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.
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.
In nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.
A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.'
The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy...to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up." The ecological thought "...is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise.
One cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.
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