[at-l] Wilderness and Wallace Stegner

[hikester@mindspring.com (Lynn Setzer)]

Hi everyone.

As usual, I'm a little off-topic in this on-going discussion of wilderness
and the AT, but I thought I'd throw this (excerpt below the line) into the
discussion, because people other than Benton MacKaye have  addressed  the
notion of wilderness.

The following is excerpted from a letter written by Wallace Stegner in 1960
to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, a body created by
Congress in 1958 to determine the recreational needs of Americans.

It seems to me important, to quote Stegner, to have "as much of it
[wilderness]as is still left, and as many kinds."

Many different kinds of wilderness....of which the AT is a part, perhaps not
as "wild" a  "wilderness" as some, but certainly not a paved, flat, urban
greenway.  Maybe the highest gift of the AT is *not* as a wilderness
preserve, but because it serves as such a wonderful launch pad to awaken the
sensibilities of those how hike it to further preserve other areas that
aren't yet so 'tamed.'

Lynn


________________________________________________
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining
wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned
into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining
members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the
last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads
through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free
in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and
automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see
ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of
the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals,
part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any
remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even
momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological
termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled
environment. We need wilderness preserved -- as much of it as is still left,
and as many kinds -- because it was the challenge against which our
character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it
is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten
years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the
incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our
insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is
there -- important, that is, simply as idea.

We are a wild species, as Darwin pointed out. Nobody ever tamed or
domesticated or scientifically bred us. But for at least three millennia we
have been engaged in a cumulative and ambitious race to modify and gain
control of our environment, and in the process we have come close to
domesticating ourselves. Not many people are likely, anymore, to look upon
what we call "progress" as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has
brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us
spiritual losses, and it threatens now to become the Frankenstein that will
destroy us. One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, to
remain, insofar as we can, good animals. Americans still have that chance,
more than many peoples; for while we were demonstrating ourselves the most
efficient and ruthless environment-busters in history, and slashing and
burning and cutting our way through a wilderness continent, the wilderness
was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the
land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became, in
America, something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least
partially to the fact that we were in subtle ways subdued by what we
conquered....

...We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do
more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring
ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.