A Poem, a Presentation

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Melissa Memory’s presentation during the first Ensayo:

For much of the history of humans,

People have used the landscapes around them to achieve their own ends.

As people began to build cities, the wild places disappeared within

and along the edges. Until all of the big trees, all of the buffalo, and the stars and the quiet was gone.

Pinchot and others thought that some trees and wildlife should be spared,

so that there would be some left for future humans. An American Idea.

Conservation.

As these ideas evolved, a land ethic

By Leopold and others

Perhaps these wild places had an intrinsic value

Even if humans did not consume them now or in the future.

Wilderness.

Championed in art and literature,

Bierstadt, Emerson, Thoreau,

Wilderness was a human necessity.

A creation of culture

to escape the trappings of the civilized.

The creative turned political,

Zahniser

The Wilderness Act of 1964,

Poetic legislation with almost absolute

consensus.

Now a network of millions of acres,

of American wild places. For themselves,

managed with human restraint and humility.

But also denied the human story,

of the human millennia before.

Another way to obscure

The creativity and complexity

of the Non-European new world.

An ambivalent now.

What is natural? What is Wild?

Where do humans belong?

m. memory

http://www.wilderness.net/

 

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