"Thoreau in the 1840s took comfort in being able to escape even what he sensed were the noisy intrusions in small towns. In his essay 'Walking,' he celebrated the fact that he could 'easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my door, without going by any house.' He wondered 'what would become of us if we walked only to a garden or a mall?' He was innocent, of course, of the degree to which the question would be forced, of the fact that eventually no one would be able to find one square mile in America free of the imprint of man."
"As Henry Beetle Hough, the late editor of the
Vineyard Gazette, said not long before he died, he was sorrier about the destruction of Martha's Vineyard than about the apparent fate of the world. We feel worst about losing the specifics of home. The issue is not just that land developers have unbalanced the ecology and made much of the geography ugly. What strikes so painfully is that, at least in the perspective of our brief lives, they have destroyed the places where we became, and would like to continue to become, ourselves."
"I take comfort ... in hope for a change not requiring large sums of money, and for the most part not in need of a majority vote – a reshaping that will come about, I think, as the result of the needs and the efforts of individuals: a recognition and enrichment and preservation over the centuries of specifically sacred places. The final goal will remain that all places be recognized as holy, but, as a step of the way, locations of particular intensity will more and more be held dear."
"Someday not only will there be more places that encourage a harmony with nature, but there will be, I think, new sacred sites originating in the principal religious traditions of our culture, Judaism and Christianity, the correction of which seems to me imperative because their abandonment is impossible (one cannot walk away form the center of one's culture and survive; Judaism and Christianity embody insights that are unique and, at least in my experience, true)."
"Many times and places since then I have tried to photograph the quality in that scene, having slowly been brought to realize that however much I loved what I saw of western American wilderness, to have loved it raw best, lifelong, would have required a misanthropy that I couldn't have borne. Like many, I have come to hope to find a valley, in sight of peaks but gentler than they are, and to be permitted to make the valley even more itself, better consonant with a harmony in nature that seems finally more true than nature's violence. To try to do this is, I know, in consideration of our history, to embark on another failure, but I believe that our weakness is at least understood, and that we may hope to be forgiven."
"America was not settled only by those following a dream of profit. Just as often, our forebears' motive was to escape some nightmare of hunger or stultification or violence, and they would always love, with a sudden intensity against which they could never fully guard themselves, the geography where they were raised – the flowers, trees, birds, clouds, and lay of the land. Ours has never been, really, just a country of easygoing transients. There has always been a counter tradition of learning to make the best of exile, of building from recollections of what was prized and torn away."
Fragments of "
In the American West Is Hope Possible?" a killer essay by Robert Adams, 1986
