National Stamp Collecting Month

Earthscapes featured on newest Forever stamps

It’s National Stamp Collecting Month and a good time to buy the newest set of Forever stamps, which bear enticing images of natural, agricultural and urban landscapes on earth taken from up above in ultra lights, airplanes and satellites. Many of the images will look familiar to anyone who has looked down from the window of an airplane.

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Here’s the postal service description of the Earthscape images:

In the top row, we fly over America’s stunning wilderness. While a volcanic eruption scars the forests of Washington State, fog drifts over the timeless sandstone towers of Utah’s Monument Valley. In Alaska, a wide stripe that looks like a highway is actually a glacier, an immense conveyer belt of ice. At its base, jagged white shards resembling broken glass are really icebergs, bobbing in a lake.

 

The stamps in the center row may look like abstract art, but they show five products being gathered, grown, or harvested: salt, timber, grain, cherries, and cranberries. Center-pivot irrigation systems create the beguiling play of geometric shapes in the middle stamp, although bystanders on the ground might see only sprinklers in fields of wheat, alfalfa, corn, and soybeans.

In the bottom row, urban life takes center stage. Highways corkscrew around themselves and neat subdivisions sport tiny blue pools.