I’m sure many MacBlog readers enjoyed as I did the recent Ken Burns 5-part documentary on PBS television devoted to our National Parks: America’s Best Idea. Charlotte and I sat in front of our fireplace inspired at Las Golondrinas, including the Scotties and even our cats. Burns and his body of work over the years are themselves national treasures and this latest venture telling the story of the struggle of the American conscience to mature beyond seeing Nature as commodity to seeing Nature as community is especially memorable to me.

Everyone who watched the series remembers frequent voice-over quotations from John Muir, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century father of protected national parks. I was familiar with the expatriot Scot’s writings and his work but less familiar with other frequently cited names in the Burns documentary and it was the depth and power of those other men that grabbed my attention.

Years ago during theology study days at the University of Glasgow I learned the power of judicious use of footnotes. Authors reveal their sources in footnotes, so I concluded by going directly to where the author got his ideas I could skim the secondary and get on to the good stuff. As I watched the National Parks series Burns kept citing Wallace Stegner and Aldo Leopold. It was clear to me that these men were primary resources for the content and concepts of Burns’ film.

It is a flaw in my education that I never read either man. I had clues to their importance in the form of acknowledgments of indebtedness by much-admired writers well-known to me, such as Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon, each in their own way advocates for reverence toward Nature. They each credit Stegner and Leopold as key influences in their thinking. I even knew Aldo Leopold’s name because of the Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico named after him. Still, the importance of these writers didn’t register until I watched the Burns documentary. But once the light bulb finally went off, I grabbed pen and paper and wrote down names. A quick search on the Internet netted three important books, two by Stegner, and one by Leopold. I bought the books and devoured them.

Wallace Stegner’s two volumes of collected essays on the West and the meaning of wilderness to the American dream and to what it means to be American, are writing at its best. The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West (1969) and Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: The Making of the American West (1998) are classics not only as bible for a modern land ethic but as models of what all writing should be: rich in imagination, brilliant in expression, and grounded in deep knowledge of the topic, of history and geography, and the politics of power. Reading Stegner is invitation to feel juvenile as a fellow writer but inspired to exceed one’s reach.

Stegner Example 1:

“A certain kind of modern American in the throes of an identity crisis is likely to ask, or bleat, ‘Who am I?’ It might help him to find out who he started out to be, and having found that out, to ask himself if what he started out to be is still valid. And if most of what I touch on in this summary is sixth-grade American history, I do not apologize for that. History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it. The obvious, especially the ignored obvious, is worth more than a Fourth of July or Bicentennial look” (Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, chapter: The Twilight of Self-Reliance, p. 191).

Stegner Example 2:

“Once the land opened out westward across pink and tan and alkali-white flats, and the horizon stepped down in cliff and talus from juniper-dotted plateaus. Once the distance went backward from gray to mauve and from mauve to lilac and from lilac to purple, and the highway stretched toward that mysterious, hazy beyond like a pictured path in a fairy tale. At sunset, driving west, a traveler saw the mesas burning at the edges with the fire behind them, and knew what Coronado felt, and the Spanish captains, laboring toward the Seven Cities of Cibola. This land is still there ….” (The Sound of Mountain Water, chapter: The Land of Enchantment, p. 137).

But in my view Stegner’s magisterial and overwhelming prose must give way to Aldo Leopold (1887-1948). Leopold writes of wilderness as compellingly as Thoreau but better because he was a trained scientist. He writes with a poet’s heart and a professional naturalist’s observational skills and heightens that union by simple, terse language into advocacy for wilderness that touches the reader’s head, heart, and will. I found his A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1949) compelling and unforgettable on nearly every page. Leopold, Yale educated, joined the United States Forest Service in 1909 and was one of the founders of the Wilderness Society. He was instrumental in 1924 in persuading Congress to set aside the Gila National Forest in southern New Mexico as the first Forest Wilderness Area–still a bastion of wildness in New Mexico today! He died in 1948 while helping a neighbor fight a brush fire in Wisconsin. The manuscript for A Sand County Almanac was in draft form when he died and his son edited it for publication the next year. Leopold is my pick of the giants whose vision brought about our National Parks.

Leopold Example:

“The marsh might have kept on producing hay and prairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberriers forever. The new overlords did not understand this. They did not include soil, plants, or birds in their ideas of mutuality. The dividends of such a balanced economy were too modest . . . The cranes were hard put, their numbers shrinking with the remnants of unburned meadow. For them, the song of the power shovel came near being an elegy. The high priests of progress knew nothing of cranes, and cared less. What is a species more or less among engineers? What good is undrained marsh anyhow? . . . To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether of marsh or market place, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish” (A Sand County Almanac (Ballantine Books, expanded edition, 1966).

If you were deeply moved, as I was, by Ken Burns’ documentary on the National Parks, do yourself a huge favor and carve out time to soak in the writings of Stegner and Leopold. These books are not Scottish Terrier reads but they are reading that will change the way you see and think about your dogs and all of Nature. You will discover in these books where Burns got his inspiration and more importantly, you will discover deep and important truth about yourself and the soul of the American dream.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine