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...
But if we are going to celebrate the gains, then we had better look hard at what has been lost. Property taxes and crime have soared along with employment. The incidence of rape in Vernal exceeds that...
There is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us we then...
Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution in human history. . . . As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country . . . there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of...
Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass’s The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, Charles Bowden’s Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston’s Cowbo...
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...
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 destr...
Terry Tempest Williams’s koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways,...
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 t...
One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way, he said. That’s a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don’t look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the...
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 re...
We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the difficulty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people a...
Stegner, for all his striving toward largeness, shared some of Abbey’s bitterness. Of course he, characteristically, framed it in a larger way. He believed that western writing as a whole was ignored,...
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....