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Rebecca Solnit urges 'radical slowness' and a redefinition of wilderness in Missoula lecture
Summary
Writer Rebecca Solnit told a packed Wilderness Lecture Series audience in Missoula that the idea of wilderness has shifted from a notion of untouched land to an actively managed landscape shaped by people, and argued that slow, persistent activism has produced many of the environmental gains of recent decades.
Rebecca Solnit, a writer, historian and activist from San Francisco, delivered the closing lecture of the Wilderness Lecture Series in Missoula, saying the meaning of “wilderness” has changed and urging what she called "radical slowness" in environmental thinking and activism.
Solnit told the audience she and photographers Mark Clatt and Byron Wolfe rephotographed historic Yosemite images to track how both landscape and public meaning have changed over decades, producing what she called a lesson in paying attention to slow shifts in culture and ecology. "Wildness is not wilderness. That is, if wilderness is a kind of place, wildness is a state of being or a state of mind," Solnit said.
She framed the argument with two interlocking strands: a photographic project that retraced Edward Muybridge's and other photographers' 19th- and 20th-century views of Yosemite, and an activist history she developed in the essay and later book Hope in the Dark. The photography work—which included rephotographing Ansel Adams' Clearing Winter Storm during a 7,000-acre controlled burn on Oct. 6,…
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