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[HOWLING] SIGURD OLSON: "Listening Point is a bare glaciated spit of rock in the Quetico-Superior country. Each time I've gone there, I've found something new which has opened up great realms of thought and interest. For me, it's been a point of discovery and, like all such places of departure, has assumed meaning far beyond the ordinary."

LES BLACKLOCK: Most people have never had that experience where they've been absolutely alone in a forest or in any wild situation with their own company and sit quietly and just allow nature to happen around them. And those that have had that experience, some of them rate it as one of the very top experiences in their entire life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

TOM STEWARD: Sigurd Olson reading from his book Listening Point, named for the land on Burntside Lake near Ely, Minnesota, where stands his one-room cabin retreat, and Les Blacklock, nature photographer and consulting naturalist, two modern voyageurs who know the Arrowhead Lake region of Northern Minnesota so well. They not only write and photograph there but live where their work is, the gateway to the Quetico-Superior canoe country.

Sigurd Olson has lived in Ely for over 50 years. The separate studio beside the pines he planted that long ago is where the man who was called our modern Thoreau wrote The Singing Wilderness, The Lonely Land, Runes of the North, Open Horizons, and Listening Point, all interpretations of the north country.

Past president of the Wilderness Society and National Parks Association, biology professor, and Dean of Ely Junior College, Sigurd Olson has long fought for the preservation of wood and wildlife in and outside Minnesota. At age 76, he still travels but, as always, returns to the country he loves best, the country he knows only as one who has canoed as far north as the Arctic Coast and back again.

Les Blacklock is 54 and has long worked but is just moving into the north to Moose Lake, Minnesota, where he's building a combination house and nature center to continue recording nature on film and to share his 160-acre private wilderness with students, teachers, and the wildlife.

He's co-authored two books, The High West, with Andy Russell's text and his photos, also in The Hidden Forest, written by Sigurd Olson and now in the third printing, two men who record their images on paper in words and colors, men for all seasons, men who spend time outside doors and conventional quarters.

For the next hour or so, we'll spend time with them, listening to reflections of the north from two Minnesota artists who homestead in the north. Sigurd Olson will read several passages from his work, beginning with this portion of Listening Point designated in 1958 as the official Minnesota Centennial book.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SIGURD OLSON: "From it I've seen the immensity of space and glimpsed at times the grandeur of creation. There I sense the span of uncounted centuries and looked down the path all life has come. I have explored on this rocky bit of shore the great concept that nothing stands alone. And everything, no matter how small, is part of a greater whole.

The Point has shown me time and time again that William Blake was right when he wrote, 'To see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.'"

TOM STEWARD: You just read a passage from Listening Point, your second book. Why is it listening point?

SIGURD OLSON: I called it Listening Point because a long time ago, I read a passage in Plato's commentaries, which runs back over 2,000 years. And Plato talked about standing on a point of rock near Athens and looking up to the heavens.

Then he looked down at the point of rock he was standing on and realized that he was standing on the apex of a great constellation triangle. And the apex he was standing on was to him the most important point of the universe.

And from that apex, he could not only explore his own soul but explore the spirit world and all of the universe. And so I decided my little point would be a little point like Plato had in mind. From my point, I could explore the universe. This to me was the most important point in the universe.

TOM STEWARD: Of course, there are fewer and fewer of those points, such as Listening Point around. Is that part of why you write?

SIGURD OLSON: Partly. But over the years since this book came out in 1958, I have received many letters saying I have found my Listening Point. My Listening Point's in Washington or Alaska.

Listening Points can be found almost everywhere. They don't have to be my Listening Point. It all depends on your perception and your state of mind and your ability to comprehend the relationship of some particular place you have found, which means the same to them as to me.

LES BLACKLOCK: Well, I certainly love that country. I loved it as a place where I grew up. And it has become much of it wilder, the area burned in the big 1918 forest fire when 500 people perished in a forest fire just shortly before I was born-- several years before I was born.

So I grew up in an ecology that was young forest. And a lot of that has grown up to be quite a mature forest by now. And it's a good area. In hiking over our land, we have found fresh moose tracks.

My boy saw a big black bear. Coyotes have sung us to sleep when we've been camping up there. I've seen both golden and bald eagles on the land. We have two beaver colonies on the land that we and the beavers own. So yes, it will be a dandy place to go.

SIGURD OLSON: "I believe that what I have known there is one of the oldest satisfactions of man, that when he gazed upon the Earth and sky with wonder, when he sensed the first vague glimmerings of meaning in the universe, the world of knowledge and spirit was opened to him.

While we are born with curiosity and wonder and our early years full of the adventure they bring, I know such inherent joys are often lost. I also know that, being deep within us, their latent glow can be fanned to flame again by awareness and an open mind. Listening Point is dedicated to recapturing this almost forgotten sense of wonder and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that is found there, truths that can encompass all."

TOM STEWARD: What brought you to this part of the country? Why is your Listening Point? Why is your place to contemplate the universe up here in the North woods?

SIGURD OLSON: I came to this country as a young man right after World War I. I lived on the shore of Lake Superior, the South Shore, and then heard fantastic stories of what lay beyond the ridges of the North Shore.

So I came back at an early age. In my first canoe trip, beside of me, because of its beauty, because of the fact this was all wilderness, was the place where I wanted to make my home. And I've never regretted that choice.

This country is still beautiful, still worth fighting for. And I fought for its preservation for over 50 years. And while I've traveled widely all over this continent and in another continents, I never feel quite at home until I get back here among these rocks and twisted pine trees and glaciated shores.

LES BLACKLOCK: As a consulting naturalist, for instance, I write my evaluations for laymen. And I don't use Latin terms. I call a critter, a critter. I call a pintail, a pintail rather than the Latin name because those people making the decisions on it, the town, or city council, or whatever board it is, are people.

And so I use-- I get excited, as a young fella should. This keeps you young, too. I use superlatives and exclamation points. And I do get wound up. And that's what sells. Save this land. It's too beautiful to lose.

TOM STEWARD: And getting to your photography, do you sneak up on your subjects out there in the woods? I mean, it's not too difficult to sneak up on a tree. But how about a wolf or a wild animal? Do they sneak up on you, or do you sneak up on them?

LES BLACKLOCK: In most instances, I become one of them. And no, I do not sneak up on them. I see most of what I photograph from a distance. And they see me. And I'm out doing my thing. And they're out doing their thing. And we're both out grazing or browsing.

And gradually through the day, I never go zooming right up to them because, of course, they'll run away. But I'm there, and they're there. And gradually through the day, they get more used to me. And we happen to be grazing or browsing a little closer together.

And eventually, we're to the point where I can hi. And I talk to them. And it doesn't make any difference what I say because I doubt if they can understand English. But I compliment them to the heaven, to the skies, and tell them, gee, if you really put on a classic pose, possibly I can get you on the cover of National Wildlife or some such thing. And that's the way I talk.

If somebody heard me out there talking to them, they'd probably think you're nuts. But I can put them at their ease. And they don't have to be staring at me all the time to keep track of me. And if I break a twig or kick a rock down the mountain, well, they know I'm there all the time because I'm talking to them, whereas if I would stand there quietly and they'd forget about me and doze off and then I break a twig, wow, they'd be up and away.

But because I'm one of them out there doing my thing but without any aggressiveness in taking hours and sometimes days or even weeks to gain their confidence so I can work in closer to them, it seems to work.

And that way, too, I have the ability to move around with my camera. I'm not stuck in a blind. If you're in a blind and there is your animal out there, just great, except he's in a lousy position, or in order to get the right composition, you'd have to move over this way. You can't. You're stuck in your blind.

So you depend upon the animal to move into the proper place to make a great picture, whereas if you're out there with him and can lift up the big old tripod and camera and move around, then you can compose.

TOM STEWARD: How do you take a photograph without making the situation look contrived or, as you put it earlier, the textbook picture of such and such animal or such and such area?

LES BLACKLOCK: I have made my rules, some rules for myself with nature, with animals-- well, with animals, unless they're stuffed, taxidermy product. You aren't going to take them out and set them in the setting. So you have to take advantage of what's there.

But I also made some rules working with other nature where you could have control. For instance, you could pick up a mushroom and move it into a beautiful mossy setting. But if it doesn't grow there, if it isn't there, I don't move it. Because if I did start building sets and somebody said, oh, that doesn't grow there, they wouldn't believe anything of what I do. So I do not build sets. I work with nature as it is. If the leaves are wet, it's from dew or rain, not because I sprayed it.

TOM STEWARD: You almost can't help make the areas you go to look anything but alive, can you? Going to the Yukon or to the Rockies or wherever you go to.

LES BLACKLOCK: One of the lecture titles that I talk to is called Ain't Nature Grand? And yes, nature is grand. And I tell people that oh and ah over some of my pictures. Well, I just copy. Mother nature does it. I just go and copy.

SIGURD OLSON: "I must leave it as beautiful as I found it. Nothing must ever happen there on the Point that might detract in the slightest from what it is now. I would enjoy it and discover all that was to be found there and learn as time went on that here perhaps was all I might ever hope to know.

As I sat there on the rock, I realized that, in spite of the closeness of civilization and the changes that hemmed it in, this remnant of the old wilderness would speak to me of silence and solitude, of belonging and wonder and beauty.

Though the point was only a small part of the vastness reaching far to the arctic, from it I could survey the whole. While it would be mine for only a short time, this glaciated shore with its twisted trees and caribou moss would grow into my life and into the lives of all who shared it with me."

TOM STEWARD: When was the first time that you took a walk or paddled a canoe and sat down and wrote a poem or a little passage about it?

SIGURD OLSON: The first time I ever took a walk was with my mother at the early age of four or five. It was in the fall. And the trees were loaded with colored leaves. As we walked under the trees, the wind blew. And the bits of color cascaded all around me. I was surrounded by coloring. And though I was only a mere child, that memory has stayed with me as one of the first times I was ever conscious or aware of what was about me.

A friend of mine wrote me not long ago. And he preached a funeral service for an old friend of his who loved the north. And then he read one page of my prologue to the book Wilderness Days. I will read that page to you now.

"During the years of roaming the far north, I discovered the meaning of open horizons, for in those great waters, sometimes islands and headlands disappeared in the distance. And waters merged with the sky in a mirage of hazy blue.

Hours and often days later when the islands appeared again and shores became real, it seemed as though I had passed through a door into the beyond itself. On those expeditions, there was time to think during the long hours of uninterrupted paddling.

And I knew that life is a series of open horizons, with one no longer, sooner completed, then another looms ahead. Some are traversed swiftly, while others extend so far into the distance one cannot predict their end.

Penetrations into the unknown all give meaning to what has gone before and courage for what is to come. No two voyageurs enter open horizons in the same way. But all have in common a certain evolution of vision and perspective. Each knows when there are no beckoning mirages ahead, a man dies. But with an open horizon constantly before him, life can be an eternal challenge."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The trouble with so many today is that they have no perspective. They have no broad sense of vision. They do not realize the enormity of the world and the universe about them. They cannot comprehend that what they really are is a composite of all that's gone before.

TOM STEWARD: And still it's mysterious country such as this, the continuous cycle and the regeneration of a natural area. What better laboratory to perhaps grasp at that unconscious thing you're reaching for you?

SIGURD OLSON: You mentioned the idea of mystery and the unknown. All man has ever done has been spurred on by his imagination, brought on by his contact with mystery and unknown.

The sense of mystery is still in our wilderness. If you can hear the singing wilderness, it's part of the old mystery, part of the old unknown. Mystery is responsible for all creative effort, which is impossible for me.

Our music is based on mystery and the unknown. Our poetry, our literature, our philosophy, all of this goes way back to the early origins when man was trying desperately to determine some of the meanings bank of what to him for uncounted millennia was a closed door.

Modern man is beginning to find some of the answers. But he will never unravel such mysteries, as love, compassion aren't creative spur which drives men into genius. Science can never answer all of those questions.

Those questions are involved with the spirit of man. I know in my own case, I've always said that the preservation of wilderness or its interpretation is far more than a physical preservation, its conservation of the spirit of mankind.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

TOM STEWARD: You have decided long ago to photograph animals and landscapes, whereas a lot of other people are out there photographing people. Do you find them more interesting?

LES BLACKLOCK: The decision was probably made before I was 10 years old because I was a wildlife photographer when I was about nine with a little Kodak that I bought with a dollar we made from having a circus in some lady's back-yard.

I bought a little brownie Hawkeye camera and mounted it on a wooden frame and had some tin can to sight through with crosshairs on it so I could shoot without having to look down through the little window in it. And if I got a blur that was recognizable as a certain species, well, I was ahead of the game.

I think that at that time that I found wildlife extremely interesting and was out when the other kids were in the gymnasium at school playing basketball, I was out on hikes. And I was enthusiastic about what I was finding in nature and wanted to share it with others. And I'd come back and tell people about it, all wound up about it. And usually, it would fall on deaf ears. Some people would be polite. But I could see, OK, so what?

But when I started taking pictures of it and bringing back pictures of it, somehow rather, it seemed more exciting to them. So I felt this was the way to share what I was finding. And it just grew. The lenses, I guess, grew in quality. And I think my technique grew. And so what I came home with was worth sharing. And gradually, the pictures got better. And eventually, I was making my living photographing nature and wildlife.

TOM STEWARD: When you put together a book, it's with pictures, your pictures, your photographs, and somebody's writing the text. That's the way it's been so far. What sort of difficulties does that present in trying to match the two, your work and the other fellow's work?

LES BLACKLOCK: Well, at first, when I approached Sigurd Olson a number of years ago on would he be willing to do the Hidden Forest with me, I had already accumulated many, many four by fives aimed at the book because I had done a mock up of the book 17 years before. So the idea was an old one.

Through the years, when I got a picture that really pleased me, I thought, oh, there's a candidate for this book. And so I went to Sigurd. And I had many transparencies ready and said, Sig, this is the kind of a book that I think that you and I could do together. And it would be a great one.

So Sig started writing to the pictures that he already was holding. And he writes like a house afire. And within a short time while, he had eaten them all up. As he went further forward then, I started shooting to his words. And there was a problem because I could go into the forest and sometimes find exactly the situation he was talking about. But it was a poor composition, or it was past season, or something was wrong that made it a not too good picture.

So we called Nicola Dukro, our art director in New York, and said, Nicola, we've got a problem here. Nicola said, each do your thing. You say you have just a wealth of information and memories. Go ahead and pour it out.

Les, you take advantage of the most beautiful, exciting, dramatic, educational, whatever, situations you can find that you think that you would like to photograph and go ahead and take pictures of that. And you're both traveling a parallel course. And you will touch occasionally.

SIGURD OLSON: The first two books, The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point, were more or less seasonal. Another book, The Hidden Forest, is seasonal. But the other books are not strictly seasonal. They touch on a variety of things which, while they do pertain to the seasons, are not grouped seasonally.

And so you can see that, well, I can't divorce myself from the seasons. Anybody who writes of years of living in an area cannot be divorced from seasons. They're part of his life. But there do come times when you describe things that while they may occur in the season, all things occur in some season or other, they don't have the same seasonal interweaving, you might say, as you find in some of the books.

TOM STEWARD: You take your photographs in color. Why do you shoot in color as opposed to black and white?

LES BLACKLOCK: Well, when color film first came out, of course, it was extremely exciting to shoot nature in color because the colors are there. That's the way they look, at least to my eyes. And so recording color for the sake of color was the thing to do.

I admire great black and white photography. Ansel Adams is fantastic. But shooting for books, such as The Hidden Forest that I did with Sigurd Olson and The High West with Andy Russell, color is the medium in which we show what is there.

And most people today, I think, that look at photography and appreciate it are-- they believe what they see in color photography. They know that it copies what the camera is looking at. And so if they see it that way, they can almost relate to it to the point of being there.

And if I can share expeditions and exciting moments that I can have, that most people find impossible just because they can't go there or they can't climb the mountains or stay the length of time that I can, if I can share those moments with them to the point where they almost feel reading the words and seeing the picture that they are there, they can vicariously have the same adventures that I'm having.

TOM STEWARD: It reminds me of going out with three bullets and making sure that you get your-- you just take your three shots. But you wait for your three shots. In other words, you wait for your shot rather than fire away.

LES BLACKLOCK: I don't usually go by if I shoot 1,000 pictures that the law of averages says some of those are bound to be fairly good. I try to shoot as much as I can in a large format, 4 by 5, which means that the film is expensive. And you do not have the bulk of film loaded that you would have 35. I might have 10 sheets per magazine loaded and maybe three magazines in my pack, which is only 30 pictures.

And so when the situation is right and I have, say, a bull elk, or Dall sheep, or Bighorn, or moose, or whatever, in a pose that I'm excited about, I don't hold back. I go ahead and shoot. But unless I figure that the shot is as good as something I've already got or better, I don't shoot just because I'm near a moose.

TOM STEWARD: I'm sure that you've heard your writing described in a lot of ways.

SIGURD OLSON: It's pretty hard to describe a style of writing. I say the things that are deepest in my heart. Nobody can ever accuse me of insincerity. No one can ever say I'm writing about something I haven't seen or haven't done.

The best of my writing comes deep from within me. What makes it sound like poetry is perhaps the result of infinite pains in writing and rewriting, eliminating all words that do not add perceptibly to the meaning, paring down whatever you're writing to the bone.

An editor once told me years ago when I was a struggling young writer, he said, this particular article sings. I said, what do you mean sings? Well, he said it sings, the word "sings," the ideas sing. Of course, everything doesn't sing.

Once in a while, you're fortunate enough to have hit the combination of words and ideas and imaginative perceptions, which all blended together like the various tones of a symphony. Make your words sing all about me. In the 15,000 square miles of the Quetico-Superior is a beauty that owes its existence to the ice.

Without its scouring, the rocks would be rough and the campsites difficult to find. Without its melting in the morainic dams, the lakes might be far apart or nonexistent. And the portage is long. The falls and rapids of its new rivers plunging over rocky ledges would not be here, unless the ancient erosion patterns had been disturbed.

The mosses and lichens that thrive in this water-drenched land, the Norways and the white pines that give it artistry might be missing had the glaciers not been here. This is the land to love, a land of poetry, cleanness, and beauty where men may always refresh their spirits and find release.

And here's the old stone wall that I described in The Singing Wilderness. Those stones were carried down by the ice. This whole yarn was covered with stones. All of these trees you see here, I planted some 45 years ago.

TOM STEWARD: This is still a young forest area since it was logged, wasn't it?

SIGURD OLSON: When the settlers came up here, this was a Norway Pine Ridge. And right below my property here was a little creek called Caribou Creek. Started in the swamp, back of the house here a little way, tumbled down the hill there into a big beaver dam. And that whole country there was a beaver dam.

When all the Norway pines were cut down, this area where we live now was a field raising hay for the horses and mules for the mines and potatoes for the mining camps. So when I moved up here, there wasn't a single tree here.

TOM STEWARD: And now you've started your own young forest.

SIGURD OLSON: Now we started our own young forest, the climax forest where the trees have lived 200 or 300 years of age. They give me a sense of continuity perhaps, a feeling of having been here long before men came in.

I think we should save a few places where the trees are allowed to die and fall down and decay just to give mankind the feeling that you can't manipulate everything. There should be some places in wilderness where the old forests are allowed to grow to maturity, fall down and die, and new forests come of their own accord.

So an old forest has its charm. New force have their charm too. All the successional changes that come in have their charm. This whole area is an area of fires. This is known as a fire ecology. And all the forests that you see in this whole area are the result of constant burning for 10,000 years.

There are no such things, never were such things as solid stands. A great pine but a great intermixture, Birch and Aspen, balsam and spruce, and then the pine. The pine are the old ones.

TOM STEWARD: They're coming back here.

SIGURD OLSON: They're coming back.

TOM STEWARD: If we were out at your cabin right now rather than walking around here toward the edge of Ely, what would we be looking out on right now at this time of year? What's it going to look like out there?

SIGURD OLSON: Well, I think the water is still open. This is an enchanting period of time to be out there because you can hear the tinkling of the ice, freezing in the shade along the shores. You can get off on skis or snowshoes at night in the wintertime and see the stars as you never see them, except in the deserts of the south, run the open ocean.

Benediction seems to have laid over the land. I don't do much writing out there. There are too many interesting things to see and do. But I go out there and walk around. And my mind, like a battery, becomes recharged. I need it out there as soon as that road's clear.

[FIRE CRACKLING]

"Many ignore the fact that preservation of environment is the greatest challenge of our time. And if we fail to meet it in our obsession with the spiraling gross national product, we will lose our cherished freedoms and the richness and beauty our homeland once knew.

We need to wonder about the purpose of man and what constitutes the good society. We must face the ecological crisis, aware that man no longer lives with nature as other creatures but has placed himself above and beyond its control.

We must develop a philosophy which considers the great imponderables, the ancient codes of ethics embodying man's sense of oneness and dependence on nature. While technology may redress the wrongs of the past, it's not the answer, unless man's spiritual welfare is concerned. We need an ecology of man in harmony with the ecologies of all living things and a recognition of the truth that our search for utopia reflects fundamental human needs."

TOM STEWARD: You've been fighting for 50 years, or you've been living this life for 50 years and better to create not the physical environment here as well as the spiritual environment.

SIGURD OLSON: We're holding pretty well. Speaking of this particular country in which I live, the battle has gone on for over 50 years. We have the satisfaction of knowing that if we had not won the early battles, there'd be no wilderness here to quarrel about or argue about as to its use.

This same story is all over the country. I think we are going through a philosophical revolution in our attitude toward the Earth. This is particularly true of the young. We are beginning to realize as young people, particularly young people, but a great many older people are realizing, too, that the time has come for us to be aware and actually jealous of the beauties of this Earth and the care of the Earth because if we are not good custodians of the earth, we may well face disaster.

But I feel with our technology, which we cannot demand and must not, we may be on the verge of a golden era in which we can put our technology to use in rewriting the wrongs of the past and bringing the beauties back to the Earth and conserving our energy and conserving our resources, conserving wild places, both small and large wilderness areas because I feel strongly-- and this is one of my major tenets-- that man cannot be happy if he's too far removed from his natural base, which is lodged in his understanding and love of the earth, his sense of oneness, his sense of completion, which can only come when he is part of the Earth.

TOM STEWARD: As your career has progressed, has your work been getting more difficult? That is, is it more difficult to find places in which to do your work?

LES BLACKLOCK: Wildlands are disappearing, certainly. Well, one of the aspects of that is not necessarily just wild lands, but agricultural lands, too, is disappearing, being covered with concrete and houses and so forth so that we're not only losing wild land, we're losing good growing land at a time when there are food shortages over the world. And about 10,000 people a day are starving to death.

As far as making it more difficult for me, many of the places where I work have boundaries which are pretty sacred, national parks, game refuges, state parks. Those are pretty sacred. And everybody's a watchdog to make sure those boundaries stay intact.

So even though there are many, many more visitors to those parks, when I go back away from the roads, most of the people stay near or on the roads. I can get back into the wildness where the grizzly bear and the elk and the moose are still doing their thing.

SIGURD OLSON: "Ours is a strange and dramatic age, the great silences replaced by the roar of engines. Our city is vibrating with noise and foul with gases and pollution. The smell of woods, fields, and forests are replaced by those of combustion and industry and their senses bombarded with impressions man has never known before.

Were it not for a racial consciousness steeped in a background that knew nothing of technology, we might make the adjustment more easily. But physiological and psychological adaptations take eons of time, too close to our past to ignore these ancient ties to the Earth. And in spite of comforts and luxuries never known before, we are conscious of tensions and the sense of instability.

When we remember that only 100,000 years have elapsed since man's emergence from the primitive with vague beginnings running back a million years or more, it is not surprising we feel as we do.

Man's life was regulated by the seasons, the fears and challenges of the wilderness, and total dependence on natural forces. Only during the last 10,000 years is there any evidence of a culture beyond the Stone Age."

LES BLACKLOCK: Rather than hopefully try to meet today's demands, why don't we work on a plan that will work forever and ever, coming up with a sizable or a sensible sized population on this Earth where everybody could have a reasonably good standard of living?

And I'm not talking about Cadillacs in the garage. I mean happiness, enjoying each other, enjoying nature, sunsets, good music, the arts, loving one another, having that kind of a good life for all time to come and having sufficient food so we could have a decent diet without gorging ourselves but have a reasonable standard of living, a happy way of life forever and ever.

SIGURD OLSON: The time has come for Americans to face reality that we can no longer afford to exploit the land as we have done during the pioneer era when there was every man for himself, that industry must consider the broad humanitarian aspects of its impact on the people, that industry can no longer consider the material rewards.

The humanitarian aspects of preserving the environment are so vital, so important that no longer can we divorce our technological progress from the humanitarian problems of mankind.

LES BLACKLOCK: The environmental quality gauge that National Wildlife comes out with each year hasn't really been very hopeful. There are small gains made here and there. But by and large, the almighty dollar is still God. And as long as that prevails, nature is going to be clobbered right and left.

And even though there are a few gains made where a number of people feel very strongly and-- say, the Minnesota River bottoms now are being set aside hopefully as a national game refuge to be enjoyed by people in this Metropolitan area. But at the same time, there is the strip mining in the west, which is going to, of course, ruin tremendous acreage of natural areas.

The Army Corps of Engineers keeps insisting that they have to build their big dams and cover thousands and thousands of acres. There are many, many things that are wrong in this country that are going to continue to be wrong as long as the dollar sets the pace.

SIGURD OLSON: Society in the last analysis is what counts. The quality of life in the last analysis is what counts. Do we want to live in an age of increasing strident clamor with polluted streams, soil, and waters, a place of growing ugliness instead of growing beauty?

Do we want to sacrifice our living space for bigger paychecks, more affluence, or are we going to change our priorities, our way of life? Are we going to do the things that will give us a full life and live in harmony with nature at the same time?

Those are tremendous questions. And they'll have to be answered. My hope is that we will come to our senses in time and become a world organization, a world government, a world in which everybody understands what is at stake.

And this is the only world we've got. We can talk about space and space colonization. But we know this is the only habitable planet. It's the only one we've got. The great picture that was taken from one of the last moon shots of the Earth brought home the point more forcefully than anything else. This is our world. This is all we've got. We better take care of it.

LES BLACKLOCK: One thing that has tended to keep me optimistic is the attitude of the young. If that prevails, there is a trend toward the dollar a bit with many of the young too going to school and coming out and getting the job that will pay them the most dollars no matter what.

But many of the young too have been dressing in jeans, hitchhiking rather than buying an automobile with the folks money, trying to show us that the accumulation of a lot of things isn't necessarily the answer to happiness.

And I think that a lot of that has gotten through the membership, for instance, in Audubon. And many of the organizations that are trying to preserve natural beauty has just shot up recently. Now, is that because a lot of the young of a few years ago are now becoming adults and joining to try to keep what beauty is left in this world?

SIGURD OLSON: When I look at this land which has become home to me, it's not harsh and forbidding because I've learned to live with this land. When the snows come, as they've come now, and all is white and frozen, there's a strange beauty about the land which it does not have and any other season.

I can take off into the north knowing the land and knowing how to live, be just as happy when it's 20 or 30 below. They could be in the middle of the summer. It's all a case of having become used to your environment, accepting the environment as it is. And when you do and understand it's poetry and its meaning, it is not harsh to you. It's home and warm and beautiful.

TOM STEWARD: It's an act of submission. I mean, you maybe don't have any choice. But it's really an act of submission, isn't it?

SIGURD OLSON: Yes, it is an act of submission. It's an act not only of physical acclimatation but a spiritual involvement in which factors that may seem harsh to others are not harsh to you.

But as I said in one chapter, "Unless you've spent a winter here and known the cold and the frigid nights and the importance of the sun coming in March and early April, when you first begin to smell the breezes of spring, see the first flowers come, see the buns are beginning to swell, the maples begin to turn red, the birches begin to turn purple in their warming colors of early spring.

The pussy is coming out before the snows are gone. These are miracles. And all winter long, you look forward to this. And when it comes, you realize what winter really is and what spring is. No one can come up here to catch the spirit of spring intentioned as those do who've lived through a winter.

But of all the moods, all the variations of feeling and experience the waters of a lake can give, it's moonlight that is most remembered, for here is a strange excitement born of man's long and intimate involvement with its light.

There's mystery when paddling down the gleaming avenues between islands silhouetted against its glow, unreality in the colonnades of tall trees or in the silvery reeds reflected in the shallows. My memories are full of it. Cypress swamps in the south with their hanging festoons of Spanish moss.

Little ponds gleaming like silver medallions and dark timber. The full glory of an unbroken path of it down one of the great waterways of the north. A castle moat in England shining like polished pewter.

And Listening Point, it seems best when watching the moonlight from the high rock, seeing its first glimmer over the ridge and its slow, majestic emergence pulsating and trembling until at last the huge iron ball is free of the horizons, grows high and white to clothe the point and all the lake with its enchantment.

These witching hours blend one into the other is calm. They blend in. The storm for water reflects not only clouds and trees and cliffs, but all the infinite variations of mind and spirit we bring to it."

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SPEAKER: You've been listening to Reflections of the North, two Minnesota naturalists and artists, Writer Sigurd Olson, Photographer Les Blacklock. At various points, Sigurd Olson read from several of his books. But most portions were excerpted from Listening Point, written in 1958 and chosen that year as Minnesota's Centennial book.

Listening Point is dedicated by Sigurd Olson to all who have found Listening Points of their own and to those who are still searching. This program was produced and narrated by Tom Steward with technical assistance from Tom Keith.

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SIGURD OLSON: You can get off on skis or snowshoes at night in the wintertime and see the stars as you never see them except in the deserts of the south around the open ocean.

LES BLACKLOCK: It doesn't make any difference what I say because I doubt if they can understand English. But I compliment them to the heaven, to the skies, and tell them, gee, if you really put on a classic pose, possibly I can get you on the cover of National Wildlife or some such thing. And that's the way I talk.

SIGURD OLSON: Listening Point is dedicated to recapturing this almost forgotten sense of wonder and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that is found there, truths that can encompass all.

LES BLACKLOCK: I get excited as a young fella should. This keeps you young, too. I use superlatives and exclamation points. And I do get wound up. And that's what sells. Save this land. It's too beautiful to lose.

SIGURD OLSON: The best of my writing comes deep from within me. What makes it sound like poetry is perhaps the result of infinite pains in writing and rewriting. This is a land to love, a land of poetry, cleanness, and beauty, where men may always refresh their spirits and find release.

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