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Noviembre 10, 2004
But why, the questioner insists...
But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love
uninhabited country so much?
Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development,
the churlish resistance to all popular improvement?
.
Very well, a fair question, but it's been asked and answered a thousand times
already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt with the
question.
.
There are many answers, all good, each sufficient.
.
Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means;
re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape;
novelty, the delight of something different;
truth and understanding and wisdom- commendable virtues in any man, anytime;
ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility
and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to
questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin
of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present --
all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead
degrading question as "Why wilderness?"
.
.
To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway:
Because we like the taste of freedom;
because we like the smell of danger.
.
.
Edward Abbey
Posted by sarita at Noviembre 10, 2004 8:37 PM