A Passion For Wild Places Speech – Robert Marshall Award Dinner – TWS
Robert Marshall Award Speech, The Wilderness Society
Zion National Park, 1997
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I am deeply honored – and, even more, deeply humbled. Both because of the people who have received this award in years past, and also because of the people in this room who have done so much, over so many years, to save our wildest places. Even more than your tribute, I am honored by your friendship – and inspired by your example.
But I must confess that something else humbles me, even more than all of you champions of wilderness; the land itself. Its richness, diversity, and remarkable ability to awaken our deepest selves – all remind us that wild lands are so much more than the rocks, trees, and waterways that comprise them. The truth is, they are the stuff of miracles.
At the April meeting in Washington, we talked about the migration routes of geese – some of whom fly all the way from the remotest slopes of the Arctic across the Yukon, over western Canada, down the Rockies, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, and back, each and every year. So by the very beating of their wings, these geese connect some of the wildest places on our continent – and, as they pass over our heads, connect all of us to those very same places.
Aldo Leopold, who joined Bob Marshall in founding The Wilderness Society more than six decades ago, was so moved by their flight that he wrote: “The wind has gone with the geese. And so would I, were I the wind.”
Don’t you love that quote? You can almost hear those whooshing wings overhead. Yet, at the same time, it reminds me of another passage inspired by geese – a sadder one that contains a sober warning. The old English proverb, penned centuries ago, laments: “They jail the thief who steals the goose from the common. Yet they let loose the greater thief who steals the common from the goose.”
That is the paradox, isn’t it? With the unending power of wild places comes their unending fragility. With their infinite gift comes their infinite peril. And our work, the work of The Wilderness Society, is to protect those places. Not for just another season, or another session of Congress, but for all time.
I’ll never forget the day, when I was just a clumsy kid playing on our backyard swing (as opposed to the clumsy adult I am today), when my mother came home from the grocery store. She got out of the car, her arms cradling two immense shopping bags, and called to me. “This is a great day,” she declared. “Why?” I asked, expecting to hear that hamburger buns were on super sale that week. But she answered: “I just heard on the radio that a new law has passed. It’s called The Wildness Act. And do you know what it means?” Seeing the look on her face, I stopped swinging to listen. “This law means that there will always be some places in our country where no roads, no mines, no houses can ever be built. Places where the land will stay” – She paused, trying hard to remember the word – “untrammeled. Wilderness forever.”
I can still see the light in her face; still hear the ring in her voice. “Untrammeled. Wilderness forever.”
It seemed only a blink of an eye later when, to my own astonishment. I found myself the most junior member of this Governing Council. After my very first meeting, I was asked to join the most senior member, Jim Marshall, brother of Bob, in a radio interview about the work of The Wilderness Society. But for a few peeps here and there, I just sat and listened. (Even if I had had anything worth saying, which I didn’t, Jim Marshall was not someone to be interrupted easily.)
I still remember his answer when the interviewer, our own Kathy Kilmer, asked him: “Do we really have a chance to prevail? There is so much out there to save! And the forces out to destroy wilderness are so many and so powerful.” Jim Marshall looked her right in the eye and replied, “Yes. Because we are The Wilderness Society.”
Since then, there have been so many memorable moments with the staff and Governing Council of this organization that I could not possibly recount them all. Some of them, I’m sure, all of us would like to forget – but most of them continue to inspire me every day. Canoeing with Kim Elliman Across an Adirondack lake in the silence of dawn; talking Alaska with Mardy Murie as we baked cookies in her cabin; taking a lesson in telemark turns in Yellowstone from Ned Ames (and flunking royally); hearing Charles Wilkinson, at a roll call, weave his own wonderful words together with the words of Wally Stegner. Terry Tempest Williams, and Tom Watkins; witnessing Rindy O’Brien respond to a defeat on the Hill by declaring, “We’re not finished yet” – and, later, to the surprising victory that followed by declaring, “We’re still not finished;” feeling the irresistible force of Bert Fingerhut on a rampage about RS2477; pondering an alpine wildflower with Caroline Getty; and, most recently, watching one Bill Meadows grab hold of the helm … The examples go on endlessly.
Let me share just one more with you now. It happened at a Governing Council meeting eleven or twelve years ago. Arnie Bolle, dean emeritus of the University of Montana’s School of Forestry, whose own cabin bordered on the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, spoke to us about the outrage of sales below cost in the national forests. Then he assessed our chances of prevailing against the Forest Service as follows: “There are seven or eight foresters on our staff,” he declared. “And there are about thirty thousand of them working for the Forest Service. I’d say … It’s about an even match.”
Where from comes that kind of confidence, that kind of chutzpah? The answer is simple: Because we are The Wilderness Society.
But something deeper, more profound, is happening here. Listen! Can you hear those geese flying overhead? Behind all that commitment, all that chutzpah, lies passion – for wild places and all the forms of creation they sustain. Yet that begs the question: Where did the passion come from? Is there any way we could tap into it, or better yet into its origins, to deepen our resources, broaden our base, and clarify our vision?
For ages and ages – hundreds of generations – humanity saw itself as a single strand in the fabric of nature. Part of the weaving; tied to all the other threads. Wild animals were our familiars, as were the winds, storms, rocks, and rivers – all those beings now called “inanimate,” (which, from the Latin root of anima, means we are calling those beings “devoid of soul”). To sense the power of those bonds, we need look no farther than the petroglyphs in Utah’s magnificent canyons. In losing those bonds, we also lost the basic humility that they fostered. So we have withdrawn from our natural relationships – insulated ourselves with pavement, electronic imaging, and all terrain vehicles – to the point that we can now destroy entire ecosystems. And, in the end, ourselves.
This is not just bad policy. It is also bad science. It was Albert Einstein, after all, who said: “The most beautiful and most profound emotion one can experience is the sensation of the mystical … It is the source of all true science.”
There is a theory of physics, of causality, that some of you may know – called the Butterfly Effect. It postulates that everything in the universe is so closely interconnected that any action, no matter how insignificant, may have consequences far beyond what we can detect. That the merest stirring of a butterfly’s wings somewhere in a forest on planet Earth – If we could trace all the intervening events out through the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and beyond – could somehow affect the motions of distant stars.
How then does humanity find its way back – not out of, but into, the wilderness? The starting point of this trail, I believe, is passion.
My guess is that every one of us is here today, doing whatever we can to protect wilderness, because at some point in our lives we discovered a strikingly wild place – both on the land and in ourselves. It could have been a canyon, a marsh, an alpine meadow, or a simple tuft of moss clinging to a stone.
For me, I think, it was an old ponderosa pine tree that grew beside a steep-walled creek on my parents’ ranch in Colorado. Sometimes I would get off the school bus, cut across a pasture, and sit with my back against its trunk, looking up into its twisted branches, wondering whether they had, long before, swayed to the chanting of the Utes. The tree’s gnarled roots, undercut by the creek, had already started to pull free of the soil. Yet, as I leaned against that trunk, I felt somehow stronger and larger than before. I felt connected to something I could not understand, although I sensed that it was even more precious than the crystalline air in my lungs. Sometimes I even dared to wonder what it might be like to actually be a tree – to shed all my assorted human longings and sink my roots deeply in one place, to stay anchored in the same soil, season after season, year after year.
Almost thirty years later, the magic of that tree inspired a passage in one of my novels called The Ancient One. Now, I think, its’ terrible when people read from their own work. But since I am now a wandering bard, I have abandoned whatever sense of shame I may once have possessed. So I hope you will forgive me if I read to you a few lines. And if you hear any passion in those lines – that passion was the gift of a little slice of wilderness.
Kate, the heroine of this story, finds herself trapped in the distant past, with a tribe of Native Americans who lived in the Pacific Northwest hundreds of years ago. Her only hope of ever returning home, to her own time, is to do the most difficult thing she has ever done. She must merge her own life with the life of the only living thing old enough to reach across the centuries to her own time: a great redwood known as The Ancient One. In other words, she must become a tree.
Ducking her head, Kate entered the cavern in the trunk of the great redwood, gouged out by fire centuries before. Slowly, very slowly, she discerned a sound vibrating in the hollow of the tree. It was a rushing, coursing sound, like the surging of several rivers. She realized with a start that it must be the sound of resins moving through the trunk and limbs of the tree. And, strangely, through her own self as well.
Then she heard something more. With all her concentration, she listened to a distant gurgling sound. It came from far below her, rising from the deepest roots of the tree. They were drinking, drawing sustenance from the soil.
Another sound joined with the rest, completing the pattern. Like an intricate fugue, it ran from the tips of the remotest needles all the way down the massive column of heartwood. Back and forth, in and out, always changing, always the same. This was the sound, Kate realized at last, of the tree itself breathing. The sound of life being exchanged for life, breath for breath.
“Great tree,” she said in wonder. “I feel so young, and you are so very, very old.”
A full, resonant laughter filled the air, stirring even the sturdiest branches. “I am not so young as you, perhaps, but old I surely am not. The mountains, they are old. The oceans, they are old. The sun is older still, as are the stars. And how old is the cloud, whose body is made from the vapors of an earlier cloud that once watered the soil, then flowed to the river, then rose again into the sky? I am part of the very first seed, planted in the light of the earliest dawn. And so are you. So perhaps we are neither older nor younger, but truly the same age.”
As she listened to the rhythmic breathing of the tree, Kate felt herself beginning to breathe in unison. A sense of her body was slowly returning, a body that bent and swayed with the fragrant wind. Every element of her being stretched upward and downward, pulling taller and straighter without end. Her arms became supple, sinewy limbs; her feel drove deeply into the soil and anchored there.
A sweep of time swirled past, seconds into hours, days into seasons, years into centuries. Spring: azaleas blossoming and pink sorrel flowering. Summer: bright light scattering through the morning mist, scents of wild ginger, and licorice fern. Autumn: harsh winds shaking branches gentle winds hearing geese. Winter: ceaseless rains, frosty gales, more rains brewing. Again and again, again and again. Seasons without end, years beyond count.
Fire! Flames scar her outer bark, charring even her heartwood. But she outlasts it, just as she does the winds, the white rot, and the earthquake that follow. In time, five-finger fern takes root at her base, mingling with the mosses and maidenhair. A doe and her spotted fawn step serenely into the glade, nibbling at the ferns.
Then suddenly: A sound unlike any other sound ever heard fills the forest. Piercing, screeching, banishing forever the centuries of stillness. A shudder, a scream of pain erupts from her whole being. Stop! Stop, please. Go away, leave in peace. But the pain only deepens. The sound grows louder.
It is the sound of chain saws.
I share with you this little story of a youngster and a tree, and the passage it inspired, because I know that each of you have been touched by a place like that in your own past. I have often wondered what a gash would have been torn in my life if that old ponderosa had been cut down for, another telephone pole, or if that land had been paved over for another shopping mall.
The spot would never have qualified as a national park, let alone as designated wilderness. Already, it has been surrounded by shopping malls. Yet, not so very long ago, it still possessed enough wildness to qualify, for one youngster at least, as a sacred place. Now, having managed several businesses over the past two decades, I am convinced that a healthy economy can create much good. But a truly healthy economy does not devour itself, does not foul its own nest, does not sever the spirit of its people from the spirit of the Earth. Ultimately, who we are as a society depends on how we value our wild lands. Are they simply more fuel for the bonfire of consumerism, or are they something else?
Such as … doorways to silence. For through silence we can join in the ongoing procession of geologic time. We can listen to voices apart from our own. Apart from those chainsaws. We can sometimes even hear the whispers of creation – that remarkable process whose essence is life, and whose engine is silent.
Perhaps in those brightly etched, highly personal moments from our own past, we can find the true origins of our passion for wilderness. And then, having once again felt the bark against our back, or having smelled the wind on the juniper, or having listened to the immense silence, we can better communicate that passion to others.
This is not merely wishful thinking. It is something we must do. For no matter how sound our economic analysis, no matter how sturdy our scientific data, we cannot possibly succeed unless we can also communicate our fundamental values. And not just to ourselves – to people of all backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. To ranchers as well as financiers, inner city residents as well as suburbanites; people whose breakfasts include buttered bread or granola, egg rolls or tortillas.
Call our theme the land ethic, the sense of place, or simply the passion for wilderness – we must do better at elucidating it, and kindling it in others. If we are destined to lose the battle for wilderness, I am convinced, it will not be through major, widely-publicized confrontations, but through subtle, creeping encroachments that nibble away at the great victories of the past – or make impossible the preservation of large, connected habitats in the future. Ultimately, to prevail, we must reach beyond the policy makers and the media, to people of all kinds. Find our common ground – for the sake of our public ground. The state of our nation’s wilderness at the onset of the twenty-second century will depend on how well we can communicate our ideas to people who today see no reason to rank wilderness issues high on their agendas.
I don’t pretend to know how to do this. But I suspect that at least part of the answer lies in re-connecting with the personal, specific wilderness experiences that have changed each of our own lives; returning to the basic building blocks of our own passion.
This will not be easy. But I am certain that, among ourselves, we can find the solution. We are, after all, The Wilderness Society.
The stakes could not be higher. For this is a battle about more than all those sights and smells and sounds that we cherish so much. It’s about more than the 623 million acres of public lands that the American people have bequeathed to the future. It’s about more than all the irreplaceable wellsprings of fresh water, fresh air, and wildlife that those lands can provide. No, the battle for wilderness is about something even greater, as far-reaching as the migration of those wild geese overhead: the wellspring, the watershed, the womb, of our very souls.
This is a battle worth fighting, over and over and over again. Because we understand that the wisdom of a tree and the worth of a river cannot possibly be computed in dollars and cents. Because we know that in saving our wildest places we are also saving our deepest selves.
Because we are … The Wilderness Society
