In 1915, Henry Ford bought around 2,000 acres of low-lying riverbank land outside Detroit with a specific dream in mind, turning it into a bird sanctuary. The First World War intervened before that dream could take shape, and the marshland instead became a shipyard, then grew steadily into the Ford Rouge Complex, completed in 1928 as the largest factory on Earth. For most of the twentieth century, Ford's original vision of birds nesting on that land seemed to have been permanently buried under 93 buildings and 16 million square feet of factory floor. Then, in 2000, engineers covered ten acres of one truck plant's roof with a thick carpet of low-growing succulent plants, and within days, birds were nesting there again, on top of the very factory that had replaced Ford's original sanctuary a century earlier.
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