A highbrow, Friday afternoon literary post

I really liked this ("Changes in the Land"), by Thomas Zebrowski, over at First Things.  It's a great reflection on the work of Wallace Stegner (if you have not read Crossing to Safety, well, cancel your weekend plans and do it).  A bit:

. . .  Stegner was on a lifelong quest for tradition, rootedness, and a sense of community that had been denied him by his peripatetic childhood and the individualistic outlook that surrounded him.

His early years in Utah had taught him about the benefits, even the necessity, of community for survival in a harsh natural environment, and Stegner recognized that it was the Mormons’ faith in God and in the future that had enabled them alone to carve out a respectable civilization in the North American desert. Wally never embraced Mormonism or any religious faith, but Fradkin believes that in a sense Stegner shared the Eastward orientation of this biblical people. The Mormons of Salt Lake City bury their dead beneath headstones that look back towards Zion. And Fradkin places much symbolic value upon the fact that Stegner chose for his own ashes to be scattered on his summer property in Greensboro, Vermont instead of near the Palo Alto home he had occupied for more than forty years. In part, Stegner’s decision may have been a testament to the comparatively stable, if flawed, local community he had discovered there. In Fradkin’s interpretation, it was also about Stegner’s belief in the greater capacity of this more verdant land to renew its own natural resources and reverse some of the grosser effects of human spoliation.

The environmental and even social perils of the West, on Stegner’s view, have been specially conditioned by an all but pervasive aridity that, among other things, freezes the effects of human exploitation into the landscape. In the more humid Eastern and Southern climes, the vertiginous wilderness is always poised to reclaim the land at least partially from human development and control. The practically necessary power plants, dams, mines, and sprawling housing developments of the West, by contrast, scar and damage the land in ways that are irreversible within any human timeframe. A New Deal Democrat who believed in the prudent use of governmental power, Stegner supported robust federal protection of the pristine wilderness areas that still remained west of the Mississippi, going so far as to invest with spiritual significance the preservation of some Western lands in a state as much unaltered by human influence as possible. He believed there were intangible and ancient resources in those places that might somehow sustain us. . . .