CONSERVATION - A Positive Statement

The following are excerpts from the article.

"Electoral Enchantment" by Timothy Egan, New York Times

SANTA FE, N.M. — He is bamboo-thin, relies on a pair of walking sticks to help him up a canyon trail, and has lost most of his vision. But at age 88, Stewart Udall, patriarch of the first family of the American West, politics division, has seen enough history to recognize a Big Moment when it’s staring back at him.

“I think we’re moving into a new era,” he said. “There’s something very pleasing and hopeful going on, a resurgence after a long drought of positive conservation sentiment.”

Stewart Udall at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. (Credit: AP Photo/Jeff Geissler)He was talking about love of land and passion for place, and how it can crystallize in a political shift once every generation or so. For Udall, one of only two surviving members of President John F. Kennedy’s original cabinet, that time first came with the 1960 election.

Doors opened. Fresh ideas were aired. And from Udall’s long tenure as secretary of the interior for both Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson came a legacy of public land protection responsible in large part for so many wilderness areas just outside Western cities.

Urban and wild define the New West — fast-growing cities nestled in Wallace Stegner’s “geography of hope.” The art, the history and the food of New Mexico have been commoditized, for obvious reasons. But many of its special places are intact, and owned by every American because of the Wilderness Act, which dates to the fertile years of Stewart Udall’s reign as the emperor of the outdoors.

Mountain Democrats found their way in part by rejecting the excesses of coastal Democrats, and by looking at what worked for their elders, like Stewart Udall and his brother, the late Morris Udall. The Udall name is written deep into the salmon-colored canyons and mesas of the Southwest, as prominent as a petroglyph. The family traces its lineage to John D. Lee, who was shot by a firing squad as a scapegoat for the slaughter of 120 settlers by a Mormon militia in 1857.

Stewart Udall was a child in the still-frontier West of the 1920s; he struggled through the Great Depression, and fought the Nazis in World War II. Reflecting on his long life recently, he wrote a message to his grandchildren.

“The lifetime crusade of your days must be to develop a new energy ethic to sustain life on earth,” he wrote. “Cherish sunsets, wild creatures and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.”

There much more in the full article.