"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste." -Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, December 3, 1960
Stegner's quote here is an almost-perfect version of William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness"--why is the "remaining wilderness" so sacred? Why does Stegner call the forests "virgin"? Oooh, religious imagery. Or "the last clear air," "the stinks of human and automotive waste"? I see Cronon's point here; Stegner leaves precisely no room for humans in this quotation, which is a problem.
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