By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine - We are the great defacers of the world; and I am not talking about pollution. I grew up among the ugliness of a landscape pitted with coal mines, and heaped with hills of culm—the refuse of 80 years of shovels and picks and dynamite. But that is at least an honest ugliness, for the fuel has to be taken from the earth. If not, we must commit ourselves to life before the industrial revolution, and then it is farewell to most of the forests that now spread across North America; for subsistence, farms require land.