| I would like to thank Sagamore Publishing for making this edition of The Wilderness Within: Reflections on Leisure and Life possible. Five essays from the original edition are reprinted here with permission from the following sources: San Diego State University's Institute for Leisure Behavior ("The World According to Gorp"), the Intermountain Leisure Symposium ("In Search of Rescue," "The Myth of Comfort; and "Inside, Outside, Upside Down: the Grand Canyon as a Learning Laboratory"), and the U.S. Forest Service ("Gardening as a Subversive Activity"). |
| I would also like to acknowledge several individuals who have greatly influenced my thinking about wilderness, recreation, and leisure over the years. Among them are people I know only through the literature: Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Robert Service, Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Sigurd Olson, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, Joseph Sax and Garrett Hardin. Others I have had the pleasure to meet: Willi Unsoeld, Rick Ridgeway, Edward Abbey, David Brower, Roderick Nash, Lee Stetson and Barry Lopez. Still others I count as my mentors, friends and colleagues: Bev Driver, Ross Tocher, John Schultz, Leo McAvoy, Larry Merriam, Tim Knopp, Rick Knopf, Rich Schreyer, Doug Wellman, Dan Williams, Janna Rankin, Arthur Frakt, Gene Lamke, Larry Beck, and Andrea Philips. I would like to think there is a little bit of all of these people in what follows. |
| I am also very much indebted to Geof Godbey, Tom Goodale, Ingrid Schneider, and, especially, Emilyn Sheffield, for their friendship and support during my extended soul search which provided the grist for the six new essays in this edition. |
| Finally, I want to thank my parents for whatever it is they did in my upbringing that allows me to look critically at myself without falling apart. Perhaps it was their modeling that we are never finished products, that there is always room for improvement, that we can and should strive to become more than we presently are. Perhaps it was also their modeling to forgive and forget. |
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