In 1960, author Wallace Stegner wrote a letter to David Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center in Los Altos, California.  In just a few years it became known as “The Wilderness Letter.”  Simply put, the letter gets to THE central reason wilderness must be preserved - at all costs.  We will publish the entire letter over several posts.  What follows is an introduction to Wallace Stegner, the person, the thinker, the writer.

Janice Albert writes, “Relationship with Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) is claimed by many states: Iowa, Saskatchewan, Vermont, Utah and California.  The California claim asserts itself in connection with his long career at Stanford University, where in 1964 he founded the creative writing program.  Stegner himself would probably laugh at this regionalism.  He spoke for the West, a land he saw possessed of a challenging aridity, a land which required cooperation for survival, and a land whose wilderness was needed for deeply spiritual reasons.

“Stegner entered the University of Utah at the age of 16,” Albert continues.  “He taught at Harvard at 30.  In time, he became a spokesperson for the West and for learning to live with ‘the iron laws of nature that govern the West.’  In the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, and as a member of the National Parks advisory board.

“In the year of his retirement, 1971, he published Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972.

“In 1992, protesting government involvement in the arts, he turned down the National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts, saying ‘government has no business trying to direct or censor [the arts].  The creation of art is three quarters error.  As Lewis Thomas said, 'It was only by making mistakes that mankind blundered toward brains.'

“Stegner and the poet Robinson Jeffers shared the same views about wilderness preservation.  Both ardently wrote of the beauty of wilderness.  But it was Jeffers who first wrote that wilderness ought to be preserved because it alone is beautiful.  Humanity, in its propensity toward cruelty and excess, is deeply flawed, and thus has no real beauty.  Stegner, on the other hand, upholds the cause of wilderness because it is the great teacher, humanity's one hope of learning to live humbly, with courtesy and restraint.

Stegner wrote that he had been lucky enough to grow up next to wilderness.  As part of his “Geography of Hope” he argued for the preservation of wilderness - “not simply as a scientific reserve, or a land-bank, or a playground (in which to recreate), but as a spiritual resource, a leftover from our frontier origins that could reassure us of our identity as a nation and a people.”

In our next post, we’ll quote more from Stegner’s Geography of Hope, and the ‘spiritual’ context he wrote about.