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66e265c We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it. David Gessner
06f5a77 But if we are going to celebrate the gains, then we had better look hard at what has been lost. Property taxes and crime have soared along with employment. The incidence of rape in Vernal exceeds that of the rest of Utah, which exceeds that of the United States as a whole. At the same time, air quality has dramatically worsened, and last winter's ozone levels in this rural county rivaled those of Los Angeles. These very real problems are co.. David Gessner
3519542 Our where determines our who," Reg Saner once wrote." David Gessner
4c6b7c6 Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell: When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American.. David Gessner
533c7c6 As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: "These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar." David Gessner
053701b What I want to preserve are not just beautiful places but the possibility that an individual can, in this overheated, overcrowded world, find a place to be quiet and alone. To have their own freedom. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn't there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines? David Gessner
7f0ea2e One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world. David Gessner
d097ef9 Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: "I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since." David Gessner
35933db As the years have gone by Lake Powell has continued to silt up, losing more than 100,000 acre-feet per year at last count, and hydrologists believe--as Abbey did--that silting will eventually lead to a pool of mud, not water. Michael Kellett is the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996 with the help of David Brower with the goal of one day witnessing the Colorado flowing freely through the old Glen Canyon... David Gessner
a121f92 What Ed and I knew, on some fundamental level, is that once you've been out in it long enough, it becomes the top priority," he told us as we settled into the study. "When you're out in it fully, you recognize it's where you belong. We concluded that it took a good ten days in the wilderness until you began to change. You need to live in the spirit of nature, so that it's totally and intuitively in your system. Then you don't have any choic.. David Gessner
b190a40 One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of "connectivity." It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region's threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It's true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphras.. David Gessner
b52ab88 Peacock said that we all have different-size territories and I would argue that one of the more important things that he and Abbey offer is that they make us uncomfortable with the size of the plots we have settled on. They push us, and inspire us to move beyond our comfortable cells. "It depends on how you are yarded," wrote Thoreau. In an age of cell phones and computers and little contact with the elemental earth, most of us are yarded p.. David Gessner
48fecb4 DeVoto shared with Stegner an ability to see the big picture. But he shared plenty with Abbey, too: a tendency toward overstatement, a willingness to bloody noses, a love of tweaking the overly proper and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the "Lone Ranger," and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and '50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes (politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men) at bay as they clamored on about takin.. David Gessner
a900509 If you have never seen a fracking boomtown, it can be hard to picture. You drive into a town that at first seems like any town, until you slowly notice that on this particular Main Street there are far too many hotels. Then you start to see the oversized white trucks, the hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silveradaos that prowl the crowded streets, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates (even when you are nowhere near these pl.. David Gessner
f267d8a Forty years later, in 1995, Terry Tempest Williams, working with the Utah writer Stephen Trimble, put together Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an anthology of the work of twenty writers whose purpose was to help preserve 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah. Just as with This Is Dinosaur, the book was distributed to every member of Congress. It was part of the effort that led to the creation of the Grand Stairca.. David Gessner
631f608 ED ABBEY'S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to "emancipate themselves." It is at that point that A.. David Gessner
687d990 ED ABBEY'S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to "emancipate themselves." It is at that point that A.. David Gessner
0448d08 Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner's thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell's beautiful mind. Powell was, according to Stegner, "incorrigibly sane," a man who tried to dispense with fable and "dispel the mists," a man who saw the facts and not the romance. The real enemies were not just greedy and stubborn congressmen but "credulity, superstition,.. David Gessner
67a23a8 DeVoto decried "the economy of liquidation" that had prevailed in the West since it was first settled, a philosophy that applied to aquifers and farms as well as mines. In the West "the miner's right to exploit transcends all other rights whatsoever." As for agriculture, it soon became clear that it was impossible without irrigation, and that irrigation itself was impossible without the massive dams that only the federal government could bu.. David Gessner
70f16d1 Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness. David Gessner
5d11f87 One thing he did more responsibly than almost any Fellow I remember. We had a practice then of having the current Fellows act as preliminary readers on the applications of people wanting to come the next year. Among the manuscripts that he got to read was one by Ken Kesey, then still at Oregon. The manuscript was a football novel all about homosexual quarterbacks and corrupt coaches. Ed's comment (we asked only for a rating: Good, possible,.. David Gessner
ec45868 But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years--that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be c.. David Gessner
fef6486 Terry Tempest Williams's koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: "I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways, Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical." David Gessner
9c0eaa2 In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical consequences: while a cow might properly graze on a half-acre in the lush East, it would require fifty times that amount of land in most of the West. It followed that the standard acreage of settlement should be different, and it followed that settle.. David Gessner
807c856 It was one of those bookstores that barely exist anymore in our age of the antiseptic chain store, replete with the smell of the musty pages and the sense that reading itself is, at its heart, a countercultural act. David Gessner
109e99a Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution in human history. . . . As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country . . . there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element--always present in our history--to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance (not excluding torture of course) in order to preserve--not wilderness!--but the status quo, th.. David Gessner
3d1b55d Stegner, for all his striving toward largeness, shared some of Abbey's bitterness. Of course he, characteristically, framed it in a larger way. He believed that western writing as a whole was ignored, and as he became known throughout his home region he chafed against being considered regional--when considered at all--by the East. I remembered watching a television interview with Stegner where he mentioned that something he had written had .. David Gessner
d86927b How some scientists speculated that gathering around fires was the original unique characteristic of human beings. Not language or metaphor or tool use but the social circle, the gathering around the flame, the place where all those other discoveries were communicated. "Yup, that's right. Around the campfire you have a lot of spirit and it comes out in different ways. Kidding each other, serious thought. Singing. Politics, nature, jokes. Ev.. David Gessner
cf93ac9 Stegner's could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: "I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meet.. David Gessner
cb5a8b5 You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future." David Gessner
56168b8 Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job. David Gessner
16ea88f There is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us we then ruin. David Gessner
01784f7 We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the difficulty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people and cars and buildings, they don't want to make a movie where the principal and intended victims are private or industrial property. Peacock cursed the various producers and directors. He had written several drafts of scripts for the movie and e.. David Gessner
543a2f4 One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way," he said. "That's a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don't look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness." David Gessner
42d7ef8 I write regularly for OnEarth and OnEarth.org, the publications of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and for my updating of the big-picture ideas about the aridity of the West I relied on the up-to-the-minute reporting of my colleagues at that magazine, particularly that of Michael Kodas on the western fires. For a larger synthesis of current and coming climate changes I looked toward Fred Pearce's When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--the D.. David Gessner
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