Utah in Peril

Nine Mile Canyon is home of hundreds of thousands of acres of public land at risk. Read here to find out what is scheduled to go down on December 19th, one week from today.







It makes me so happy and grateful that there are people who work tirelessly to protect beautiful, ancient lands like these. The least I can do is spread the word.

If John Steinbeck were alive today, I wonder what his thoughts would be. I don't include the following passages to unfairly associate his past words with this current issue. But while reading Travels With Charley recently, I couldn't help but think that he'd be quite horrified to see this day. His observations of a changing America some 50 years ago:

"I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills beside a matchless harborage-a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off to make level warrens for the rabbits of the present. The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land. This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity."

"This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carcinomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction."

"The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die."

"And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside."

-excerpts from Travels With Charlie in Search of America
John Steinbeck

I hope to have plenty of countryside left for the children to return home to.