David Gessner > Quotes

“It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they're fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that--imagine the difference. (50)”
― David Gessner, My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

“ED ABBEY’S FBI file was a thick one, and makes for engrossing reading. The file begins in 1947, when Abbey, just twenty and freshly back from serving in the Army in Europe, posts a typewritten notice on the bulletin board at the State Teachers College in Pennsylvania. The note urges young men to send their draft cards to the president in protest of peacetime conscription, exhorting them to “emancipate themselves.” It is at that point that Abbey becomes “the subject of a Communist index card” at the FBI, and from then until the end of his life the Bureau will keep track of where Abbey is residing, following his many moves. They will note when he heads west and, as acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!” The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott. And so he quickly loses his editorship while the FBI adds a few more pages to his file. The Bureau will become particularly intrigued when Mr. Abbey attends an international conference in defense of children in Vienna, Austria, since the conference, according to the FBI, was “initiated by Communists in 1952.” Also quoted in full in his files is a letter to the editor that he sends to the New Mexico Daily Lobo, in which he writes: “In this day of the cold war, which everyday [sic] shows signs of becoming warmer, the individual who finds himself opposed to war is apt to feel very much out of step with his fellow citizens” and then announces the need to form a group to “discuss implications and possibilities of resistance to war.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless.”
― david gessner, My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

“We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“If only non-hypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none. (60)”
― David Gessner

“Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: “I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner’s thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell’s beautiful mind. Powell was, according to Stegner, “incorrigibly sane,” a man who tried to dispense with fable and “dispel the mists,” a man who saw the facts and not the romance. The real enemies were not just greedy and stubborn congressmen but “credulity, superstition, habit.” In many ways Stegner subsumed Powell’s own thinking and brought it into a new century. Ideas that were before then half-formed for Stegner became habitual. Like Powell himself, Stegner had a “bolder, generalizing imagination” than most who struggle to think historically, and, like Powell, he liked to apply his mind to actual problems in the actual world. Both men believed that through hard thought and focused clarity we can get at certain truths. That our minds, uncultivated, go where they will, to the till or trough, but that trained and focused, they can be put to good, and even selfless, purpose. It was an old-fashioned value and one shared by both biographer and subject.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: “These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Peacock said that we all have different-size territories and I would argue that one of the more important things that he and Abbey offer is that they make us uncomfortable with the size of the plots we have settled on. They push us, and inspire us to move beyond our comfortable cells. “It depends on how you are yarded,” wrote Thoreau. In an age of cell phones and computers and little contact with the elemental earth, most of us are yarded pretty tightly. It isn’t just pronghorns who live in a diminished territory. Most modern humans know exactly how those ungulates feel. With each generation we settle for less wildness, less freedom, less space. We begin to accept things we would have previously deemed unacceptable. That our e-mails will be read, that we will stare down at screens for hours, that it’s okay for drones to look down on us, that only crazy or dangerous individuals seek solace by going alone into the wilderness. We shrug, half-accepting our limited lives and damaged land. What can we do about it after all?”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of “connectivity.” It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.” Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“If you have never seen a fracking boomtown, it can be hard to picture. You drive into a town that at first seems like any town, until you slowly notice that on this particular Main Street there are far too many hotels. Then you start to see the oversized white trucks, the hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silveradaos that prowl the crowded streets, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates (even when you are nowhere near these places). You also note that the drivers of the trucks are twentysomething men, who, like their trucks, are almost all white.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“For artists, obsession obviously comes in handy. It not only gives us the energy and power to create the artistic object, but it fills up our minds in a way few other things could. But can obsession fill the death hole? Of course not, though maybe it is out of nothingness that we all begin to create. If the world doesn't exist then we will make our own world. Maybe all this fever of creation, this need to be special, this frenzy--what Thomas Wolfe called an "enormous task of excavation" of self--this creation comes at least in part out of the terror of pure emptiness, the terror of the end. The need to fill the void, to make something out of this vast sense of nothing. Extreme fear of oblivion creating extreme creation. We hurl ourselves against the death void.”
― David Gessner

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Finally, Abbey tells us that we can’t expect to be rewarded, let alone celebrated, by a society we are acting in opposition to. In other words, if you choose to go against the world, you can’t expect the world to heap praise on you. Choosing to go against will not make you comfortable. It will not make you rich. It will not make you famous (usually). And you might just go to jail. To be truly countercultural, then, is difficult. It requires boldness and belief. It requires commitment. And it requires accepting consequences.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“I write regularly for OnEarth and OnEarth.org, the publications of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and for my updating of the big-picture ideas about the aridity of the West I relied on the up-to-the-minute reporting of my colleagues at that magazine, particularly that of Michael Kodas on the western fires. For a larger synthesis of current and coming climate changes I looked toward Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century and, especially, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest by William deBuys, a writer who calmly but convincingly presents a terrifying picture of the current and future West.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“But if we are going to celebrate the gains, then we had better look hard at what has been lost. Property taxes and crime have soared along with employment. The incidence of rape in Vernal exceeds that of the rest of Utah, which exceeds that of the United States as a whole. At the same time, air quality has dramatically worsened, and last winter’s ozone levels in this rural county rivaled those of Los Angeles. These very real problems are counterbalanced for the citizens by the gifts the boom brings. But what happens when boom turns bust? When Big Oil leaves and the problems remain?”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“You never really “won” an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Our where determines our who,” Reg Saner once wrote.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“Here is what Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said about Stegner’s biography of John Wesley Powell: When I first read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, shortly after it was published in 1954, it was as though someone had thrown a rock through the window. Stegner showed us the limitations of aridity and the need for human institutions to respond in a cooperative way. He provided me in that moment with a way of thinking about the American West, the importance of finding true partnership between human beings and the land.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“What Ed and I knew, on some fundamental level, is that once you’ve been out in it long enough, it becomes the top priority,” he told us as we settled into the study. “When you’re out in it fully, you recognize it’s where you belong. We concluded that it took a good ten days in the wilderness until you began to change. You need to live in the spirit of nature, so that it’s totally and intuitively in your system. Then you don’t have any choice but to defend it.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“One thing he did more responsibly than almost any Fellow I remember. We had a practice then of having the current Fellows act as preliminary readers on the applications of people wanting to come the next year. Among the manuscripts that he got to read was one by Ken Kesey, then still at Oregon. The manuscript was a football novel all about homosexual quarterbacks and corrupt coaches. Ed’s comment (we asked only for a rating: Good, possible, or impossible) was one sentence: “Football has found its James Jones.” And that’s about all I know. I never saw Ed Abbey after he left here, though I read his books with pleasure”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“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.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“DeVoto decried “the economy of liquidation” that had prevailed in the West since it was first settled, a philosophy that applied to aquifers and farms as well as mines.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world.”
― David Gessner, All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West