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Exploring The Geography of Hope
In 1960, Stegner wrote his Wilderness Letter to the US Congress in which he made the argument that altered the course of how America viewed public land and wilderness. In the letter he described wilderness as places of spiritual renewal, the birth of awe, and recognition of identity. He concluded, saying we need to preserve wilderness as a means of “reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
Wallace Stegner - Wilderness Letter
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 . . .