David Gessner on ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

Paul Roland interviews David Gessner about his new book, ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West. 

David Gessner speaks tonight (Monday, May 18th) at 7:30 PM at Powell's Books on Hawthorne.

As western rivers dry up and western land cracks from aridity, the voices of Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey have never been more important. At a time of fires and record low snowpack in the Sierras, with water beginning to be seen as the gold it is, these two environmentalist writers can teach us that this has always been the reality of the West, not the myth we have been taught to believe in. They can show us how our way of inhabiting the region has never been sustainable, that today's fracking is yesterday's mining, and can show us how the dots of the West have always connected: from aridity to the snowpack to water conservation to mining to a landscape unlike any other to an attitude toward that landscape that veers wildly from loving to rapacious. With climate change making a historically dry climate even drier, never has it been more vital to listen to what Abbey and Stegner have to tell us.