Wofford

A friend wrote today in an email and said "Save the Earth" at the end of her note. I'll admit I've thought about the problems of "saving the earth" a great deal since we touched down in Shanghai. The pressures on the planet here are seriously extreme already, and it's obvious they will mount in the next few decades. The scholars who have lectured us have said that the Chinese know they will not be able to establish a middle class like the West because there will simply not be enough resources.

I'm headed to China for two weeks on a Wofford College faculty study trip. At first I wasn't very excited about going. I'm not a city boy, and our whole 14-day excursion would mostly take place in vast Shanghai, a coastal city of over 20 million people, China's New York, a pulsing vortex of trade, commerce and consumerism.

At the beginning of SAND COUNTY ALMANAC Aldo Leopold divides humanity into two groups: those who can't live without wild things and those who can.

I'm in the second group. I need to visit wild places, and when I'm not in them (most of the time), I need to know wild things are out there, simply being wild.

There is no certain human utility to real wildness as far as I understand it, though some people believe that they can't live without wildness because it provides habitat for the animals they like to hunt, territory for trails they like to hike, reservoirs for wild plants containing some undiscovered medicine that might cure cancer, or distant vistas for the scenes they like to photograph.

Once in the presence of wildness, its possible to perceive how its real value is something beyond these simple utilities. True wildness, as Wallace Stegner said in his famous 1963 "Wilderness Letter" is "part of the geography of hope," and we who love it and need it should take pleasure in knowing that "such a timeless and uncontrolled part of the earth is still there."

On Saturday I paddled my canoe above the dam at Glendale. It was a warm late summer day, and yellow-bellied and painted turtles were basking on debris along the old mill pond's far shore. It couldn't have been more beautiful, and I couldn't have been more happy.