Writers Gone Essay collection in First & Wildest gathers voices of the Gila Wilderness BY JULIE ANN GRIMM P H O T O S B Y M I C H A E L P. B E R M A N e d i t o r @ s f r e p o r t e r. c o m
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rom the howling lobos to the silent native Gila trout, the endangered animals that live in the Gila Wilderness are among its best-known inhabitants; the lumbering pines and the rushing rivers take a close second. The writers of a new collection of essays from Torrey House Press recall a century of protection for 500,000 acres and the beings within them in southeastern New Mexico in First & Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100. As the title hints, the Gila was the nation’s first-ever space designated as a wilderness area, a label that now defines 800 places in the United States, including the Pecos Wilderness in our own backyards. Federal law calls on them to remain “without permanent improvements or human habitation” that are “protected and managed so as to preserve [their] natural conditions.” The book, partly funded by WildEarth Guardians, presents portraits of a rugged place: far from a policy guide or a tick-tock history of the fraught path to the present. Yet, it couldn’t succeed without being grounded in what’s come before—even the fairly recent past that includes bark-beetle infestation, setbacks for endangered species programs and wildfires of staggering acreage and intensity. Writers including Pam Houston revisit the human emotional toll of political polarization and of pandemic isolation in the same space as the peril of nature, and Beto O’Rourke (yes, that Beto) and others touch on the power of time spent away under the 14
MAY 11-17, 2022
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