Wallace Stegner: Wilderness

Wallace Stegner was American historian, writer, and environmentalist. Explore interesting quotes on wilderness.
Wallace Stegner: 58 quotes1 like

“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. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

“If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.”

Wallace Stegner

It All Began with Conservation Smithsonian magazine, April 1990, pages 35-43

“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as 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 of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

Wallace Stegner

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)

“It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.”

Wallace Stegner

"The War Between the Rough Riders and the Bird Watchers" (1959 address; reprinted in Wildlands and Our Civilization, David Brower, editor, 1964, and in Voices for the Wilderness, William Schwarz, editor, 1970, page 76)