“SOMETHING will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…” Wallace Stegner wrote in his “Wilderness Letter.” “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
There was a debate among the Governing Council: Should we publicly denounce Secretary of the Interior Manuel Luhan’s latest environmental policies by taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times, or work behind the scenes, influencing members of Congress who had access to President George H. W. Bush? The Council was split down the middle.
It was decided that Wally, in his wisdom, would be the tiebreaker. The question posed: Should we be stronger in our public response to the Bush administration or more strategic in our private one? Charles Wilkinson and I were drafted by the council to write something for The New York Times should we choose the more radical route. We took the declaration to Stegner at his home in Palo Alto.
“Let’s hear it—” Wally said after he had been briefed about the divide and dilemma of the Governing Council. We had just finished a long, lovely lunch with his wife, Mary, on their porch overlooking the soft yellowed hills of Los Altos.
Charles and I were anxious. How do you read a piece of writing to one of the writers you admire most?
Wilkinson read the beginning of what we had drafted, and I finished it.
Wally sat in his chair with his hands folded. “That’s it?” he said. “You came all the way to California to read me that?” He then lit into the Bush policies with such incredulousness that we were shamed for our timidity, which we had seen as progressive and brave.
True eloquence has an edge, sharp and clean.
A month later Stegner was awarded the 1992 National Medal of Arts, but turned it down because he was “troubled” by the political controls placed upon the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities under the tyranny of leadership by administrators like Lynne Cheney.
For Stegner, the integrity of wilderness and the integrity of art were the same thing, something to be honored and protected as a wellspring of inspiration. Both Robert Mapplethorpe’s orchids and the threatened tundra on the Arctic’s coastal plain deserved our respect and restraint as harbingers of imagination. Creativity is another form of open space, whose very nature is to disturb, disrupt, and “bring us to tenderness.”
When Wally spoke about “the native home of hope,” it was in direct response to his belief and imperative that we can “create a society to match the scenery.”
I returned to Utah, our home in the desert. My politics would remain local.
After the 1994 Republican sweep in the midterm elections, the Utah congressional delegation, led by Representative Jim Hansen and Senator Orrin Hatch, announced they were going to draft a Utah wilderness bill once and for all. They were tired of the decades-old contention over Utah’s wildlands. Hansen and Hatch believed, alongside the “Gingrich revolution,” they had the political power to get what they wanted—as little wilderness as possible. The governor, Michael Leavitt, reminded them that by law, they had to conduct public hearings. So in 1995, January through May, local hearings were held throughout the state. More than 70 percent of the people in Utah wanted more wilderness, not less, advocating for the Citizens’ Proposal, which at the time protected 5.7 million acres of wilderness. Utahns were told that their voice would not only be heard but respected.
Formal congressional subcommittee hearings were held in Cedar City, Utah.
There were three panels: the political panel, the extractive industry panel, and the conservation panel. I had been asked by the conservation community to speak. We would testify last.
Congressman Jim Hansen and his colleagues sat on a riser above us, designed to intimidate. As I stood to speak, Hansen began shuffling through his papers, yawning, coughing, anything to show his boredom and displeasure. I was halfway through my testimony when it became clear that the congressman wasn’t even listening. I stopped mid-sentence. “Congressman Hansen, I have been a resident of Utah all of my life. Is there anything I can say to you that might in some way alter your perspective on wilderness?”
He looked over the top of his glasses perched at the end of his nose, slowly leaned on his elbows, and said simply, “I’m sorry, Ms. Williams, there is something about your voice I cannot hear.”
And then it was over.
I don’t think he was referring to the quality of the microphone. Congressman Hansen’s remarks became a metaphor, a symbolic representation of our delegation’s inability—no, refusal—to hear what we were saying about wilderness.
One month later Hansen and Hatch presented the 1995 Utah Public Lands Management Act, proposing protection of only 1.8 million acres out of the 22 million acres administered through the Bureau of Land Management.
It was a slap in the face of democracy, a betrayal of public trust in the name of our public commons. Outraged, I kept thinking, What can I do as a citizen?
I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times, “Open for Business,” outlining the grave inadequacies of this bill created by Utah’s congressional delegation. The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 undermined the 1964 Wilderness Act by opening up previously protected lands to oil and gas development.
In July, a special hearing was held before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in Washington, D.C. Senator Hatch and Senator Bob Bennett both testified on behalf of their bill. Again, there were three panels. Again, the conservation panel was last. And once again, I testified with three other Utahns to support the Citizen’s Proposal for 5.7 million acres, part of America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act already before Congress, not the Hatch-Bennett bill advocating only 1.8 million acres.
The panel on industry had finished its testimony—given by representatives ranging from the Utah Farm Bureau to the oil and gas companies. The conservation committee was next. Mayor Phillip Bimstein from Springdale, Utah, gateway to Zion National Park, was the first speaker. Two minutes into his allotted five-minute testimony, committee chairman Senator Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, stood up and said boisterously, “This one is yours, Senator Hatfield,” and then he walked out. Mark Hatfield was a lame duck from Oregon. Phillip had to stop his testimony while this “changing of the gavel” occurred, and after the disruption, Senator Hatfield looked at the small-town mayor and said, “Your time is up—next!”
It was more than rude and ill-mannered, it was disrespectful of the democratic process. For the rest of the hearing Senator Hatfield read a book during our testimonies. Basically, we ended up speaking to the wall. Our consolation: our testimonies were entered into the Congressional Record.
We left the nation’s capital disheartened and discouraged. It was hard not to ask, “What is the point?”
When I returned home, I met with Stephen Trimble, a fellow writer, for coffee. We talked about the wilderness debate and what was happening in Congress.
“Perhaps Congress can’t hear one voice,” I said, “but maybe they can hear a community of voices.” We had been talking about creating a small chapbook to celebrate Utah wilderness.
“Perhaps now is the time,” Steve said.
We wrote an impassioned letter to our friends. It began: “We need your help.” The letter went on to say, “Utah’s redrock wilderness is in jeopardy. Here’s the political situation we are up against…We know you love Utah’s wildlands. We are asking you to please write the most eloquent, beautiful essay or poem you have ever written. We cannot pay you, and we need your essay in three weeks.” We mailed the letter to twenty-five western writers, each one with firsthand knowledge of America’s redrock wilderness.
Miraculously, in three weeks we had twenty original pieces from a community of writers committed to language and landscape, essays as heartfelt as anything we had ever read.
The roster of writers included John McPhee, Barry Lopez, Bill Kittredge, Scott Momaday, Ann Zwinger, Richard Shelton, and U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand, all powerful voices within American letters. Karen Shepherd, a former congresswoman from Utah, contributed. Charles Wilkinson contributed his water law expertise. Mardy Murie, who was turning one hundred that year, allowed us to publish a piece of hers regarding wilderness in general. At the other end of the age spectrum was Rick Bass, thirty-eight at the time, a muscular writer and wilderness advocate from Yaak, Montana. We asked T. H. Watkins, the distinguished historian and lover of Utah, if he would consider writing a foreword, which he did.
We sought a designer, again a friend of ours, Trent Alvey, who graciously agreed to work on the project for free. We received six thousand dollars from a local foundation sponsored by Annette and Ian Cumming, great supporters of conservation efforts in Utah. This paid for the printing costs of a thousand chapbooks.
We organized the essays in a sequence we felt was the most powerful progression of ideas. We had to work quickly. We knew the biographies were important to show the standing of the writers involved. We wanted signatures from each of the writers to add solidarity and depth. There was a flurry and frenzy of writers faxing their signatures to us so we could incorporate them into the design, adding power and presence to the book.
We included a map, with a list of all the proposed wilderness areas within the Citizen’s Proposal for America’s Red Rock Wilderness. In two weeks we had our book. We called this anthology Testimony: Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness.
Good work is a stay against despair.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a smart and scrappy grassroots advocacy group, helped us place Testimony in the hands of every member of Congress. This is the power of collaboration, of one community supporting and helping another.
In mid-September we held a press conference in Washington, D.C., on the Triangle, next to the U.S. Capitol. The historian Tom Watkins spoke, placing this anthology in a political context alongside Wallace Stegner’s This Is Dinosaur, a collection of writings to stop the dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument in the 1950s. Congressmen Maurice Hinchey and Bruce Vento, cosponsors of America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, were present. They publicly accepted copies of Testimony, acknowledging this chapbook as the equivalent of a literary bill brought to the halls of Congress by American writers. They promised to carry these words to their colleagues. They spoke eloquently about wilderness as a spiritual birthright belonging to all Americans. Senator Russ Feingold was also in attendance, with a vow that he would take Testimony to the floor of the Senate and defeat the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995.
Following the press conference, a reporter from The Washington Post approached Steve and me.
“What a waste of time,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much paper gets passed around Congress? You are so naive. This will never see the light of day.”
I was incredulous, ready to have a good, spirited debate. Steve had a calmer presence of mind. He said to the reporter, “Writing is always an act of faith.”
Copies of Testimony were, in fact, passed throughout Congress. I was able to deliver a copy to Mrs. Clinton, who promised to present Testimony to the president.
We placed a copy in the hands of Vice President Gore and key members of the Clinton administration.
In March 1996, the Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 finally found its way to the Senate floor. The Senate went into a filibuster. What a filibuster needs is words. Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey rose to his feet. “With all due respect, Senators Hatch and Bennett, these wildlands belong to all Americans, not just those living in Utah. I would like to read from one of my constituents, John McPhee: ‘Basin, Range, Basin, Range…’ And Senator Bradley read John McPhee’s essay in its entirety. He was followed by other senators reading from Testimony. Throughout the filibuster, essay after essay celebrating sandstone buttes and mesas was read out loud, saturating time and space within the Senate Chamber. The Utah Public Lands Management Act of 1995 died on the Senate floor.
Testimony is now part of the Congressional Record.
Six months later, on September 18, 1996, President William Jefferson Clinton designated the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, protecting nearly two million acres of wilderness in Utah. The environmental community held strong, and the political climate was right in the midst of a presidential election. Afterward, President Clinton held up a copy of Testimony and said, “This little book made a difference.”
One never knows the tangible effects of literature, but on that particular day, looking north into the vast wildlands of the Colorado Plateau, one could believe in the collective power of a chorus of voices.
Driving back from the ceremony, I felt like a sister to Thelma and Louise, seated in their light blue convertible with the arch of sky above me. Not quite an outlaw and not yet choosing to drive off a cliff, I was still free to move in big, open country that for now remained wild. Democracy demands we speak and act outrageously. We can change the world if our view is long and focused with friends drawn lovingly around the place we call home.
More than a decade later America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act continues to be a bill before Congress, now advocating for 9.2 million acres of protected wilderness in Utah. Our voices are still singing on the margins.