Philip Connors

Philip Connors (born 1972) is an American journalist, essayist, author, and environmentalist. His book Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout won the 2011 National Outdoor Book Award (NOBA). Quotes The ironies inherent in the concept of “managed wilderness” are enough to make your eyes cross if you think about them long enough. I didn’t want to write a treatise on the subject. It’s been done. But I did want to tell the story of the Gila Wilderness, because it marks a profound turning point in our relationship to the American land. Aldo Leopold, the man many consider the founding father of modern ecology, came to the Southwestern United States Southwest to work for the United States Forest Service Forest Service in 1909. At the time there were half a dozen areas of New Mexico and Arizona with at least a million roadless acres. Ten years later only one was left. The automobile had so quickly penetrated the wildest areas of the region that he feared it was only a matter of time before there was no wilderness left at all in this part of the world. So he made a pretty radical proposal. He wanted to ban new roads around the headwaters of the Gila River, the last wilderness of its kind in the Southwest. He recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country—that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. as quoted by Maud Newton in: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/04/15/philip-connors-on-fire-season/ Philip Connors on ‘Fire Season’ The Paris Review April 15, 2011 ... all of life on Planet Earth is affected by global phenomena. Wilderness books once focused on how an encounter with wild nature altered the human soul and human consciousness; now, they tend to ruminate on how wilderness has been altered and diminished by human tools and patterns of consumption.Wilderness in its purest sense may be gone, but wild remnants remain, and many of my favourite books in the genre celebrate a particular place (often in America), cherishing what is native and mourning what's been lost. Philip Connors's top 10 wilderness books. From novels by Cormac McCarthy and Marilynne Robinson to essays by John Fowles and Gary Snyder, the author chooses the best encounters with wild nature 2 November 2011 The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/02/philip-connors-top-10-wilderness-books Quotes about Philip Connors In the spring of 2002, then a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, Connors quit the canyons of Manhattan for the mountains of the Gila Wilderness Gila. Upon arriving, he ascended 10,000 feet above sea level to the summit of Apache Peak, then another several flights of stairs to the top of a Depression-era Fire lookout tower lookout tower. There, for the next five months, in a 7-by-7-foot “steel and glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning,” he spent his days as “a professional watcher of mountains,” “a sensei of the sedentary,” “an aristocrat of sky,” which is to say as a lookout in the employ of the United States Fire Service — the U.S. Fire Circus, he now prefers to call it. He has resumed the post every summer since.His book narrates a single fire season, that of 2009, from the snows of April to the “blessed indolence” of August, one chapter devoted to each month, a structure that gives the book a kind of plot. Donovan Hohn, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/books/review/book-review-fire-season-by-philip-connors.html The ‘Walden’ of the Wildfire (review of Fire Season by Philip Connors) April 8, 2011 The New York Times External links Bio, Philip Connors philipconnors.com http://www.philipconnors.com/bio.html Category:1972 births Category:Living people Category:Environmentalists from the United States Category:Essayists from the United States Category:Journalists from Iowa Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States