Wild Dreams and Steps to Reality

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Dramatically enough, the team, which includes three women climbers, has in its possession messages from thousands of people, recorded on compact disc, carrying their hopes for mother earth. Appropriately, many of these messages will come from Mother Earth News itself. The messages will be broadcast from the mountain not only around the world but also outward—to deep space, as a kind of electronic time capsule.

Is this climb purely symbolic, somewhat of a public relations stunt?
Ask the climbers, slogging into a region of near anoxia, watching over their shoulders for storms and avalanches, their lives depending on two other climbers they hardly know, from countries that haven't gotten along, linked together by a rope. Says Whittaker, "Nature is not subterfuge; nature is not politics."

Sometime after Earth Day, the team—successful or not—will descend, hauling tons of junk off the mountain. And their task will continue. They will set about raising funds to reproduce the compact disc with all those pleas for peace and the restoration of health to the planet. And they will send those messages to the attention of political leaders of the world in hopes that those leaders will listen" and, in the manner of the mountaineers, rope up together, keep their eyes on the summit—on the universal goal—and take one step after another, over and over, until it is achieved. There is a creed for this effort, and one that is suitable for the 20th anniversary of Earth Day and for the decades to come. It's a quote from Norman Cousins; "The wild dream is the first step to reality. It is the direction finder by which people locate higher goals and discover their higher selves."

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