If you believe
nostalgia serves a purpose, you don't mind enjoying it now and
then. Before knowing that it served a purpose and when very young,
I stumbled across John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra
and began to feel nostalgic about a place I had not yet known,
in particular the approaches to Yosemite and the high country
above it. Muir's own sense of discovery was so vivid as to instill
a sense of already having been there.
Nearly a century
after Muir's first summer, Richard Kauffman has come along with
color camera instead of notebook to recapture the feeling of
discovery and the vividness in what Muir was to call the Range
of Light. Here is the Sierra the way Muir saw it, the way others
have seen it confirmed in First Summer; and here is the
place I myself have felt at home in for nearly half a century,
whether for only a week or two at a time, or a month or a year
or two -- the way it was then and is now. . . .
One of the purposes
of the Sierra Club is to keep some nostalgia alive that is devoid
of futility, to gather together people who know how important
it is that there should always be some land wild and free. They
are needed to counter the rationalizations of the highway builders,
the dam and logging-road builders, who would slice through and
dismember the Sierra Wilderness, all for a variety of reasons
that may apply some place else but that ought not be applied
here. The purpose of this book is to remind everyone we can that
neither California nor the rest of America is rich enough to
lose any more of the Gentle Wilderness, nor poor enough to need
to. . . .
More than anything,
we hope the series will do something lasting for wilderness.
Man needs to save enough of it, what he knows viscerally is enough
without waiting for all the statistics. Man can safely assume
that for all his shortcomings, he is bright enough to carry on
his civilization on the 95 per cent or so of the land he has
already disrupted. He is wise enough to recognize that he will
not have a bright land, nor really serve himself well, if he
hurries to disrupt that last five per cent on the pretext that
progress will otherwise cease. It won't. It will cease, however,
if we cannot be kind enough to tomorrow's men to leave for them,
in big wilderness, a chance to seek answers to questions we have
not yet learned how to ask.
DAVID
BROWER
Executive Director,
Sierra Club
Berkeley, California
November 1, 1964