Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Term Paper

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After examining her national and family history, Williams came to believe that the 1950's aboveground detonation of a nuclear bomb near her family's home could be the source of her family's struggle with cancer, as well as the cause of the community's propensity to contract cancer as a whole. Williams details her feelings about this fact in a personal as well as a clinical manner. This is not simply a natural and historical tragedy, but a tragedy she must live with for the rest of her own life -- she will never have another mother, just as many of the flooded-out birds will never have another home. The author admits that the bomb she remembers seeing explode as a young child, the bomb that could have caused the cancer that killed her mother, haunts her in her dreams.

Thus her search for a source of blame for an apparently random act of sickness and suffering is not simply fantasy on the part of the author. It is based in clinical evidence. Likewise, the difficulties the birds experience are not like a random flood that occurs 'naturally' at times in nature. If the government had not allowed the over-development, the wild creatures could have found a home. As with the nuclear testing, the government placed life as a lower priority than money -- it was more important to test the bombs for the military industrialist complex and protect people from the Russians in theory, than to protect the future of the population's health in fact -- just as it was deemed more important to give people jobs in the short-term than to protect the environment to save human and animal health in the long-term.

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Thus, where is the refuge, in the midst of all of this suffering of the environment, and in terms of human and animal life, both for the author and the reader? The desert and sanctuary beloved by the author is no more. Her mother and grandmother are dead. She cannot restore the developed land of Salt Lake, nor dry the basin, or bring her mother back from the dead. She cannot even protect herself from her own likelihood of developing cancer. She can only, Williams states, love the world as it is, and find refuge in protecting the environment of the present, whatever the future may hold.

Refuge is a powerful text because it connects human suffering to the suffering of other species and the suffering of the environment. It shows that human beings must think in the long-term rather than in the short-term about prolonging human and animal life and protecting the environment. It also reminds people that to be effective, government cannot simply think about the political and economic needs of the moment. Government too must think in the long-term, and readers and voters must think in the long-term when addressing environmental needs. And if they do not, the lives that are harmed may not only be animal….....

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