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
On September 3, 1964, 
The history of achieving the 1964 Wilderness Act in the U.S. Congress is commonly seen as an eight-year legislative struggle. The first wilderness bills were introduced in Congress in 1956 — in the House of Representatives by John P. Saylor of Pennsylvania and in the Senate by Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota.
“About ninety years ago, there was born in Concord, Mass, a boy who never really grew to be a man, though he lived forty-four years. It is true that he got to be tall and strong, with a deep bass voice; that he wore a beard, and that from all external appearances he would have at once been taken for a full-sized man. But at heart he was always a boy. He never got over the habit of looking at things from a boy’s point of view. Instead of regarding the world as a place for serious business, where men must work so many hours a day and produce so many dollars’ worth of goods, and till the fields and labor hard in factories, or offices, or stores, and ‘get along’ – instead of all these things, he always seemed to consider the world as a great, fine, glorious playground — a place to be enjoyed and appreciated. This man-boy was Henry David Thoreau.” – From Gilbert P. Coleman’s “The Man Who Was Always A Boy.” 
