David gessner Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: David Gessner
Quotes of Author: David Gessner

David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Forty years later, in 1995, Terry Tempest Williams, working with the Utah writer Stephen Trimble, put together Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an anthology of the work of twenty writers whose purpose was to help preserve 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah. Just as with This Is Dinosaur, the book was distributed to every member of Congress. It was part of the effort that led to the creation of the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. At the monument's dedication on September 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said, "This made a difference.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
If you have never seen a fracking boomtown, it can be hard to picture. You drive into a town that at first seems like any town, until you slowly notice that on this particular Main Street there are far too many hotels. Then you start to see the oversized white trucks, the hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silveradaos that prowl the crowded streets, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates {even when you are nowhere near these places}. You also note that the drivers of the trucks are twentysomething men, who, like their trucks, are almost all white.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
DeVoto shared with Stegner an ability to see the big picture. But he shared plenty with Abbey, too: a tendency toward overstatement, a willingness to bloody noses, a love of tweaking the overly proper and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the "Lone Ranger," and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and '50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes {politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men} at bay as they clamored on about taking back "their" land. Stegner joined DeVoto in the fight, but it wasn't until Ed Abbey came along that anyone took to the fight with anywhere near the same cantankerous spirit.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Peacock said that we all have different-size territories and I would argue that one of the more important things that he and Abbey offer is that they make us uncomfortable with the size of the plots we have settled on. They push us, and inspire us to move beyond our comfortable cells. "It depends on how you are yarded," wrote Thoreau. In an age of cell phones and computers and little contact with the elemental earth, most of us are yarded pretty tightly. It isn't just pronghorns who live in a diminished territory. Most modern humans know exactly how those ungulates feel. With each generation we settle for less wildness, less freedom, less space. We begin to accept things we would have previously deemed unacceptable. That our e-mails will be read, that we will stare down at screens for hours, that it's okay for drones to look down on us, that only crazy or dangerous individuals seek solace by going alone into the wilderness. We shrug, half-accepting our limited lives and damaged land. What can we do about it after all?
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of "connectivity." It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region's threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It's true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it's also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands-particularly isolated and small islands-the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey's, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls "linkages." He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process "rewilding." Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. "We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution," writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
What Ed and I knew, on some fundamental level, is that once you've been out in it long enough, it becomes the top priority," he told us as we settled into the study. "When you're out in it fully, you recognize it's where you belong. We concluded that it took a good ten days in the wilderness until you began to change. You need to live in the spirit of nature, so that it's totally and intuitively in your system. Then you don't have any choice but to defend it.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
As the years have gone by Lake Powell has continued to silt up, losing more than 100,000 acre-feet per year at last count, and hydrologists believe-as Abbey did-that silting will eventually lead to a pool of mud, not water. Michael Kellett is the program director of the Glen Canyon Institute, which was founded in 1996 with the help of David Brower with the goal of one day witnessing the Colorado flowing freely through the old Glen Canyon. At a time when western dams are actually being decommissioned so that rivers can flow, experts are wondering whether it is really viable to have two enormous evaporative and silting reservoirs, Powell and Mead. Kellett wrote in the summer of 2012: The trends of the last decade have dramatically changed the situation. Rising public water demand, relentless drought, and climate change have significantly reduced the flow of the Colorado River from that of the past century. Scientific studies have predicted that this situation will continue. Lake Powell reservoir, and Lake Mead reservoir downstream, are half empty. Most scientists believe that there will never again be enough water to fill both reservoirs. Which had led to proposals like the Fill Lake Mead First project, the idea being to keep the downstream reservoir, Mead, full while releasing the upstream Glen Canyon. In other words, for the first time Abbey's wild fantasies are being considered as serious policy.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: "I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
What I want to preserve are not just beautiful places but the possibility that an individual can, in this overheated, overcrowded world, find a place to be quiet and alone. To have their own freedom. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn't there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines?
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: "These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
book-quote
David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner's biography of John Wesley Powell: When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land.
book-quote