SAVE WILD CONNECTIONS
“In every
biotic community, there are story lines which fiction writers would
give their eyeteeth for: Desert tortoises with allegiances to place
that have lasted upward of 40,000 years, dwarfing any dynasty in
Yoknapatawpha County. Fidelities between hummingbird and montane
penstemon that make the fidelities of Port William, Kentucky, seem
like puppy love. Dormancies of lotus seeds that outdistance Rip Van
Winkle’s longest nap. Promiscuities between neighboring oak trees
which would make even Nabokov and his Lolita blush. Or all-female
lizard species with reproductive habits more radical than anything
in lesbian literature.
“And yet, with the myriad
stories around and within us, how many of them do we recognize as
touching our lives in any way?”
* Gary Paul
Nabhan
Nabhan is among 30
writers who discuss the need for wilderness in our lives in Place
of the Wild: A Wildlands Anthology. Editor David Clarke Burks, who
teaches at the University of Oregon, organizes the essays into
narratives about how people connect to the land, frameworks with
which to think about these connections, and dispatches from
activists working to preserve wild spaces. Many of the contributors
are active in the Wildlands Project, a group whose long-term goal
is nothing less than the re-establishment of wildlands over half of
North America by 2300. Writers include Alison Deming, Dave Foreman,
Bill McKibben, Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams, who tell us
that preservation efforts must stretch beyond isolated spots to
protect vast ecosystems. Without wildlands, Burks writes, “we will
lose access not only to the natural world but to the original place
of the human spirit.”
Island Press, Washington,
D.C., 1994. $29.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. 340
pages.
* Chip
Giller
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Save wild connections.
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