My Cry for Wilderness
(Page 2 of 2)
May/June 1996
Terry Tempest Williams, National Parks (www.npca.org)
Planning during the wilderness review last spring were in favor of America's Red Rock Wilderness Act. A majority of Utahns wanted 5.7 million acres of wilderness, not less. Jim Hansen says this legislation is dead. So what happened?
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Quite simply, the Utah congressional delegation turned its back on its constituents, and expert and impassioned testimony from scientists around the state had no impact. Hansen shut them down, saying, 'Wilderness has nothing to do with biology.' Their voices have been ignored and so have these lands. Listen to the names of some of these forgotten places: Labyrinth Canyon, Arch Canyon, Comb Ridge, Owl and Fish Creek, Paria, Parunuweap, Moquith Mountain, Wahweap, Nipple Bench, Burning Hills, the San Rafael Swell. To walk in this country is to live inside poetry. Native grace.
Red rock wilderness is both the bedrock land of southern Utah and a metaphor of unlimited possibility. Something in the world can remain untamed. These questions must be asked: How can we cut ourselves off from the very source of our creation? And can we truly survive the worship of our own destructiveness?
As a citizen of Utah and of these United States, I do not believe that this is a wilderness bill the majority of Utahns or Americans recognize, want, or desire. I do not believe that this is a wilderness bill that honors or respects the natural laws required for a healthy environment. And I do not believe that this is a wilderness bill that takes an empathetic stance toward our future.
When we look at the undermining of our public lands, whether it is wilderness in Utah or our national parks and forests, we must realize that the debate over Utah wilderness is not about economics. This debate is not about 'taking back the West,' as the proponents of the Wise Use movement would have us believe. It is about putting ourselves in accordance with nature, about consecrating these lands by remembering our relationships to them.
Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. For those of us who so love these lands in Utah, who recognize America's red rock wilderness as a sanctuary for the preservation of our souls, the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 is the beginning of a forgetting--a forgetting we may never be able to reclaim.
Reprinted from National Parks, November/December 1995.
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