I Shall Append One Further Answer Anyway

Edward Abbey: The Dead Man at Grandview Point

TOWER OF SET / HAKATAI RAPID / POWELL PLATEAU

Why this cult of wilderness?
Why the surly hatred
of progress and development,
the churlish resistance
to all popular improvements?
Very well, a fair question,
but it’s been asked
and answered
a thousand times already;
enough books to drive a man
stark naked mad have dealt
in detail with the question.
There are many answers,
all good, each sufficient.
Peace is often mentioned;
beauty; spiritual refreshment,
whatever that means;
re-creation for the soul,
whatever that is;
escape; novelty, the delight
of something different;
truth and understanding and wisdom -— commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir,
the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask,
a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present -— all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as Why wilderness?
To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
--Edward Abbey
Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

Edward Abbey: Planting a Tree


TREE ABOVE HERMIT CANYON / SHINUMO AMPHITHEATER