#Into the wilderness full
#Into the wilderness free

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your 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. I believe that you are working on the wilderness portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission's report.

#Into the wilderness full

”īelow is full text of Wallace Stegner's 'Wilderness Letter,' written to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, and subsequently in his 'Wilderness Idea,' in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969).

#Into the wilderness free

'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. In an excerpt from the letter, Stegner wrote: This letter was used to introduce the Wilderness Act, which established the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. In 1960, he wrote his famous Wilderness Letter on the importance of federal protection of wild places. Stegner joined the conservation movement in the 1950s while fighting the construction of a dam on Dinosaur National Monument’s Green River. Stegner also served as assistant to Stewart Udall, the secretary of the department of interior under President Kennedy. Wallace Stegner’s fiction novels include Pulitzer Prize winner “Angle of Repose,” National Book Award winner “The Spectator Bird” and “Crossing to Safety.” His nonfiction works include “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” and “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.”

This experience shaped Stegner’s writing and conservation ethic.

Wallace Stegner’s family moved around the West throughout his youth as his father chased opportunities in North Dakota, Washington, Montana and California. He has been called “the dean of Western writers.” He taught at the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard and Stanford. Over a 60-year career, Stegner wrote over 60 fiction and non-fiction books.