Ten, fifteen, twenty dollars at a time, I have been sending money to environmental & human rights groups for years. Consequently, I have a sizeable collection of Free Personalized Mailing Labels and Thoughtful Notecards. What luck. I can't throw them away.

A few weeks ago, prompted by an unsolicited mailing from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (what? does caring about torture, Tibetans, fishes, and the Ivorybilled Woodpecker automatically make me a three-cornered hat fetishist?) I was looking at all the cards together & I realized there was something funny going on with their animal imagery. The cards either featured 1) natural or manmade landscapes empty of all animal life, 2) noble predators & other large animals all by themselves, 3) cutesy animals in safe, idealized landscapes.

I decided to see what happened if I mashed them up. Put the wolves in Williamsburg, make cutesy-animal-shaped holes in the landscape, insert a predator or two next to a Christmassy covered bridge. Here are some results (click to see full images in new windows):