Submitted by Dr. Kyle R. Crocker on Tue, 11/25/2008 - 16:16.
Certainly I have my favorite wild places, particularly the Boundary Waters Wilderness near my home in northern Minnesota. Yet these aren't what I'd like to share at this time. Instead, I have some thoughts about just what has been rescued out of our tragic national history to inspire the youth of today. A veteran university professor and environmental activist, I am just concluding a special course 'Nature and the Cultural Imagination.' The story my teaching partner and I have been tracing in recent weeks -- the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny and the 'conquest' of the West, the failures of polar exploration and failures of modernity in all respects -- has not been a very optimistic one. Our themes of wanton exploitation and the seemingly inevitable destruction of wilderness might have a deadening depressive effect on our students. There has been, however, one bright ray of hope -- our national efforts as early as the 1870s to preserve special wild places in our National Parks. We don't need to preach a message; the historical facts speak for themselves. Preservation was hard to accomplish, and its legacy is about all we have left. When these young people have come to understand that for 10,000 years the presence of something wholly beyond ourselves has shaped the human imagination, our deepest thoughts and greatest aspirations, they can rejoice that something of this wild otherness yet survives, and inspired by it, that they can yet survive as true human beings. For our common future, this is everything.
A legacy of survival for today's youth
Certainly I have my favorite wild places, particularly the Boundary Waters Wilderness near my home in northern Minnesota. Yet these aren't what I'd like to share at this time. Instead, I have some thoughts about just what has been rescued out of our tragic national history to inspire the youth of today. A veteran university professor and environmental activist, I am just concluding a special course 'Nature and the Cultural Imagination.' The story my teaching partner and I have been tracing in recent weeks -- the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny and the 'conquest' of the West, the failures of polar exploration and failures of modernity in all respects -- has not been a very optimistic one. Our themes of wanton exploitation and the seemingly inevitable destruction of wilderness might have a deadening depressive effect on our students. There has been, however, one bright ray of hope -- our national efforts as early as the 1870s to preserve special wild places in our National Parks. We don't need to preach a message; the historical facts speak for themselves. Preservation was hard to accomplish, and its legacy is about all we have left. When these young people have come to understand that for 10,000 years the presence of something wholly beyond ourselves has shaped the human imagination, our deepest thoughts and greatest aspirations, they can rejoice that something of this wild otherness yet survives, and inspired by it, that they can yet survive as true human beings. For our common future, this is everything.