Quotes from David Gessner

It is not my place to offer pep talks, aphorisms, or dictums. But if I had to give one piece of practical advice it would be this: Find something that you love that they're fucking with and then fight for it. If everyone did that--imagine the difference. (50)

This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless.

If only non-hypocrites are going to fight for the environment then it will be an army of none. (60)

We used to think the world was so big. So indestructible. So fun. We still can't completely believe that it is as small and serious, as threatened and vulnerable, as we have made it.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness.

Terry Tempest Williams's koan came to me in an e-mail, which reads: "I loved both these men. I still feel their hands on my shoulder, wondering what they would be saying, writing, now. In so many ways, Ed was the conservative, Wally, forever the radical.

Our where determines our who," Reg Saner once wrote.

It was one of those bookstores that barely exist anymore in our age of the antiseptic chain store, replete with the smell of the musty pages and the sense that reading itself is, at its heart, a countercultural act.

As far back as 1912, John Muir had protested against the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam with these words: "These temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.

You never really "won" an environmental battle, after all, just saved places that would be fought over again in the future.

we might be able to intellectually understand that the West has lost 18% of its trees over the last 20 years, and at the same time be overcome by the quaking of a single Aspen leaf.

Environmentalism or conservation or preservation, or whatever it should be called, is not a fact, and never has been. It is a job.

What I want to preserve are not just beautiful places but the possibility that an individual can, in this overheated, overcrowded world, find a place to be quiet and alone. To have their own freedom. Is this really too much to ask? Shouldn't there be a few places left to get away from motors? From the incessant roar of machines?

There is a fundamental irony at work. More and more of us keep pouring into the region, in no small part because it seems relatively empty compared to the rest of the country. What attracts us we then ruin.

One of the reasons people steer clear of environmentalism is all the guilt associated with it. The creepy feeling that by doing what everyone else in one's society is doing - driving, washing the dishes, catching a flight - we are bringing about the end of the world.

Wallace Stegner was impatient with the remnants of romanticism in the West, particularly with those who wrapped themselves in the cloak of the western myth so they could continue their agenda of destroying western land. He wrote: "I grew up in a cowboy culture, and have been trying to get it out of my thinking and feeling ever since.

One thing I know is that the inward way is not the way," he said. "That's a trap. Anything that gets you outside of yourself is good. Don't look inside for salvation. Go spend a little time alone in the wilderness.