Why We Need Wilderness

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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 a 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 or 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 200 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 than 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

From The Sound of Mountain Water by Wallace Stegner. © 1969 by Wallace Stegner. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.

Help Preserve Wilderness

The Wilderness Act charged Congress with the responsibility to protect our wilderness resources for present and future generations. But our remaining wild places face increasing threats from varied development pressures — seven out of every eight acres of U.S. wild land today are at risk of irreversible damage, according to the Campaign for America’s Wilderness. To locate protected areas near you and learn how you can help preserve remaining wilderness, contact:

Campaign for America’s Wilderness
(202) 544-3691
www.leaveitwild.org

The Wilderness Society
(800) 843-9453
www.tws.org

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