Job hunting is making me philosophical...or crazy, depending on how you define it.
I recorded a show last week and finally got around to watching it today as I ate lunch. It aired on KUED and is entitled, "Wilderness: The Great Debate."
I'm sure it will play again—if you get the chance to watch, I highly recommend it. It's fairly even-handed, though not completely. But put aside the politics of it all and simply listen to the arguments being made.
The program quotes Wallace Stegner, of whom, I am loath to admit, I’d never heard. Among other things, Stegner was a novelist, professor, and environmental advocate. His Wilderness Letter is among his most famed writings and is absolutely worth reading regardless of your political leanings.
In this letter, Stegner argues for the importance of preserving wilderness in America. Not just high alpine wilderness that’s essentially inaccessible anyway, but wilderness in all its forms.
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…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.
He goes on to assert that, even if you rarely spend time in the great outdoors, you can still benefit from knowing there are places in this world that aren’t covered with pavement or pocked with power lines and billboards and cell towers and business parks.
The reminder and the reassurance that [wilderness] is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it…. 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.
I've always loved being outdoors, especially in the mountains. From the time I was a Boy Scout hiking to a secluded lake in the Uintas, right up to the present day when, astride my mountain bike in the early morning hours, I huff and puff my way through solitary meadows and onto silent peaks and overlooks.
Stegner says of his upbringing on the plains of Saskatchewan, “I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone.”
I know I certainly have. And I intend to do more to ensure that my children, and their children after them, are afforded the same opportunity I’ve had on countless occasions: To marvel at the majesty of God’s creation, and to look inward as they search out their own identity and struggle to find their own place in this world.
4 comments:
Bravo.
I'm not a big fan of the Wilderness Letter.
Wallace Stegner starts from a position chosen by many who try to argue for why we, the Human Race, should preserve some wilderness.
"These are some of the things wilderness can do for us."
Here's the thing. The reason for preserving the wilderness, the best reason, is not what it can do for us.
The whole idea that we have to ask ourselves how it benefits us not to destroy the natural world indicates a criminal mentality.
It's behaving as if the only reason we don't all rob each other is that we have laws and police and we want to avoid the consequences.
Most of us have sympathy for our neighbors and compassion for the world.
Interesting point. Have you read anything else on the topic that expresses the same need in a different way?
Have you read "Call Me Ishmael"?
That's a whole novel on the subject, wort of.
A shorter thing to read might be the poem, "Me up at does" by e.e. cummings.
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