“The Marks of Human Passage”

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too.
It needs them now.”
–from “The Marks of Human Passage” by Wallace Stegner, included in “This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers” (1955)

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