Thoreau didn't say, "In wilderness is the preservation of the world;" what he really said was, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Either way, though, the point is true: For the survival of our souls and our sanity, we need places where we can get away from the roar and rush, the clash and clamor of our "civilized" world.
On Monday, President Obama signed into law a piece of legislation that will protect one of those precious wild places - the Badlands wilderness area, about 15 miles east of Bend.
The signature was the final victory in a political battle that had gone on literally for decades, since the federal Bureau of Land Management first proposed that the 30,000-acre swath of high desert was special enough to deserve protection from the assaults of development, mining, grazing, and the howl of the infernal combustion engine. That victory was the result of the patient labor of dozens of people both in Congress and outside of it, notably Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and the Oregon Natural Desert Association.
