Wilderness & America with Dr. Andrew Gulliford

With Andrew Gulliford, Ph.D., Professor of History, Fort Lewis College

Wilderness in America has been an idea, an ideal, and finally it became a law in 1964 with Congressional passage of the Wilderness Act which preserves millions of acres of land in its primitive state. This is a perfect topic for Earth Day because no other landscapes in the United States are more fully protected yet also threatened in a variety of ways. Wilderness landscapes are “untrammeled lands,” “where man is a visitor who does not remain.” Dr. Gulliford will review our history of wilderness, and how Colonial settlers feared it, and how advocates like Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt, enthusiastically supported it. He will tell a few wilderness tales from the Weminuche Wilderness, which is out our back door, and he will show slides of a wilderness workshop held in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico.  This virtual program will be run via Zoom. Email darcy@prlibrary.org for login information.

“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we know, and we will know only what we have been taught.”  –Baba Diom, Senegal

 “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” –Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac