By Lori Whalen, February 2026 There is a moment—subtle, visceral—when a place feels right. Not manicured or shaped unnaturally in an attempt to impress. Just right in a way that settles the body. The air smells familiar. The ground seems to know you. You are not a visitor so much as a participant. Most of us recognize this feeling immediately when we step into an intact ecosystem: a chaparral hillside after rain, coastal sage scrub at dawn, a forest where leaf litter muffles sound and time loosens its grip. What’s harder to articulate—but impossible to ignore—is how rare that feeling has become in our everyday landscapes. Instead, we are surrounded