How some scientists speculated that gathering around fires was the original unique characteristic of human beings. Not language or metaphor or tool use but the social circle, the gathering around the...
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 f...
You never really won an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.
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 w...
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...
It was one of those bookstores that barely exist anymore in our age of the antiseptic chain store, replete with the smell of the musty pages and the sense that reading itself is, at its heart, a count...
I write regularly for OnEarth and OnEarth.org, the publications of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and for my updating of the big-picture ideas about the aridity of the West I relied on the up-...
We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.
Our where determines our who, Reg Saner once wrote.
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 dish...
DeVoto decried the economy of liquidation that had prevailed in the West since it was first settled, a philosophy that applied to aquifers and farms as well as mines. In the West the miner’s right to...
But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in...
One thing he did more responsibly than almost any Fellow I remember. We had a practice then of having the current Fellows act as preliminary readers on the applications of people wanting to come the n...
Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.
Stegner’s could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated...
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 fa...
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 w...
Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner’s thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell’s beautiful mind. Powell was,...
In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical conseq...
ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice...