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The Wilderness Letter 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 clean 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, seperate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the enviroment of trees and rocks and soil... 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 enviroment. We need wilderness preserved - as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds - because it was the challenged 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... It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our sane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there - important, that is, simply as idea... 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.by Wallace Stegner; 1960 |