Conservationist Speaks on Reconnecting With the Landscape

Feb. 28, 2007

MISSOULA – At a lecture Tuesday evening at the University of Montana, author and conservationist Gary Ferguson described the Rocky Mountain region as a haven for societies’ outcasts.
The west is a, “classic, archetypal landscape for those who don’t fit in,” Ferguson said.
In the past it has been an escape from dingy industrialist city life for factory workers, from social expectations for Victorian sons and daughters of privilege, from slavery for black slaves-turned trappers, and from the confines of a materialist society for the freaks of the hippie movement.
“But where do you go if you’re a freak,” Ferguson asked his audience. People now say, “we don’t want you here lowering our property rates.”
Ferguson concentrated on the concept that the landscape of an area shapes the perception of the people who live in it.
Although he gave brief examples of other landscapes, Ferguson’s main points were on the draw of the west and why the Rocky Mountain region is so significant in the United States’ past.
“I just love this landscape and have since I was nine years old,” said Ferguson, who is originally from Indiana but has lived in Redlodge for the past few decades.
As Ferguson explained though, this place he loves was once described as a hideout for heathens and devils by what he described as certain powerful people.
These powerful people rallied support for the westward movement by misunderstanding and mischaracterizing the people who made their homes in the Rocky Mountains, especially the native peoples.
Ferguson used period paintings to illustrate this. One of these paintings was, The Trapper’s Bride, by Alfred Jacob Miller, that depicted a white trapper marrying a Native American woman surrounded by her family.
Most common people and critics who saw the painting hailed it as an embodiment of the freedom and empowerment that the western United States symbolized.
From the time the country was founded wilderness as a symbol for democracy and freedom has been a popular notion.
Many people believed that the popular depictions of the west were, “Eden before the fall,” Ferguson said. They believed that, “we took the Eden that we were given and pissed it away,” he said.
Ferguson put forth questions to the audience about the wilderness today. Many of them expressed concern that most people don’t feel a connection with the wilderness, and are, in fact, scared of it.
“We want the illusion of risk, but we don’t want risk,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson made jokes about people in Yellow Stone National Park chasing bison and jumping out of their minivans with cameras but, “at least the hunger and the need for a relationship with nature is still there,” he said.
Whitney Gaskill, 19, a UM sophomore who is in the Wilderness Issues Lecture Series class said that she agreed with a lot of what Ferguson had to say.
“Its really important to see how the landscape connects to people, and to make a personal connection,” said Gaskill.
Others worried about the effect that media has on people’s perception of nature. One audience member described a popular view of wilderness as just another place we go to have a good time.
Ferguson expressed hope that people will once again feel the need to reconnect with nature and not continue the trend of watching nature through their RV windows as if it were a television show. We need to start seeing nature, “as a part of our daily lives,” Ferguson said.