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Show 436. put on my pack and spend several days in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne, to remind myself what I was talking about. Even late in the season, when the oaks are flaming and the aspens are dropping their yellow leaves, one needs to sit by a campfire and remind oneself that the real research library of Yosemite lives in its canyons, rivers, lakes, meadows, forests, and mountains. It seems to me, even now returned, that the chief difficulty we experience as humans is that we forget too easily, and depend on artificial stimulants for our memories. There are many good books about the history of conservation, but they are all books about a social movement, about the cultural changes in America. None of them attempt to immerse the reader in that deeper flow, which sings quietly all the while in Pate Valley and Glen Aulin. All of these books are, in the nature of their origin and significance, anthropocentric. They are perhaps not secondary sources, but tertiary, twice removed from Nature, being neither about the real issue of conservation or preservation, or even about the impact of Nature on the men who went to Washington, but primarily about the interactions between these men. Sometimes this produces a discussion of personalities. If it was true for Pinchot and Mather that "It was natural that each of these men, so devoted to the promotion of his own domain, should fight hard for it, and therefore against the other," then the whole history of conflict between the Forest Service and Park Service might be reduced to power games between egotists. I would |