That essay, "This Savage Land," appears in this collection of the author's nonfiction. However, instead of the self-effacing, quiet humor of that essay, the rest of this book is a poignant account of an apparently doomed effort to preserve the Yaak River valley as a wilderness and bring a stop to the clear-cut logging that has been steadily turning it into a vast area of devastation. Chapters describing the author's letter-writing campaigns and his trip to Washington DC to make his case before Montana's congressmen alternate with descriptions of walks on the mountains, sighting bears and other wildlife, discoursing on the delicately interrelated flora and fauna, and admiring what is left of the old growth forests. There's also a chapter on the experience of the winter months and another on a summer of fires in the mountains and the role that fire plays in the regeneration and preservation of forests.
Through it all are the themes of loss and the ruinous harm of the logging industry, which he believes is not simply destroying a wilderness area but removing a critical link connecting regions where grizzlies, wolves, and other forms of wilderness wildlife still survive. When that connection is gone, he believes that these creatures will quickly die out. Meanwhile, the poet in him believes that something also dies within humankind when the wilderness is gone, and he reminds us that once it's gone it will be gone forever.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the mountainous West, nature writing, and the lives of people in sparsely populated and isolated areas. It's also a book for those whose hearts respond to the call of the wild and who are concerned by the destruction of national forests by the heedless economics of the logging industry and its strangle-hold in government and other seats of power.
I loved the book, and recommend it highly -- it really focuses on the valuable resources we have but often don't appreciate.Don't Hack the Yaak Rick Bass has written a plea that is at times elegant and at other times shrill. The best writing in the book are the stories of long-time valley residents (both human and animal) trying to exist in a habitat that is shrinking in the hands of indifferent government and corporate stewards. Every 30-40 pages there is the ripe whiff of the holier-than-thou that usually occurs when a gifted writer transplants himself to the West and somehow comes to believe he is the only one who can truly interpret its significance. But this is possibly a quibble based on the prejudices in my head as a longtime Wyoming rancher. In any case, it's good to know that each member of the Congressional delegation received a copy of this book, although it's doubtful that Conrad Burns or Craig Thomas ever cracked the thing.
