OUR NEED OF BREATHING SPACE 



^ Sigurd F. Olson 



The urban sprawl is here to stay; it will continue and increase in the 

 foreseeable future. Anyone who has flown over the United States 

 during the past few years cannot help but be impressed with the 

 evidence of this movement into the countryside. This growth is espe- 

 cially dramatic when flying at night, when cities and their radiating 

 arteries of traflic look like skeins of Christmas tree lights, giant flow- 

 ing tentacles reaching out into the dark, probing farther and farther 

 into the surrounding land. There was a time not very long ago when 

 you could leave the glow of metropolitan centers behind, but today, 

 especially in the eastern half of the country, one barely leaves one 

 glow before being conscious of another in the distance. 



Nor is there any question but that this urban development exerts 

 a great drain on natural resources. Luther Gulick has pointed out 



SIGURD F. OLSON is President of the National Parks Association, 

 Wilderness Ecologist for the Izaak Walton League of America, consultant to 

 the President's Quetico-Superior Committee, former Dean of Ely Junior Col- 

 lege, Ely, Minnesota. These formal designations, however, tell very little of a 

 man who has devoted most of his life to the preservation of wilderness regions 

 all over the continent, who has led many expeditions by canoe in the Quetico- 

 Superior and the far northwest where he is known as Bourgeois, the French 

 Canadians' name for leaders of treks into the remote hinterlands in the early 

 days of exploration and trade. Among his writings. The Singing Wilderness is 

 perhaps the best known. Another book, "Listening Point," is to be published 

 soon. He was born in Chicago in 1899 and received degrees at the universities 

 of Wisconsin and Illinois. 



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