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Diffstat (limited to 'leopold-essay.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | leopold-essay.txt | 6 |
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/leopold-essay.txt b/leopold-essay.txt index 70b4534..2bb8c0b 100644 --- a/leopold-essay.txt +++ b/leopold-essay.txt @@ -4,7 +4,11 @@ If that's true we're screwed. Fellow conservationist Aldo Leopold seems to have written much of what he did to let us know not so much what we could save as what it was already too late to save, the wildness we had already lost. The last grizzly killed in Arizona. The jaguars disappearing from the banks of the Colorado as it snakes it's way through the Grand Canyon; the ways countless birds in Leopold's day still clung to existence in the islands of native prairie that speckled his home country of Sand County. -All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. +All that was gone long before I was born. Or mostly gone. + +Wilderness + +When I was young there were still small pockets of wildness to be found. Buy enough 7.5 topo sheets and you were bound to find some relatively blank spots. The Superstition mountains. The chocolate mountains. The Chihuahuas. The Dragoons. For a kid who grew up in the decidedly not wilds of southern California, the southern edge of Arizona, the borderlands in more ways than one, retained pockets of wildness here and there. My father and I made frequent forays into such places. He always looking for snails. Me looking for something I could not put my finger on at the time. Some intangible thing that felt missing from the world. Adventure perhaps, connection perhaps. Whatever it was, all I knew back then was that it did not, for a few moments here and there, hiking the agave chocked hillsides of nameless mountains, tracing the delicate wisps of shade in the Palo Verde lined washes, sitting at the base of sheer buttes, back leaning against the warm sandstone, watching the shadows lengthen and the thunderheads roll in the from the south, it did not feel like anything was missing from the world. |