SOMETHING WILL HAVE GONE OUT OF US
VM. 008
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge represents something more than just a piece of public land with a certain number of acres. It represents something that speaks to who we are as an American people. It speaks to the value that we've placed on these wild, wide open places and the ways of life that revolve around having that, whether that's native people or the wildlife that depend on these landscapes.
But it also is of almost spiritual importance to people, even in the lower 48, who can go to sleep at night knowing that there's still some place left out there that is just as it was thousands of years ago.
Wallace Stegner said that something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, and if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were to lose its coastal plain, and the calving grounds for the caribou herd, and the denning sites for the polar bears, and the sites where these hundreds of thousands of migratory birds pass through, if we lose that, something will have gone out of us as a people, something that we'll never be able to get back.”
