wilderness.

“Putting land aside……and creating wilderness remains a key part of the environmental fight in the West. When Powell made his first maps he knew that the region demanded that some of the land simply had to be left alone. If we are looking at the big picture – a puzzle even – then we need as much land as possible that shows us what the land could do without us. It is a key to adaptation, one clear way we can ready ourselves for the vast uncertainties of a changing climate. /these wild places serve as a counterbalance , a reminder, a baseline, a template for recovery.” – David Gessner

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U.S. 395 Walker River

The 10 Best Backroads In Northern California For A Long Scenic Drive

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“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 and accepted. Stegner once called DeVoto the “Lone Ranger,” and one can easily imagine DeVoto standing alone in the 1940s and ’50s, keeping a mob of vigilantes (politicians, developers, ranchers, oil men) at bay as they clamored on about taking back “their” land. Stegner joined DeVoto in the fight, but it wasn’t until Ed Abbey came along that anyone took to the fight with anywhere near the same cantankerous spirit.” – David Gessner

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Devil’s Postpile near Highway 395

https://www.viamagazine.com/destinations/highway-395-your-route-sierras-secret-wonders

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“Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell: When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land.” ― David Gessner

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route 395

U.S. 395, the California Highway Least Traveled—and Its Most Epic

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“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. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn’t there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines?”
― David Gessner

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Highway 58

https://www.desertusa.com/desert-california/discover-highway-58.html

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“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 thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.” Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.” ― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

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