David gessner Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: David Gessner
Quotes of Author: David Gessner

David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way," he said. "That's a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don't look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
We talked for a while about the difficulty he and others had had trying to make a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. Part of the difficulty was that while Hollywood is fine with violence toward people and cars and buildings, they don't want to make a movie where the principal and intended victims are private or industrial property. Peacock cursed the various producers and directors. He had written several drafts of scripts for the movie and even had one in his room at that moment. The movie had almost been made a dozen times, with actors from Jack Nicholson to Matthew McConaughey cast as Hayduke.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
There is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us we then ruin.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Stegner's could sometimes be a grumpy goodness. In a fascinating exchange of letters with the beat poet and environmental guru Gary Snyder, Stegner argues for the less exotic virtues of the cultivated western mind versus the enlightened eastern one. This included the importance of doing what one should and not what one felt like. In a letter dated January 27, 1968, he wrote: "I have spent a lot of days and weeks at the desks and in the meetings that ultimately save redwoods, and I have to say that I never saw on the firing line any of the mystical drop-outs or meditators." He went to those meetings because it was the right thing to do. An obligation, yes, but one he valued. "The highest thing I can think of doing is literary," he wrote a friend. "But literature does not exist in a vacuum, or even in a partial vacuum. We are neither detached nor semi-detached, but linked to the world by a million interdependencies. To deny the interdependencies, while living on the comforts and services they make possible, is adolescent when it isn't downright dishonest.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
How some scientists speculated that gathering around fires was the original unique characteristic of human beings. Not language or metaphor or tool use but the social circle, the gathering around the flame, the place where all those other discoveries were communicated. "Yup, that's right. Around the campfire you have a lot of spirit and it comes out in different ways. Kidding each other, serious thought. Singing. Politics, nature, jokes. Everything mixed, like you say. Campfires are a medium of expression all their own.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Stegner, for all his striving toward largeness, shared some of Abbey's bitterness. Of course he, characteristically, framed it in a larger way. He believed that western writing as a whole was ignored, and as he became known throughout his home region he chafed against being considered regional-when considered at all-by the East. I remembered watching a television interview with Stegner where he mentioned that something he had written had not been reviewed or recognized properly. "Because it's provincial?" the interviewer asked. Stegner just stared at the poor man, who shrunk as the silence swallowed him. "No," Stegner finally replied, "because the critics are provincial." Of course. It was the New York critics who were the regionalists and their region was a tiny, crowded island.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Democracy has always been a rare and fragile institution in human history. . . . As social conflict tends to become more severe in this country . . . there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element-always present in our history-to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance {not excluding torture of course} in order to preserve-not wilderness!-but the status quo, the privileged positions of those who so largely control the economic and governmental institutions of the United States.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
It was one of those bookstores that barely exist anymore in our age of the antiseptic chain store, replete with the smell of the musty pages and the sense that reading itself is, at its heart, a countercultural act.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
In the face of this vision, Powell put forth another. What was needed above all else, Powell believed, was to know the land, to understand the land, and to react accordingly. This had practical consequences: while a cow might properly graze on a half-acre in the lush East, it would require fifty times that amount of land in most of the West. It followed that the standard acreage of settlement should be different, and it followed that settlement should take into account sources of water. Powell's goal with his survey was to clearly map out the western lands, to determine what land could be realistically used for agriculture, which meant also determining where irrigation dams should be placed for best effect. In other words, his goal, to use Wendell Berry's phrase, was to think about "land use" and to do so on a massive scale. Specifically, Powell wanted to think out the uses of land that would be the most beneficial and fruitful for the human beings living there, and for the entire ecosystem {though that word did not yet exist}. From the Mormons, Powell learned how "salutary co-operation could be as a way of life, how much less wasteful than competition." In the late 1880s, Powell wrote a General Plan for land use in the West that "reached to embrace the related problems of land, water, erosion, floods, soil conservation, even the new one of hydroelectric power" that was based on "the settled belief in the worth of the small farmer and the necessity of protecting him both from speculators and from natural conditions he did not understand and could not combat." It was a methodical, sensible, scientific approach, essentially a declaration of interdependence between the people and their land, and the miracle is that it came very close to passing into law. But of course it met with fierce opposition from those who stood to profit from exploitation, from the boosters and boomers and politicians who thought it "unpatriotic" to describe the West as dry. After all, how dare he call their garden a desert? What right did he have to come in and determine what only free individuals should? Powell was attacked in the papers, slandered in Congress. According to Stegner, Congressman Thomas M. Patterson of Colorado referred to Powell as "this revolutionist," and the overall attack on Powell "distinguished itself for bombast and ignorance and bad faith.
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David Gessner _ All The Wild That Remains:
Terry Tempest Williams's koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: "I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways, Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical.
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