Oa hoe nw Ue RO) Nie Bo ori coe IN 23 
“K Different Kind of Country,” by Raymond F. Dasmann. MacMillan. 1968. 
A different kind of country; diversity and a different way of life is the 
philosophy of the author Dasmann, who is a world-known and respected 
ecologist and conservationist. Our big job is to keep this planet a fit place 
for humans to live on. He pleads for diversity of human culture and ways 
of life for the preservation of different types of natural environment and 
open space; the values of wilderness, natural communities, and their re- 
lationship to a happy and prosperous people. Ecology, the basic science of 
interpreting our relationship among all living things, can provide the 
proper attitudes in respect to intelligent conservation of all our resources, 
including human. Dasmann sees a dangerous drifting toward conformity 
of our environment, our culture, our recreation with accompanying loss 
of freedom and liberty. Our computerized, complex living is being directed 
by men with slide-rule minds. 
Wilderness is essential to personal freedom. Environmental changes 
threaten the survival of many species. Each species is specialized to fit 
into a specific habitat, which is an unlimited storehouse of biological 
evidence that may enrich the human spirit and in the end be the difference 
between the good life and bare existence or extinction. Diversified open 
space offers a buffer zone for freedom, an escape from restrictions. Man 
has been an evolutionary creation of nature too long to be cut off from 
contact with it. When contact with nature is not available, it causes psy- 
chological, mental, spiritual, and physical ills. When the land loses its 
vitality, man suffers. The multiple use concept of resource use often con- 
fuses and weakens wise use of resources. 
The Redwood forests best use is their aesthetic value to the human 
spirit. It is not compatible with lumbering interests. The original diverse 
wilderness, accompanied with its diverse culture, stimulated deep virginal 
aititudes of great feeling which is one of man’s most precious heritages. The 
future welfare of civilization is based on ideals, imaginations, anticipated 
dreams, associated with solitude and meditation, resulting in. spiritual 
renewal. If the earth becomes unfit for wildlife, it may also become unfit 
for man’s survival. Natural diversity with its accompanying beauty, form, 
vitality, and eternal hope are co-existent. Where there is no hope, a 
people perish. 
Technology has only one standard of values—“Does it pay?” Progress 
of a nation or of people cannot always best be measured by its Gross 
National Product. You cannot dam the Grand Canyon without destroying 
its irreplacable wilderness. Many of our larger cities have grown like 
topsy, unplanned, hap-hazard, mushrooming. They are no longer fit for 
human occupation. Bigness alone is not always the best standard. It is 
more important in the final analysis to be right than to misuse our ir- 
replacable resources, which have been and are now basic to civilization’s 
future welfare. —J. W. Galbreath 
Ft ft ) ft & 
“Our Illinois Wildlife Legacy” as extracted from "The Shadow of a Gun,” 
by H. Clay Merritt. Peterson Company, 1904. 
H. Clay Merritt was a market hunter, game buyer and shipper in the 
Geneseo-Kewanee area. The golden age of game bird abundance was from 
1857 to 1887. After that came poverty in wildlife, not so much a result of 
the market-gunner as destruction of the habitat by invention of the steel 
mold-board plow, which made it possible to plow the prairie grassland 
