from A Sand County Almanac...      
There are some of us who can  live without wild things, and some of us who cannot.
            Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them.  Now we face the question whether a still higher "standard of living" is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. 
            For us in the minority, the  opportunity to see geese is more important than
television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech. 
            These wild things, I admit, had little human value until mechanization assured us of a good breakfast, and until science disclosed the drama of where they come from and how they live.  The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree.  We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.
            We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor fur us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.
            That land is a community is a basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.  That land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten. 
            Such a view of land and people is, of course, subject to the blurs and distortions of personal experience and personal bias. But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear:   our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so
obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity  to remain healthy. 
The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for the plethora of material blessings.
            Perhaps such a shift in values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free.
            Wilderness is a resource that can shrink but cannot grow.  Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science, or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
            Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.  The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important;  it is such who talk of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years.  It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and  meaning to the human enterprise.
Aldo Leopold, 1948