Wallace Stegner's 1960 Wilderness Letter sent to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, in its entirety.
Los Altos, California
December 3, 1960
David E. Pesonen
Wildland Research Center
Agricultural Experiment Station
243 Mulford Hall
University of California
Berkeley 4, 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.
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. 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, 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
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...."
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. 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. 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.
Very sincerely yours,
Wallace Stegner
via cold splinters and the wilderness society
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