Of Time and the Wilderness

One of the joys of talking and writing about the wilderness is that it is so dynamic, so controversial, so varied an issue that one never tires of exploring its many meanings and values. We of the modern ages are steeped in time with our clocks and schedules, histories and forecasts. We think at one and the same time of aeons and nanoseconds. We deplore and welcome the torrent of change that sweeps us along ever further from yesterday and yesteryear, from our personal, family, community and national pasts. After a lifetime of living, we find ourselves to be strangers in our own world.

It is in this context that we reach out for some sense of mooring, something to cling to, that we pause for a few moments to catch our breath, to restore our souls. It is an old story, older even than history.

Only now are we time-worn peoples discovering that ancient man, that aborigines and indigenous peoples from all countries really had something that we have lost, something for which our souls seem to be famished. And, in our search for this something, call it peace or serenity or belonging, we have discovered wilderness, the timeless, eternal, unspoiled reality of the original world, our real-life Eden.

Thoreau said it most beautifully, perhaps, in Walden.

Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in.
I drink at it; but while I drink
I see the sandy bottom
and detect how shallow it is.
Its thin current slides away,
but eternity remains.
I would drink deeper;
fish in the sky whose bottom
is pebbly with stars.

This is what Listening Point is all about.

In this issue, we have featured Sig's dictum that "Everyone has a Listening Point somewhere." Best-selling author Doug Wood writes about his own Fawn Island in Rainy Lake in northern Minnesota and a book in the writing. Sigurd Olson biographer Dave Backes writes about his week at The Clearing in Door County in Wisconsin with a group of seekers.

Many have spoken to me shyly, diffidently, humorously of their own special places somewhere. But it is a strange thing: people are generally reluctant to speak out and describe their special place as if to do so was to reveal something about themselves that is too special, too private to display. They have their places and their experiences, but have hung out the "Do Not Disturb" sign. Which is all right, perhaps as it should be. But what Sigurd Olson and Listening Point do is to show others that they are not alone, there are Listening Points for each of us, that they are important to our souls, and that they may be shared with others.

A second theme follows: "the wilderness crisis" of quite the opposite quality, one of those seeming contradictions that make wilderness such an eternally interesting subject. I leave it to the reader to decide how they can be reconciled. This is a time when wilderness is being challenged not only by the usual tides of the economic and social development, but must also compete with a host of overwhelming global issues.

What of wilderness in an era when world population is expected to double and industrial grown to quadruple in the next forty years?

What of wilderness? Will it become irrelevant, overwhelmed by sheer human need for food, land, and resources, a mere historical artifact as legendary as Eden itself?

We surely hope not. We hope that an international consensus will come to see wilderness not as irrelevant, but as precious as peace, not only for the good of our souls, but as a buffer to global warming and a reservoir of species. To a world, which it is predicted will become more crowded, more polluted, more vulnerable, wilderness has a lot to say.

Wilderness in other words, will someday, we hope, come to be seen as an elementary component of human as well as nature's survival, will eventually prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Thoreau was right when he said: "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

This, too, is what Listening Point is about.