Tag: wilderness

You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it needs you to do.

So too does my eye for the Creator veiled and present in His evidence. Without them, how could I recognize what was first and larger in what I sense of the present? I couldn’t love the Appalachians without learning the language of their cosmic and physical existence.

Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s book consistently does this is enough to commend it as a constructive entry in this vexed genre.

Bugbee’s thought suggests a defiant confidence that the things themselves can and do reveal themselves to us in their independence, if only we would have the patience to let them.

Particularly in a culture that values comfort and convenience, we need to listen to those who have encountered wilderness with the humility and attentiveness necessary to receive its instruction.

The Wilderness calls forth the bond of community, labor, and leisure. It calls forth the best in humanity, so long as humans understand their relationship to the Wilderness.

We also need technological monks.

The explosive growth in wilderness-designated land is one of the few modern desert Southwest trends of which I heartily approve. In 1975, Arizona had several hundred thousand acres of designated wilderness; now there are something like 4.8 million acres in 92 units. Fedeally managed or not, I approve. And I cite Edward Abbey as my authority.

Washington Park, Arizona. It used to take seven hours to get here by car, even though the journey was only some 90 miles from...