The Nature Pages

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	Spirit of the North The Quotable Sigurd F. Olson edited by David Backes University of Minnesota Press, 2004
	Drawing from the speeches, letters, journals, articles and books of the famous wilderness advocate, Sigurd Olson's biographer has compiled a selection of quotations that give voice to the life and beliefs of the man in a condensed form.             "I want to give a sense of his development over time as a person, a writer, a conservationist, and a wilderness philosopher," David Backes explains.		"At night, after a long day of cruising through lakes, running rapids, and making portages, his bodily wants satisfied, with nothing ahead but rest and peace under the stars, the full realization comes to him, and then he understands why men go into the wilderness."
	The quotes are arranged in chapters by topic -- "A Strange and Violent World," "Wilderness," "The Power of Wonder," etc. -- and presented chronologically within the chapter to show the evolution of the Olson's ideas. Backes begins each chapter with a preamble that provides some historical context for the quotes that follow.
	"Sigurd Olson believed humans have a biological attachment to nature formed during the course of our evolution," Backes points out in foreword to 'The Power of Wonder' chapter. "The psychological and spiritual restlessness so evident in modern society is due in part to the instinctual longing we still feel for the intimate connection to the earth that our species once enjoyed. He call this longing 'racial memory,' and it formed the biological underpinning to his later ideas about wilderness as a key component of mankind's continuing spiritual evolution."		"Though to modern man the music seems to have changed, he still listens to the ancient rhythms. His are the old fears as well as the basic satisfactions, and because of them there is a powerful nostalgia for the wild. While the great silences are now shattered by the roar of jets, the cities he has built vibrating with noise, natural smells replaced by those of combustion and industry, senses bombarded with new and violent impressions, he is still attuned to woods and fields and waters. He has come a log way from the primitive, but not far enough to forget. Were it not for a nature steeped in a racial experience that knew nothing of these things, his adjustment might be swift, but adaptations take eons of time, and mental and physiological processes that have been maturing slowly for a million years cannot be ignored at will. Man of the Atomic Age and its conflicting technologies is still part of the past."