Embedded Files
December 3, 1960
David E. Pesonen
Wildland Research Center
Agricultural Experiment Station
243 Mulford Hall
University of California
Berkeley, Calif.
Dear Mr. Pesonen:
I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor
Recreation Resources Review Commission's report. If I may, I should like to urge
some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is
ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. (CREATE COUNTERARGUMENT): Hunting, fishing, hiking,
mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all,
surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific
yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in
its man-made imbalance. (CONCEDE): These are noble arguments for wilderness.
(CONVERSE): What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses,
valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an
intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical minded--but
then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to
them.
I want to speak for the wilderness idea as something that has helped form
our character and that has certainly shaped our history as a people. It has no more
to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation, or than the
strenuousness and optimism and expansiveness of what the historians call the
"American Dream" have to do with recreation. Nevertheless, since it is only in this
recreation survey that the values of wilderness are being compiled, I hope you will
permit me to insert this idea between the leaves, as it were, of the recreation report.
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 (NEED TO REJECT INDUSTRIAL TOURISM) , 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. (ORGANIC TRANSCENDECE IN WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE)
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. (SPIRITUAL VALUE OF WILDERNESS(
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 an 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, any more, 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. (ECOCENTRISM)
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 subdued ways subdued by what we conquered. (WILDERNESS EXPERIENCE DEVELOPS APPRECIATION OF LIBERTY AND DIGNITY)
The Connecticut Yankee, sending likely candidates from King Arthur's unjust
kingdom to his Man Factory for rehabilitation, was over-optimistic, as he later
admitted. These things cannot be forced, they have to grow. To make such a man,
such a democrat, such a believer in human individual dignity, as Mark Twain
himself, the frontier was necessary, Hannibal and the Mississippi and Virginia City,
and reaching out from those the wilderness; the wilderness as opportunity and idea,
the thing that has helped to make an American different from and, until we forget it
in the roar of our industrial cities, more fortunate than other men. For an American,
insofar as he is new and different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself
in the wild. The American experience has been the confrontation by old peoples and
cultures of a world as new as if it had just risen from the sea. That gave us our hope
and our excitement, and the hope and excitement can be passed on to newer
Americans, Americans who never saw any phase of the frontier. (NATURE DEVELOPS THOUGHT: "VISIBLE DISTANCE BEFORE US AND BEHIND US ARE OUR CONCEPTS OF THE PAST AND HOPE FOR THE FUTURE."- RALPH EMERSON)
But only so long as we keep the remainder of our wild as a reserve and a promise--a sort of wilderness
bank.
As a novelist, I may perhaps be forgiven for taking literature as a reflection,
indirect but profoundly true, of our national consciousness. And our literature, as
perhaps you are aware, is sick, embittered, losing its mind, losing its faith. Our
novelists are the declared enemies of their society. There has hardly been a serious
or important novel in this century that did not repudiate in part or in whole
American technological culture for its commercialism, its vulgarity, and the way in
which it has dirtied a clean continent and a clean dream. I do not expect that the
preservation of our remaining wilderness is going to cure this condition. But the
mere example that we can as a nation apply some other criteria than commercial
and exploitative considerations would be heartening to many Americans, novelists
or otherwise. We need to demonstrate our acceptance of the natural world,
including ourselves; we need the spiritual refreshment that being natural can
produce. And one of the best places for us to get that is in the wilderness where the
fun houses, the bulldozers, and the pavement of our civilization are shut out. (SPIRITUAL VALUE OF WILDERNESS)
Sherwood Anderson, in a letter to Waldo Frank in the 1920s, said it better than I
can. "Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the
fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in
some way been lost.... Mystery whispered in the grass, played in the branches of
trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust
at evening on the prairies.... I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my
belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formerly at work among our
people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain.... I can remember
old fellows in my home town speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big
empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of
quiet...." (WILDERNESS AS THERAPEUTIC)
We could learn it too, even yet; even our children and grandchildren could
learn it. But only if we save, for just such absolutely non-recreational, impractical,
and mystical uses as this, all the wild that still remains to us.
It seems to me significant that the distinct downturn in our literature from
hope to bitterness took place almost at the precise time when the frontier officially
came to an end, in 1890, and when the American way of life had begun to turn
strongly urban and industrial. The more urban it has become, and the more frantic
with technological change, the sicker and more embittered our literature, and I
believe our people, have become. For myself, I grew up on the empty plains of
Saskatchewan and Montana and in the mountains of Utah, and I put a very high
valuation on what those places gave me. And if I had not been able to periodically to
renew myself in the mountains and deserts of western America I would be very
nearly bughouse. Even when I can't get to the back country, the thought of the
colored deserts of southern Utah, or the reassurance that there are still stretches of
prairies where the world can be instantaneously perceived as disk and bowl, and
where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five
directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation. The idea alone can
sustain me. But as the wilderness areas are progressively exploited or "improve", as
the jeeps and bulldozers of uranium prospectors scar up the deserts and the roads
are cut into the alpine timberlands, and as the remnants of the unspoiled and
natural world are progressively eroded, every such loss is a little death in me. In us.
I am not moved by the argument that those wilderness areas which have already
been exposed to grazing or mining are already deflowered, and so might as well be
"harvested". For mining I cannot say much good except that its operations are
generally short-lived. The extractable wealth is taken and the shafts, the tailings, and
the ruins left, and in a dry country such as the American West the wounds men
make in the earth do not quickly heal. Still, they are only wounds; they aren't
absolutely mortal. Better a wounded wilderness than none at all. And as for grazing,
if it is strictly controlled so that it does not destroy the ground cover, damage the
ecology, or compete with the wildlife it is in itself nothing that need conflict with the
wilderness feeling or the validity of the wilderness experience. I have known
enough range cattle to recognize them as wild animals; and the people who herd
them have, in the wilderness context, the dignity of rareness; they belong on the
frontier, moreover, and have a look of rightness. The invasion they make on the
virgin country is a sort of invasion that is as old as Neolithic man, and they can, in
moderation, even emphasize a man's feeling of belonging to the natural world.
Under surveillance, they can belong; under control, they need not deface or mar. I do
not believe that in wilderness areas where grazing has never been permitted, it
should be permitted; but I do not believe either that an otherwise untouched
wilderness should be eliminated from the preservation plan because of limited
existing uses such as grazing which are in consonance with the frontier condition
and image.
Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth
preserving. Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high
mountain country. For all the usual recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest
wildernesses are obviously the most important, both as genetic banks and as beauty
spots. (INTRINSIC VALUE AND AESTHEIC VALUE OF WILDERNESS)
But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe,
other kinds will serve every bit as well. Perhaps, because they are less friendly to
life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better. On our Saskatchewan
prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two
lights on all the dark rounding earth. The earth was full of animals--field mice,
ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes. I knew
them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look
upon animals in any other way since. The sky in that country came clear down to the
ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and
hawks. I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from
being much alone. A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the
sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the
sea. It is as good a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the
vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.
So are great reaches of our western deserts, scarred somewhat by prospectors but
otherwise open, beautiful, waiting, close to whatever God you want to see in them.
Just as a sample, let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah,
near the Capitol Reef National Monument. In that desert climate the dozer and jeep
tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making
the scars insignificant. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as
Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and
worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from
Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of
springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the
slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value.
Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the
strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two
hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of
the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into
themselves as anywhere I know. (SOLITUDE IN WILDERNESS ENCOURAGES APPERCEPTION: AWARENESS OF HOW ONE THINKS)
And if they can't even get to the places on the
Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply
contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled
part of earth is still there.
These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we
need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles
of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. 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. (LANGUAGE / THOUGH STEMS FORM NATURE: WILDERNESS ENCOURAGES THOUGHT AND OPTIMISM: HOPE)
Very sincerely yours,
Wallace Stegner
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