Some 20 years after he wrote “the Wilderness Letter,” Stegner wrote, “By luck or accident or the mysterious focusing by which ideas [whose time has come] reach many minds at the same time, my letter struck a chord.  Before it had time to appear in the ORRRC report, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall had picked it up and used it as the basis of a speech before a wilderness conference in San Francisco, and the Sierra Club had published it as a document of that conference.  It was published in the Washington Post and the ORRRC report, and I included it in my collection of essays, The Sound of Mountain Water.   Before long, some friend of mine saw it posted on the wall in a Kenya game park.

"From there, someone in South Africa or Rhodesia carried it home and had an artist named C. B. Cunningham surround it with drawings of African animals and birds, and turned it into a poster which the Natal Park Board, a Rhodesian kindness-to-animals organization and perhaps other groups have distributed all over south and east Africa.

"A quotation from it captions a Canadian poster, with a magnificent George Calef photograph of caribou crossing river ice; and I have heard of, but not seen, a similar Australian poster issued with the same intent.  The Sierra Club borrowed its last four words, "the geography of hope," as the title for Eliot Porter's book of photographs of Baja California.  Altogether, this letter, the labor of an afternoon, has gone farther around the world than other writings on which I have spent years.

"I take this as evidence not of special literary worth, but of an earnest, world-wide belief in the idea it expresses.  There are millions of people on every continent who feel the need of what Sherwood Anderson called "a sense of bigness outside ourselves"; we all need something to take the shrillness out of us.

"Returning to the letter after 20 years, I find that my opinions have not changed.  They have actually been sharpened by an increased urgency.  We are 20 years closer to showdown.  Though the Wilderness Bill in which we all placed our hopes was passed, and though many millions of acres have been permanently protected--the magnificent Salmon River wilderness only a few weeks ago--preservation has not moved as fast as it should have, and the Forest Service, in particular, has shown by its reluctance and foot-dragging that it often puts resource use above preservation. Its proposed wilderness areas have consistently been minimal, and RARE II was a travesty.

"Nevertheless, something saved.  And something still to fight for.  And also, since the BLM Organic Act, another plus-minus development.  It is now possible that out of the deserts and dry grasslands managed by the BLM there may be primitive areas set aside as wilderness, as I suggested in my letter to Pesonen and as some of us proposed to Secretary Udall as early as 1961.

Unhappily, the Organic Act was contemporary with the energy crisis and the growing awareness that the undeveloped country in the Rocky Mountains states is one of the greatest energy mines on earth.  That discovery, at a time of national anxiety about energy sources, has brought forward individuals, corporations, and conglomerates all eager to serve their country by strip mining the BLM wasteland, or drilling it for oil and gas.  Economic temptation begets politicians willing to serve special economic interests, and they in turn bring on a new wave of states'-rights agitation, this time nicknamed the Sagebrush Rebellion.

"Its purpose, as in the 1940s when Bernard DeVoto headed the resistance to it, (it was then called Landgrab) is to force the transfer of public lands from federal control to the control of the states, which will know how to make their resources available to those who will know what to do with them.  After that they can be returned to the public for expensive rehabilitation.

"The Sagebrush Rebellion is the worst enemy not only of long-range management of the public lands, but of wilderness.  If its counterpart in the 1940s had won, we would have no wilderness areas at all, and deteriorated national forests.  If it wins in the 1980s we will have only such wilderness as is already formally set aside.  Federal bureaus are imperfect human institutions, and have sins to answer for, and are not above being influenced by powerful interests.  Nevertheless they represent the public interest, by and large, and not corporate interests anxious to exploit public resources at the public's expense."

Tomorrow we will post more background and foreground on Wallace Stegner’s famous “Wilderness Letter.”  Then it is our intention to post the entire letter over a few more posts.  Please feel free to comment on these posts.