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7 WILDERNESS ~ A Place of Humility Terry Tempest Williams A Sand County Almanac changed my life. It is the only book that I can remember where and when I read it for the first time: Dinosaur National Monument,June 1974. My mother and grandmother were talking comfortably in their lawn chairs, my brothers were playing on the banks of the Green River, and I was sitting beneath the shade of a generous cottonwood tree. Aldo Leopold spoke to me. With a yellow marker in hand, I underlined the words: 'Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.... The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth."l And a few pages later: "Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility."2 I closed the book having finished the last two chapters, 'Wilderness" and 'The Land Ethic." I wanted desperately to talk to someone about these ideas, but I kept quiet and tucked Leopold into my small denim pack, not realizing what the personal effect of that paperback copy, with its flaming orange sunset over wetlands, would be. I was eighteen years old. Twenty-five years later, I can honestly say it is Aldo Leopold's voice I continue to hear whenever I put pen to paper in the name of wildness. The essays of A Sand County Almanac were published in 1949. They were revolutionary then and they are revolutionary now. His words have helped to create the spine of the American wilderness movement. The vision of Aldo Leopold manifested itself on the land in 1924, when he persuaded the United States Forest Service to designate 1,200 square miles within the Gila National Forest as a wilderness area. That was forty years before the Wilderness Act of 1964 was signed into law. Aldo Leopold perceived the value ofwilderness to society long before it was part of the public discourse. He has inspired us to see the richness in biological systems and to hear all heartbeats as one unified pulse in a 99 100 Part I. Conservation Science and Practice diversified world. He understood this as a scientist and land manager, and he understood it as a natural philosopher. When Leopold writes about "the community concept" and states that "the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,"3 he instinctively elevates the discussion above what one typically hears in wilderness debates-that the land is meant for our use at our discretion, that profit must dictate public lands policy. And when he takes this notion of interdependent parts one step further and proposes that we "[enlarge] the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land," he challenges us.4 In a politically conservative and theocratic state like mine (Utah), this kind of thinking may be regarded as grounds for heresy, evidence of paganism, the preemptive strike before black helicopters fueled by the United Nations move in to defend public lands against the people who live there. But what I love most about AIdo Leopold is that he keeps moving through his lines of natural logic with eloquent rigor and persistence. Finally, he ruptures our complacency and asks simply, "Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, butjust what and whom do we love?"5 Wilderness. In the American West, there may not be a more explosive, divisive, and threatening word. Wilderness. The place ofa mind, where slickrock canyons hold a state of grace for eons whether or not human beings make an appearance. Wilderness. The mind ofa place, where perfection is found through the evolutionary path of a mountain lion slinking down the remote ridges of the Kaiparowitz Plateau like melted butter. Roadless. Ruthless. Wilderness. "A resource which can shrink but not grow."6 ... Shrink but not grow ... AIdo Leopold's words echo throughout the wildlands of North America. Why is this so difficult for us to understand? Why as we enter the twenty-first century do we continue to find the notion of wilderness so controversial? Perhaps Leopold would say wilderness is becoming more difficult to understand because there is less and less wilderness to be found. Wilderness is threatening as a word because it is now threatened as a place. How can we begin...

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