Winter is settling into our canyon community, the sun has lost its earlier intensity, the days have grown shorter, and I find myself drawn to the warmth of the evening fire, where long nights lend themselves to good bourbon, good books, and complex and contradictory ideas.
In the American West, few issues invite more complex contemplation than our relationship with wild spaces and their preservation. The tensions between access and protection, between conservation and preservation, between wilderness as idea and wilderness as place, have occupied some of our finest writers and thinkers. Many of whom you’ll find on our shelves, including Wallace Stegner and Jack Turner, who represent two distinct voices in this ongoing dialogue - Stegner advocating for wilderness preservation through policy and poetic appeal, Turner calling for a more radical reconnection with true wildness. While they often diverge in their thinking about wilderness and its meanings, both have profoundly influenced my own complicated relationship with western landscapes and their protection.
Wallace Stegner, who would become known as the "Dean of Western Writers," looms large over any serious discussion of wilderness, conservation, and the meaning we derive from wild places. Jackson Benson's masterful biography, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work, gives us an intimate portrait of this influential voice. Benson's careful research reveals how Stegner's early life - marked by constant movement across the West's harsh landscapes - shaped his understanding of both the region's fragility and its importance to the American character. Through detailed correspondence and interviews, we see Stegner evolve from a young writer searching for his voice into the passionate defender of western landscapes and thoughtful critic of the mythology of the frontier. What emerges is a portrait of a man wrestling with contradictions: the need for development and preservation, the romance of the West and its harsh realities, the individual and community. Benson's biography reads like a history of the modern American West itself, told through the life of one of its most articulate champions.
This biographical understanding adds profound depth to what may be Stegner's most influential piece of writing, "The Wilderness Letter," found in the essay collection The Sound of Mountain Water. Written in 1960 to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, this remarkable document transcends its original purpose as a piece of conservation advocacy. In it, Stegner articulates what he calls the "geography of hope" - the idea that wilderness has value beyond recreation or resource extraction, that it serves as essential nourishment for the American spirit. The letter became foundational to the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act and remains perhaps the most eloquent argument ever made for preservation of wild places. Reading it today, one is struck by its prescience and continuing relevance to our ongoing debates about public lands and wilderness protection.
Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild carries Stegner's concerns into our contemporary moment with fierce intensity. In these passionate essays, Turner argues that our modern relationship with "wilderness" has become increasingly artificial and abstracted from actual wild places and experiences. With philosophical rigor and personal experience as a mountaineer and guide, Turner challenges our comfortable notions about what it means to truly encounter the wild. His essays range from meditations on the disappearance of predators from our landscapes to pointed critiques of the commercialization of outdoor recreation. Turner's prose can be uncomfortable reading - he means to disturb our complacency - but his love for wild places and concern for their future echoes Stegner's vital message about what we lose when we lose the wild.
Among Turner's essays, "The Maze and Aura" stands out as particularly compelling in its weaving of adventure narrative with philosophical insight. Through his account of navigating the canyons of southern Utah, Turner explores how true wilderness experiences evoke a sense of wonder that has become increasingly rare in our managed and mediated world. The essay transforms from an account of desert exploration into a meditation on how we've lost our capacity for genuine amazement in an age where every canyon and crevice has been mapped and photographed. And, as a side note, now rated on social media. Turner argues that this loss of wonder - what he calls the "aura" of wild places - represents something more profound than mere nostalgia; it signals a fundamental shift in how we relate to the natural world.
Though Stegner and Turner approach wilderness from different angles - one seeking its preservation through policy and poetic appeal, the other demanding a more radical reconnection with true wildness - both voices remain essential to contemporary discussions about conservation and preservation in the West. Together, these works remind us that our relationship with wilderness is not merely about preservation of scenic beauty or recreational opportunities, but about maintaining something essential to our cultural and spiritual wellbeing.
Happy Holidays! May your winter days be filled with good books and wild thoughts. Cheers to you all.
Dave
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