A Letter to Congress

Christopher Newman’s short, lyrical visual poem was inspired by and is an homage to Wallace Stegner’s 1960 “Letter to Congress,” in which the writer advocated for the preservation of the wilderness that then remained. “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” Stegner wrote. In hindsight, the 1960s were hopeful; today, the exhortation is more urgent than ever.