Desert Cabal. Amy Irvine

      FOREWORD

      Nearly two decades ago, I moved to the edge of one of the most rugged and remote landscapes in the American West: Boulder, Utah, bordered by the newly designated Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. I had been a Grand Canyon river cook for ten years before this, and had learned firsthand the transformative power of time spent in a protected wild landscape combined with a lovingly prepared meal. I had also been an advocate for public lands all of my adult life, largely informed by my obsession with the writings of Edward Abbey. So when the opportunity arose to open a restaurant in southern Utah’s redrock country, I seized it joyfully, and I and a friend—another woman—started a business in a town so tiny and remote that it was the last in the country to receive its mail by mule.

      Our concept was simple: we wanted to be a warm hearth for the kind of traveler who was seeking an authentic, heartfelt wilderness experience; we would offer a place to gather before and after the journey, a welcoming room in which to be received and fed. We were proud to be women business owners in old-fashioned southern Utah, and proud of our work: we were delighted to bring everyone to the table. Deeply committed to our new community and fostering ideas of sustainability, we started a farm and hired locally, paying everyone a living wage. But more than anything, we wanted to help people fall in love with this high mountain desert through the intimate act of feeding them food literally of this place. Think of it as culinary activism: help guests develop a devotion to the land, and they will be moved to speak and act on its behalf.

      During my camp cook days, deep in the Grand Canyon, on the banks of the Colorado River, I had held the hands of visitors who were shaken to the core by the profundity of absolute quiet. I had wiped their tears as they sobbed over the almost unbearable magnitude of beauty. I often asked them to imagine what the state of the place would be today, had it not been protected more than a hundred years ago.

      I ask this again, this horrid imagining—only now I ask it of everyone I encounter, and I ask on behalf of the wild, rugged redrock country where I live. What will the state of this place be, in fifty years, if it’s not protected?

      Just over two decades back, we rejoiced as one president declared 1.9 million acres surrounding our restaurant as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. And less than a year ago, we mourned as another president shrank its boundaries by more than half. Now a foreign company has bought rights to mine the land—despite the fact that the updated management plan for the newly amputated monument has not yet been approved nor the pending lawsuits resolved.

      All my life, I have fought to preserve wilderness for the sake of wilderness, but my fight is no longer about that. We’re talking now about survival—ours and that of the plants and animals and habitats under siege by runaway human destruction. Saving our common home will only happen if we preserve large, intact ecosystems in which whole communities of species, including humans, can flourish. And only if every one of us cares, engages, and takes action.

      Today, as I celebrate Edward Abbey’s fifty years of inspiring people to speak and act on behalf of Utah’s redrock country, a passage of his runs through my mind like a daily mantra. These are the words I reflect on, the words that help me muster more love, more communal spirit, just when my heart wants to give way to anger:

      This is a remote place indeed, far from the center of the world, far from all that’s going on. Or is it? Who says so? Wherever two humans are alive, together, and happy, there is the center of the world. You out there, brother, sister, you too live in the center of the world, no matter where or what you think you are.

      We all deserve to feel that we’re at the center of the world, but the center cannot hold for much longer. The planet is heating up, changing faster than living things can adapt, disrupting natural systems and human cultures at an alarming speed.

      We have a moral imperative to save wild places—not for ourselves, but for the creatures that inhabit them, the indigenous peoples whose forebears made their homes there, and, lastly, for the generations to come, who will need a just land ethic in order to thrive. It’s up to us to be the ancestors who give those who follow what they will surely need.

      It won’t be easy, but we’re unafraid, and we know where to start. Many hard battles have been won, many seemingly irreconcilable disputes resolved, over a shared meal. At the table, alchemy can occur. At the table, we can be transformed into better versions of ourselves—more civil, more communal, more sustainable.

      So come to the table. Let us sit, all of us. Let us eat good food, and raise a glass to Abbey, and ponder where we’ve been and how we proceed. For the desert wilds that Abbey knew—really, the nation he knew—is no longer.

      It is indeed a new season in the wilderness.

      —Blake Spalding

      Former backcountry caterer and professional river chef Blake Spalding is co-owner of the award-winning Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Boulder, Utah, and co-author of two books, This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness and With a Measure of Grace: The Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant