I've recently come upon Wallace Stegner's nonfiction writing. How he previously escaped my attention, I don't know, but I've been captivated by him this past month. He manages to weave his emotional connection to western lands in with his knowledge of regulatory history in such a graceful manner.
"The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. And the western landscape that it has taken us a century and three quarters to learn about, and partially adapt our farming, our social institutions, our laws, and our aesthetic perceptions to, has now become our most valuable natural resource, as subject to raid and ruin as the more concrete resources that have suffered from our rapacity. We are in danger of becoming scenery sellers - and scenery is subject to as much enthusiastic overuse and overdevelopment as grass and water....We should all be forced to file an environmental impact study before we build so much as a privy or a summer cottage, much less a motel, a freeway, or a resort....I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be dangerous to it."
- Excerpt from "Thoughts in a Dry Land", Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West
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