"geography of hope"

Posted by ESC on November 05, 2005

In Reply to: "Geography of hope" posted by Michael Mery on November 04, 2005

: I'm looking for the origin of the phrase "geography of hope" used by Wallace Stegner and others. thanks.

I couldn't find the phrase in my political dictionary. I googled "political phrase" "geography of hope" and found several sites including this:

The Geography of Hope: Poets of Colorado's Western Slope, Edited by David J. Rothman.

From the Foreword by David J. Rothman:

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs , a collection of essays, is the last book Wallace Stegner published in a long and productive life of thinking and writing about the West. In the Introduction to the book, Stegner writes that "the West at large is hope's native home, the youngest and freshest of America's regions, magnificently endowed and with the chance to become something unprecedented and unmatched in the world". These are inspiring and hopeful words for a man in his 80s, and in darker moods in the same book, when contemplating, for example, the desperate foolishness of water policy west of the hundredth meridian, Stegner repudiates them, saying of the West that "neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope". The phrase "the geography of hope" is also Stegner's coinage, and when he says he can no longer make a case for the American West as its native home, he is arguing with himself, against himself, over the crucial tensions out of which he made his life's work.