Suppose we say that wilderness involves nostalgia, a justified not merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of the earth from which we all emerged. It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond us and without limit. Romance---but not to he dismissed on that account. The romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole truth.
But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we ever know, the only paradise we ever need if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-- if only re were worthy of it.
Wilderness is not all luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little there remains of the wild, the spare, the original is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principals of civilization itself.
