One of America’s great writers of both fiction and non-fiction, the late Wallace Stegner was a pioneer of the environmental movement starting in the 1950s. Stegner used his extraordinary literary gifts to wake Americans up about threats to the environment nobody was paying attention to.

In 1960 Wallace Stegner published his personal manifesto on humanity’s need to preserve wild lands. March 1 this year is the 145th anniversary of America’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872. That law signed by President Ullyses S. Grant was the first of its kind and triggered the creation of national parks around the world. Today 100 countries have over 1200 parks or comparable land preserves. The United States now has over 400 parks covering 84 million acres in all 50 states.

To honor the historical significance of that March 1, 1872, law, and to remember again why these parks are so valuable, here is Wallace Stegner’s famous Wilderness Letter.

THE WILDERNESS LETTER From “Coda: Wilderness Letter,” copyright by Wallace Stegner, 1960.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved– as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds– because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simple because it is there–important, that is, simply as idea.

Working into the wee hours Friday night, December 9, 2016, the U.S. Congress authorized $1.5 billion to pay for Great Lakes restoration over the next five year. Included in that legislation is $170 million badly needed to help Flint clean up its lead-contaminated water. The Water Infrastructure Improvements will upgrade water facilities for states facing public health threats—with the nationally publicized crisis in Flint topping the list.

But what wasn’t in the press releases was that this historic $1.5 billion environmental leap forward for the country began at Steelcase, Inc., in Grand Rapids in May of 2004. A visionary who believed any thing was possible, the late Steelcase heir Peter M. Wege had told his staff that spring, “We’re going to save the Great Lakes.” And they knew him well enough to think he might just do it.

Wege then invited over 70 nationally recognized environmental leaders to a three-day working conference titled Healing Our Waters. In his invitation to the conference, sponsored by The Wege, Frey, Beldon, and Mott Foundations, Wege wrote, “Our objective is to collaboratively reach consensus on a policy statement for restoring the Great Lakes ecosystem. We will focus not on the problems, but the solutions.”

Wege asked the attending experts to “develop a powerful statement on the policy reforms needed to begin healing the Great Lakes.” And they did! Over three days in May 2004 packed with long sessions and lively debate, the environmental scientists collaboratively agreed on the greatest threats to the Great Lakes. Included in their final report, the HOW experts outlined a program to deal with deteriorating water quality in the Great Lakes—the same solutions just approved by Congress for Flint.

Wege called the HOW experts’ final statement the “Magna Carta of the Great Lakes.” That “Magna Carta” coincided with an executive order by then-President George W. Bush that brought together over 1,500 Great Lakes citizens to craft the Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Strategy to Restore and Protect the Great Lakes calling for $20 billion in federal funding. The citizens’ recommendations mirrored the conclusions from the HOW conference in Grand Rapids. Indeed, the $1.5 billion Great Lakes funding just passed is a direct outcome of the Steelcase HOW conference.

Another direct outcome of the Steelcase conference has occurred over the past seven years with Congress having invested over $2.2 billion to restore Peter’s Great Lakes. That two-plus billion has funded some 2,900 local projects around the five Lakes. One example has been the cleanup of three contaminated sites. In the twenty years before the GLRI was passed, only one toxic site had been decontaminated.

For Peter Wege, who died in 2014, that 2004 Great Lakes conference was not just one more good cause. Rather he described it as “the most important single project of my life as an environmental activist since starting The Wege Foundation in 1967.”

He did say, “We’re going to save the Great Lakes!”

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