This reminding is revolutionary, because it opens up the wild again. Stewardship doesn't work if there is nothing at the core of it, no outgoing, wild connection to the wild planet. Planning ahead, keeping every kind of record, mitigating our latest construction project's environmental effects, we just get farther away from the source. Most of us are so distractedly active, so thickly insulated with ourselves and our works, that we have to be hit over the head with a week in a wilderness area to come somewhat naturally alive again and know what world we're in. At this level the nature essay originates.
Nature writing affirms humanity as essentially unneedy.
The significance of this reclamation may not be immediately apparent, but what it amounts to is a clearing-away of the entire mistaken strategy of progress. This is the frontier mind, and we all have it. We have gone out all over the world, and by one means or another converted it to our time sense and our myth. The desperate quality of this style, and its rather pathetic neediness and self-assertion, don't come clear to us as long as we're under the dome, cottoned in the folklore of comfort and control. Under the protective cover, our reference is only other people, and they're all under the same roof, too.