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The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence-free of the network of dead speech. — Freya Stark · 1948
If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. — Terry Tempest Williams · 1955
Why this cult of wilderness?... 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 · 1971