Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Update full.md
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
DMecker authored Feb 16, 2024
1 parent 2536b6e commit 59db51f
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 1 deletion.
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion pages/essay/full.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ Two wings of environmental thought were crystalizing in the late nineteenth and

The creation of wilderness areas such as The Church directly correlates with the decline of fire lookouts. After all, there is no reason for a human made structure in what is legally defined as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” However, fire lookouts sometime in the middle of the twentieth century become endowed with a similar scarcity as wilderness, and a different, less utilitarian gaze begins to be cast from them. As Aldo Leopold once said of wilderness, "only when the end of the thing is in sight do we discover that the thing is valuable."

Writers like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, and Wallace Stegner staffed lookouts in the 1950’s and 60’s. Gary Snyder, rather than writing of the official management purposes of lookouts, “[sits] cross-legged, in the practical and traditional posture of a Buddhist meditation.” Jack Kerouac, too, not encountering wildfire per se, had “instead come face to face with [himself].”
Writers like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, and Phillip Whalen staffed lookouts in the 1950’s and 60’s. Gary Snyder, rather than writing of the official management purposes of lookouts, “[sits] cross-legged, in the practical and traditional posture of a Buddhist meditation.” Jack Kerouac, too, not encountering wildfire per se, had “instead come face to face with [himself].”

By the 1980’s it was clear that the real cultural significance of lookouts rested not in their utilitarian purpose, but rather in their connection to human wilderness. In the definitive lookout “bible” written by Ray Kresek and published in 1987, _Fire Lookouts of the Northwest_, he asks “Where have all the lookouts gone?” Rather than evoking nostalgia for antiquated management practices, Kresek outlines the troubles one returns to in civilization, that “his buddy had run his car into a tree, his family was sore because he didn’t write all summer, and his girlfriend was going steady with someone else.” Instead, the lookout wishes to “return to his summer job in the wilderness atop Mount Sentinel … only to be told that his lookout was no longer there. They burned it down last fall.”

Expand Down

0 comments on commit 59db51f

Please sign in to comment.