The reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it. We need wilderness of all kinds, large and small, public and private. Wee need to go now and again into places where our work is disallowed, where our hopes and plans have no standing. We need to come into the presence of the unqualified and mysterious formality of Creation.
Interpretation
Wilderness is essential for our well-being and creativity.
Wendell Berry emphasizes the importance of preserving wilderness areas as vital spaces for human reflection and rejuvenation. He argues that we need to regularly escape to untouched nature where our societal pressures and ambitions cease to exist, allowing us to reconnect with the profound mysteries of creation and our own existence.
In practice
During a council meeting about conservation efforts, one might say, 'As Wendell Berry wisely stated, the reason to preserve wilderness is that we need it.'
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person
We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
I feel most at home in the water. I disappear. That's where I belong.
I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.
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