Based on newly available archival sources and interviews with many of the participants, this groundbreaking study explores for the first time the grassroots campaigns that yielded some of the largest designated wilderness areas in America.
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Based on newly available archival sources and interviews with many of the participants, this groundbreaking study explores for the first time the grassroots campaigns that yielded some of the largest designated wilderness areas in America.
Read Less
Add this copy of Where Roads Will Never Reach: Wilderness and Its to cart. $10.32, very good condition, Sold by Idaho Youth Ranch Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Boise, ID, UNITED STATES, published 2015 by University of Utah Press.
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"Where Roads Will Never Reach" by Frederick Swanson is a weighty and thoroughly compelling story about courage. Idealists, visionaries, activists - call them what you will - have taken on unequal and usually unpopular fights over decades to save wild places in the Northern Rockies of the United States. Their call? Leave the wilderness alone. Don't punch holes in it with roads. Leave forest fires to burn. Leave spruce beetles to help the process of forest regeneration. Leave rivers to run free and to flood when the mood takes them.
Of course the "world's wealthiest nation and greatest consumer of resources" - the words are the author's - can't leave the wilderness alone. Such consumption requires massive oil and mineral extraction, timber cutting, control of the rivers for irrigation and power production. He observes that the "American wilderness has always existed in a social context, and if the populace at large cannot see the virtue of leaving large landscapes alone, intervention is sure to follow."
The book details unexpected alliances that mitigated the most destructive manifestations of intervention, and also pragmatic idealism. It's not an oxymoron. Some of the individuals profiled so ably in the book acquiesced, when necessary, to interventions in one wild place as a quid quo pro for legislation that left some other area unmolested. In instances where the heavy hand of the Army Corps of Engineers, or Bureau of Land Reclamation or commercial interests was unavoidable, these idealists fought for modifications that promised a less destructive impact on wilderness. They strove, in the words of the author, for a "vision of landscape in harmony with its population. " Without that vision, he concludes, "we are committed to overuse, incessant conflict and the decay of our dreams."
The book focuses on a particular geographic area of the United States. Though vast, the area is but a microcosm of the uphill battle fought on a global scale to preserve Earth's remaining wild places from the worst depredations of Man. For its near-universal lessons about the wilderness-development conundrum, "Where Roads . . . " deserves a place on library shelves the world over.
