space have changed.