A Year in the Wilderness: Bearing Witness in the Boundary Waters
- Sep 17, 2022
- 1 min read
★★★★☆
Traveling in the wake of environmentalist Sigurd F. Olson, both literally and figuratively, Amy and Dave Freeman set out to document a year in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Their adventure wasn’t a purely personal one, however. They were working with a network of organizations and individuals to bring attention to the threats the BWCAW faces from the prospect of increased sulfide-ore copper mining. Part travelogue, part blog, part photo essay, part documentary, A Year in the Wilderness is a love letter to attendance, to presence, to attentiveness, to connection, to stewardship, to slowing down, to living with intention. Those are lessons we can learn in many ways, though perhaps from nature especially, but they are also lessons that can be turned into ways of living we can carry with us always. As the Freemans put it, “There are many lifetimes’ worth of knowledge hidden in the wilderness. … [T]he land speaks to anyone who takes the time to listen.” And so it does, but each of us who cares, who knows and cherishes its importance, its value—its necessariness—must speak loudly for these quiet places if we want them to not just survive but thrive for us and for future generations.
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