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Open Horizons
Octavo, Illustrated By Leslie Kouba
246 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 1969
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198 people want to read
About the author
Sigurd F. Olson
22 books79 followersSigurd F. Olson was an American author, environmentalist, and advocate for the protection of wilderness. For more than thirty years, he served as a wilderness guide in the lakes and forests of the Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota and northeastern Ontario. He was known honorifically as the Bourgeois — a term the voyageurs of old used of their trusted leaders.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 10, 2022
I love this man more with each book of his I read. His nature writing is always immersive and his thoughts wise. I really wish I'd marked or saved quotes that stood out to me so I could return to them now, but I begrudged the time and couldn't help but rush on to the next line and page and horizon. Oh well; that simply means that the first reread will have to come sooner rather than later.
August 9, 2008
I love these books. If you love the wilds or like the idea of loving the wilds, these collections of thought will captivate you. Especially if you have experienced the Boundary Waters region in Minnesota. Sigurd Olson is the wilderness canoist's godfather.
June 13, 2022
In this, his 5th book, Sigurd Olson moves beyond the BWCA area of northeastern MN and the rivers of northern Canada, to explore his own life and how he came to see the world. Often, the philosophy overtakes the timeline of his life. He seldom includes any dates but we do get a sense of how the bigger ideas that have influenced his life developed and how he sees them as he neared his 6th decade. An enjoyable book on his wilderness philosophy. David Backes' biography on Sigurd Olson, A WILDERNESS WITHIN, is more helpful on understanding his life, rather than just his ideas.
September 6, 2011
When Olson described childhood adventures in northern Wisconsin, canoe trips into the Boundary Waters (Quetico-Superior as he calls them, in MN and Ontario), the characters who used to guide those trips, or (too briefly) his efforts to protect those lands from commercial development, this book sang. But these sections did not last long enough and the chapters were too easily diverted from topic to topic. Too often the writing also became diffuse with Olson's too general love of the land and his sense of modern peoples need to return to something primitive in the wilderness as a reason for conservation. It is an odd spiritual sense that felt awkward and unconvincing to me. But I cannot disagree with comments like this:
"With inexhaustible energy we are not only taming the last remnants of a primitive country, but molding it to satisfy our wants."
"With inexhaustible energy we are not only taming the last remnants of a primitive country, but molding it to satisfy our wants."
August 3, 2014
Open Horizons is somewhat autobiographical and what a life he led! The strongest point of the book is that we all have to keep the vigilance for the welfare of wilderness. Every few months there is another attack on some wilderness area. The oil and mining lobbies are terrifically strong and we must muster ourselves to the ongoing fight.
I've canoed the BWCA many times and if not for the fight of Sigurd Olson and others there probably would be roads and resorts and mining and lumbering and polluting and on and on.
I've canoed the BWCA many times and if not for the fight of Sigurd Olson and others there probably would be roads and resorts and mining and lumbering and polluting and on and on.
September 6, 2018
All of Sigurd Olson's books are wonderful, but this was the most beautiful I've read yet. While structured as an autobiography, the writing is so richly descriptive that it feels like you're out among the open horizons yourself. Olson's words instantly bring back memories of canoe trips in the Boundary Waters, and of the general feeling of being in nature. The dynamic land, the complexity of ecosystems, the power of writing, and the necessity of conservation are magnificently displayed as well. Reading this makes you want to head up north yourself.
August 3, 2015
Put words to some of those outdoor moments we have in life where our whole being suddenly feels at one with the earth, woods, streams and wildlife. These moments come not when you go seeking to make them happen, but when your awareness starts to tune into what is always there for us to enjoy. Sounds sappy, but it's a beautiful thing when it happens.
November 6, 2016
As a Minnesotan currently living overseas in a bustling Asian city, Olson's writing allows my mind to travel back to the BWCA when my body can not. Additionally, nearly 50 years later as a controversial mining project threatens the Quetico-Superior, his call to find a balance between economic development and conservation is as relevant as ever.
July 25, 2009
Olson's reminiscences about his early days as a guide in what was later to become, thanks to him, the BWCA. Great history and sociology of the border lakes area when there were not even any maps of it in existence.
June 16, 2013
Very informative book. Anyone who has ever dipped a paddle or experienced the love of the outdoors read this book. Tells the process of protecting the American Wilderness.
April 29, 2019
Although the writing is nice, there is too much hunting and shooting for me. Other people who like that sort of thing will be happier with the nostalgia
September 9, 2020
I have read all of Sigurd Olson's books, and am now rereading them in order of publication. This, I believe is his masterwork. The publisher calls this Olson's "autobiography-in-nature" a term I have not encountered elsewhere, but it fits the book perfectly.
In each chapter the author explores an aspect of his life and the role nature played in developing his character. In the first chapter "The Pipes of Pan" he illustrates how as a child he began to hear as music the call of nature to his young soul, calling him to adventure. In "The Winds Will" he told how the hard physical toil on the family farm in northern Wisconsin shaped his maturing body, hardening it for the life of outdoor living he would later experience. Each successive chapter continues to develop aspects of his life and character that were shaped by his immersion in nature.
These chapters alone would have earned the book five stars for my review, but he goes on in a final chapter to extend the discussion beyond his own character development to that of our human species in general. In this essay, he showed how the human species has developed throughout the millennia profoundly influenced by our interaction and interdependence with nature. He concludes by showing how we continue to need the natural world to feed our character, and warns us of the peril we face if we cut off our contact with nature and fail to protect her. Written as the book was in 1969, I found this prophetic.
In each chapter the author explores an aspect of his life and the role nature played in developing his character. In the first chapter "The Pipes of Pan" he illustrates how as a child he began to hear as music the call of nature to his young soul, calling him to adventure. In "The Winds Will" he told how the hard physical toil on the family farm in northern Wisconsin shaped his maturing body, hardening it for the life of outdoor living he would later experience. Each successive chapter continues to develop aspects of his life and character that were shaped by his immersion in nature.
These chapters alone would have earned the book five stars for my review, but he goes on in a final chapter to extend the discussion beyond his own character development to that of our human species in general. In this essay, he showed how the human species has developed throughout the millennia profoundly influenced by our interaction and interdependence with nature. He concludes by showing how we continue to need the natural world to feed our character, and warns us of the peril we face if we cut off our contact with nature and fail to protect her. Written as the book was in 1969, I found this prophetic.
October 20, 2023
“Open Horizons,” originally published in 1969, is as close to an autobiography as Sigurd F. Olson ever wrote. It was, as Olson states in the opening acknowledgments, conceived by his long-time publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. Though I haven’t read all the books that came before, I have read his first, “The Singing Wilderness,” a collection of adventures and observations about the North Country organized by season. The others, “Listening Point,” “The Lonely Land,” and “Runes of the North,” though shifting their focus or casting their gaze more intently hither and thither, appear to follow the same playbook. Not that there’s anything wrong with that: Olson has a keen eye and a way with words that is both poetic and plainspoken, easily drawing the reader into his world, and creating a sense of awe and connection to him and with the place he cared about so deeply.
Olson’s books were highly successful and Knopf could have easily continued to publish new collections of his writings at regular intervals. Instead, they must have recognized the opportunity for Olson to create something bigger in scale, grander in scope, more compelling in depth and feeling than the folky, if erudite, cabin classics he was already famous for. How right they were. To be certain, Olson’s writings are infused with a love of the land and veneration for wild places, but it is here, in “Open Horizons,” where this deep feeling and connection transcend into universality.
Just as in his own life, it takes the story a long time to get there. As Olson says in the tenth chapter (of eleven), “When I first came to the Quetico-Superior, I had not thought about conservation.” Along the way, we learn how he was shaped by wilderness and by others connected to that wilderness, how education deepened that connection, how traveling and exploring places near and far broadened his horizons, and how the rapid modernization in the wake of World War I and the potential encroachment it made possible awoke him from the assumption that “things would never change, or that there were threats which might despoil the wilderness.”
So, it is here, in the final two chapters, where Olson’s journey from thoughtful, observant, passionate lake country explorer to ardent, philosophical, outspoken conservationist is realized. It is in these final two chapters where “Open Horizons” transforms from a highly readable biography to an environmental call to arms. Olson is no finger-pointing indicter, however. These final chapters aren’t devoted to shaming and calling to account. Rather, he asks us to “wonder about the purpose of man and what constitutes a good society” and to consider “what kind of a world do we want, involving man’s whole relationship to the earth, what he does to it and how he feels about what he has done.” His words and the passion with which he conveys them are immediate — and given that they were published more than fifty years ago — incredibly prescient, and, sadly, still as timely as ever.
The final thirty-four pages are chockablock with profoundly quotable passages; each one seems fitting as the best way to finish this review. I will, however, end with this one, the one that seems the most foretelling, the most predictive of the path we would take in the years since it was written, the one that could have been written in 1969 or 1980 or 1999 or yesterday, the one that speaks the bluntest truth about us as a country and as a people — even more so in light of the recent presidential election and the lengths to which some will go to distort truth and undermine democracy and the millions who would follow such madness: “Americans have a history of never moving unless confronted with a major disaster. We are now faced with one of greater proportions than the world has ever known, and for the first time are becoming concerned.”
More than fifty years later, to our peril, not enough of us are “becoming concerned.” Instead, we have aligned ourselves on ideologically opposing sides, debating the health and fate of the planet. Rest assured, regardless of what we choose to do or not do, whether we are guilty or innocent of the world we have created, the planet will survive. What life is like for this generation or the next or the one after that — not to mention the millions of non-human species that must bend to, and suffer from, our will — does not appear to be something enough of us give a shit about. “There are those who believe we can have our high technology, continue at the same pace, and still preserve our world. I doubt this will be possible. The only alternative is to reverse our dominant attitude toward the earth and in our use of it recognize that man is part of nature, and that his welfare depends as it always has and always will on living in harmony with it.”
What else is there to say? Only this, “If we can develop love and stewardship, we can look forward to the future with hope and confidence. If we look at our land with reverence, our great knowledge could mean an age of happiness and peace. This is our greatest task, for unless we meet our ecologic crisis and solve its problems as thinking men, there will be nothing to plan for, no utopia, no paradise to regain. If we are able to do this, to look at the earth, not as pioneer explorers, but through enlightened eyes, only then will the full measure of our evolution be realized.” We can be better, do better, live better, treat one another better, gain and grow, achieve and thrive. We can do all these things and more, but it must come from a place of love and compassion, of curiosity and openness, of wonder and awe, in the powers and mysteries, strengths and bonds of fellowship with one another, with all the living creatures of the earth, with the earth itself. As Olson concluded, “If we can move into an open horizon where we can live in our modern world with the ancient dreams that have always stirred us, then our work will have been done.”
Olson’s books were highly successful and Knopf could have easily continued to publish new collections of his writings at regular intervals. Instead, they must have recognized the opportunity for Olson to create something bigger in scale, grander in scope, more compelling in depth and feeling than the folky, if erudite, cabin classics he was already famous for. How right they were. To be certain, Olson’s writings are infused with a love of the land and veneration for wild places, but it is here, in “Open Horizons,” where this deep feeling and connection transcend into universality.
Just as in his own life, it takes the story a long time to get there. As Olson says in the tenth chapter (of eleven), “When I first came to the Quetico-Superior, I had not thought about conservation.” Along the way, we learn how he was shaped by wilderness and by others connected to that wilderness, how education deepened that connection, how traveling and exploring places near and far broadened his horizons, and how the rapid modernization in the wake of World War I and the potential encroachment it made possible awoke him from the assumption that “things would never change, or that there were threats which might despoil the wilderness.”
So, it is here, in the final two chapters, where Olson’s journey from thoughtful, observant, passionate lake country explorer to ardent, philosophical, outspoken conservationist is realized. It is in these final two chapters where “Open Horizons” transforms from a highly readable biography to an environmental call to arms. Olson is no finger-pointing indicter, however. These final chapters aren’t devoted to shaming and calling to account. Rather, he asks us to “wonder about the purpose of man and what constitutes a good society” and to consider “what kind of a world do we want, involving man’s whole relationship to the earth, what he does to it and how he feels about what he has done.” His words and the passion with which he conveys them are immediate — and given that they were published more than fifty years ago — incredibly prescient, and, sadly, still as timely as ever.
The final thirty-four pages are chockablock with profoundly quotable passages; each one seems fitting as the best way to finish this review. I will, however, end with this one, the one that seems the most foretelling, the most predictive of the path we would take in the years since it was written, the one that could have been written in 1969 or 1980 or 1999 or yesterday, the one that speaks the bluntest truth about us as a country and as a people — even more so in light of the recent presidential election and the lengths to which some will go to distort truth and undermine democracy and the millions who would follow such madness: “Americans have a history of never moving unless confronted with a major disaster. We are now faced with one of greater proportions than the world has ever known, and for the first time are becoming concerned.”
More than fifty years later, to our peril, not enough of us are “becoming concerned.” Instead, we have aligned ourselves on ideologically opposing sides, debating the health and fate of the planet. Rest assured, regardless of what we choose to do or not do, whether we are guilty or innocent of the world we have created, the planet will survive. What life is like for this generation or the next or the one after that — not to mention the millions of non-human species that must bend to, and suffer from, our will — does not appear to be something enough of us give a shit about. “There are those who believe we can have our high technology, continue at the same pace, and still preserve our world. I doubt this will be possible. The only alternative is to reverse our dominant attitude toward the earth and in our use of it recognize that man is part of nature, and that his welfare depends as it always has and always will on living in harmony with it.”
What else is there to say? Only this, “If we can develop love and stewardship, we can look forward to the future with hope and confidence. If we look at our land with reverence, our great knowledge could mean an age of happiness and peace. This is our greatest task, for unless we meet our ecologic crisis and solve its problems as thinking men, there will be nothing to plan for, no utopia, no paradise to regain. If we are able to do this, to look at the earth, not as pioneer explorers, but through enlightened eyes, only then will the full measure of our evolution be realized.” We can be better, do better, live better, treat one another better, gain and grow, achieve and thrive. We can do all these things and more, but it must come from a place of love and compassion, of curiosity and openness, of wonder and awe, in the powers and mysteries, strengths and bonds of fellowship with one another, with all the living creatures of the earth, with the earth itself. As Olson concluded, “If we can move into an open horizon where we can live in our modern world with the ancient dreams that have always stirred us, then our work will have been done.”
February 14, 2024
The over arching message of this book is that no one will ever work to save any wilderness unless they've immersed themselves in a wilderness--or at least visited a wilderness area. Olson developed his love, respect, and appreciation for the Boundary Waters over many years and much reflection on the role of wilderness in his life. It behooves us all to visit a natural setting any time we can and think about its importance to our survival as a species.
June 14, 2020
An autobiographical memoir of Sigurd Olson, one of the great American Conservationist centered on his travels/guide/voyaging through what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of upper Minnesota/southern Canada. The sketches and writing are vivid and transcendent to the point that everyone should read this excellent book.
October 18, 2020
I liked some chapters more than others. A few of them were really eye-opening and gave me a sense of understanding the natural world. Although, I would've liked him to go more in-depth on his writing and work with conservation, which only accounted for a couple chapters.
January 29, 2022
I love all of Sig's books, but this one is special. It transported me to a place of peace.
June 28, 2024
This was the perfect book for me to read while fishing at an outpost in the Quetico.
September 3, 2024
Maybe 4.5
September 8, 2021
I always enjoy Sigurd Olson, especially when I am vacationing in the woods. He sees the large environment picture and the details of the wild .
April 20, 2023
This is a fun read written in a ecological philosophical style which speaks of the wonder, beauty and necessity of wilderness. This is a great read which is written in nice bite size segments.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews