But I wish to set your encounter with nature beyond both resource use and management. But neither do want a de-natured life. Treating the dirt as natural resource to be farmed, mined, timbered, or owned is necessary but not sufficient for an understanding of natural value. The question is not simply one of multiple exploitive uses, but of multiple values to be optimized. We need roots as well as resources.
Good citizenship is important.
But it is not simply what a society does to its slaves, women, minorities, handicapped, children, or future generations, but what it does to its fauna, flora, species, ecosystems, rivers, beaches, landscapes that reveals the character of that society. Nature neither is, nor ought to be ended. Rather, humans can and ought to make nature an end in itself, complementary to their own human ends. If you commence with the end of nature in mind, you are to be pitied. The chief poverty in your life is likely to be a degraded encounter with nature.