The Ken Burns documentary film Henry David Thoreau is airing on PBS. This renewed focus on Thoreau’s life provides an opportunity to present an excerpt of Ed Zahniser’s speech “Wilderness and Our Community of Life,” delivered at Vassar College on March 31, 2004.
Novelist Andrew Lytle writes that prophets do not come from the city promising riches and wearing store-bought clothes. No, prophets have always come from the wilderness, stinking of goats… and telling of a different sort of treasure. Wendell Berry writes that “if change is to come, it will come from the margins… It was the desert, not the temple, that give us the prophets.” And in Hebrew scripture, as in New Testament Greek, the words we translate as desert and wilderness are the same word.
This prophetic role of wilderness experience – how wilderness can call us back to right relationships, to right living, to social justice – this prophetic role of wilderness also figures in the history of the Wilderness Act of 1964. For this we step back to the Transcendentalist reformers Margaret Sarah Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. [Read more…] about Thoreau, Wilderness, and Our Community of Life
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On September 3, 1964, 
The early conquest of overseas territories led to the application of European directives regulating life in the colonies.
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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” — U.S. Declaration of Independence
