Importance of Wilderness

In this week’s reading of Wallace Stegner’s letter to David Pesonen, Stegner writes: “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 cigarette cases… 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 voice.”

I think this is a very strong argument for why we need to conserve the wilderness.  If we destroy nature we will be forced to live in a completely man-controlled environment, which cannot be good for our spiritual health or our sanity.  Like McKibben alluded to in the afterward of The Great Experiment in Conservation, if nature is destroyed there would be no escape from the constant disturbing city smog.  It would not make sense to talk about the Adirondacks as ‘wild’ anymore; the entire meaning of the Adirondacks would change.  Without a doubt, the wilderness in the Adirondack Park will face problems in the foreseeable future as development and recreation increase and the climate augments.  The Adirondack Park in 100 years will not look like it does today.  I hope that even though there will be significant changes, the Park will still be considered a wilderness and a home to thousands of different species and humans.