crossing to safety wallace stegner summary

He had always envied those with their feet and their traditions firmly planted in one place. Every tree and bush-most of which he had planted forty years before-seemed as real a part of his being as his own internal organs. When I first was given a tour of the little plot of land around his and Mary’s home in Los Altos Hills, California, I was struck by the tender sense of intimacy his idle conversation about the place conveyed. Stegner spent much of his life trying to find his place-not so much his intellectual or social place (though that, too, was important to him), but his actual physical and spiritual place in the world, a way to see the world and himself in it. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”Ī good part of who Stegner was, I think, resides in that passion, for the concern was the inevitable by-product of years of searching. What is more, he gave voice to the emotional content of the environmental movement as no one else did, particularly in “Wilderness Coda,” in which lies a literary moment, like Thoreau’s “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” whose echoes will reverberate a generation later and will probably be felt for generations to come: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. He joined a body of environmental writers whose influence, for the first time in our history, was a major force in shaping public policy across a wide variety of conservation issues, from the building of dams in the Grand Canyon to the threatened disposal of the nation’s public land system, from species preservation to the Wilderness Act of 1964.

Most important in this context, of course, was his writing.

He founded one organization, the Committee for Green Foothills served for a time as an advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall sat on the National Parks Advisory Board, the board of the Sierra Club, and the governing council of the Wilderness Society and was emotionally and often directly involved in most of the major conservation issues from the postwar years until his death. He never accepted my characterization of him as one of the central figures in the modern conservation movement, but I got no arguments from anyone else.

So is the story of his role as a citizen agitator in the cause that remained closest to his heart for some forty years-conservation.

Crossing to safety wallace stegner summary