At the end of a PBS American Experience program about photographer Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope summed up:
Well, Ansel’s life encompasses the long national debate — the debate that, I think, began ten years before he was born with the release of the Census of 1890, the declaration that the frontier had closed, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous challenge to the American people: who were we going to be now that we didn’t have a frontier anymore?
And Ansel’s life occupied almost exactly a century in which Americans debated that question, and at the end of the century came to Ansel’s answer, which was that while the frontier as a statistically measured artifact of the Census Bureau might have ended, wildness did not end with the frontier, and that what it was to be an American was to respect and cherish wildness.
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I think Ansel captured in film that opportunity, that possibility which Americans spent all of his lifetime debating whether to value. And then, really almost at the end of his life, Americans decided that we wanted to be Americans. We did not want a second Europe. We wanted a place that was still wild.
The difficulty with protecting wild places is that you can’t win the victory once and for all. Every day, there is pressure to allow logging or drilling or other exploitation of wilderness lands. We can turn the developers away a hundred times, but they’ll be back, over and over, until there are no wild places anywhere.
Such things, once lost, can never be recovered. Never.
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