Via greentangle:

The modern environmental movement is a messianic mission to save wild ground and at its heart — at spots like this unnamed canyon where we sit on a rock and eat while a cold front beats against Pusch Ridge — it always seems to me that the center of the movement is a kind of empty barrel.  The barrel at first looks full, in fact, overflowing with slogans, calendars, environmental impact statements, critical habitat lists, natural area plans, mitigation schemes, and big shovelfuls of tradeoffs.  But after sorting through this barrel, I never find much that explains why I come to spots like this unnamed canyon.  We have developed a new language of bureaucratic forms and categories and we wrap the wild ground in this gibberish.  But we generally skirt the real issue.  The way we live and work kills wild ground and when the wild ground is gone, we will vanish also.

Those of us who hunger for these places live as a kind of holding action, a group of marginal human beings huddled in the firestorm of energy called industrialism, people who retreat from time to time like ancient druids to this pagan ground that stamped us with our truest sense of self.
—  Charles Bowden, Frog Mountain Blues