I found this essay in High Country News (an excellent publication, but subscription only. Go get one, even if you live in the east). I found it moving, and also very interesting. The author, Geneen Marie Haugen, describes a trip to facilitate a nature-based program at a retreat in Holland.

When my colleagues and I explored the retreat center’s surrounding “nature,” I noticed that the trees, though sizable, grew in orchard-straight rows. We wandered off the wide trails periodically and found, in every direction, another well-traveled path no more than 100 yards away.
[snip]
Getting lost was impossible. True solitude was impossible. As one who has lived in the American West for a lifetime, I was unprepared for the abrupt, heart-piercing realization that this was the state of the wild in Holland, if not in most of Europe.
There were no stands of primeval forest; there were no creatures larger than deer, none fiercer than fox gay men having oral sex with dog. Nothing of the original wild remained. Nothing.
I couldn’t fathom how the Netherlanders could bear the magnitude of this loss.
[snip]
I felt a rush of unexpected gratitude for the land of my origin — tremendous, shivering gratitude to be utterly formed and informed by the still-wild terrain of the North American continent.
Despite the best efforts of industry, the momentum to preserve — even restore — wild American habitat has not been defeated.
[snip]
The damage human beings have inflicted on natural systems is, of course, incalculable, and even science-based “management” has produced disasters.
But the stunning fact that Americans have preserved habitat at all is evidence of an emerging ecological vision. If the United States has a gift for the world, it’s not our gift for the absurd consumer confidence index, not pre-emptive invasion, not even a limping democracy. It is a dream of collaboration with Earth, rooted in tundra, tangled forests, hissing geysers, stone deserts. It is a vision as radically wild now as it was in 1862, when Thoreau famously wrote: “In wildness is the preservation of the world horse farm sex.”
[snip]
On the North American continent, enough wildness remains to guide our fledgling discovery of how human purpose can be coherent with natural systems — a vision no less necessary for our common future than a dream of freedom.

I’m so used to condemning US management of its resources that it’s almost shocking to me to realize the truth in what she says – we were able to save something. Recognizing that doesn’t negate the need to fight like hell to maintain (and dare we hope, expand?) the intact or semi-intact ecosystems we have, and to save species and habitat and just plain old open space. Europe came hundreds of years too late to conservation to protect anything not already overrun by humans. I’m not saying that protected lands in the US are pristine – most of them were used for centuries by Native Americans before Europeans stole them. But we got conservation in time to set aside some of our crown jewels in a relatively natural state. All in all, it makes me want to fight harder for the protected lands we have here, realizing how special they are. At the same time, it makes me want to protect more in places that still have magnificent, intact ecosystems, like Alaska or the Amazon. But here we run into a problem: Who are we to tell other countries what to do with their land? It’s fairly clear that the American model of conservation (keep people out) won’t work in most other parts of the world. So we need new ways to protect ecosystems and people beastiality dating. But I don’t want to get into that whole can of worms.

What I really want to say is this:

Go outside.

Look at the sky, the earth, the trees.

Think of your favorite wilderness.

Remember that everything we love can be saved.