For part of the answer, which alone is sufficient justification to preserve large tracts of wilderness, permit me to quote myself (from “What is Wilderness For?,” by H. Charles Romesburg, April, 2002, The Highlands Voice, newsletter of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy):
As most everybody learns, nature is vital to our physical well-being. For one thing, it sustains the balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen in the atmosphere. For another, it holds medically-useful molecular compounds, preventives and cures to be discovered in centuries ahead.
At the same time, few learn that wild nature, or wilderness, especially when experienced in solitude, is vital to society’s creative well-being. One source of support for this is my research into the credos of notable creators, as written in their published diaries, journals, letters, and memoirs. Here is a sample of the beliefs, and of some of the creators holding the beliefs:
To begin with, wilderness stands alone in its psychotherapeutic powers. It is a wick that draws away our neurotic troubles, removing their capacity of tormenting (John Cowper Powys). To experience wilderness regularly, Powys said, is “to possess the power to forget.” By this, wilderness frees us to create better, and to appreciate the creations of others.
Further, wilderness stimulates the imagination, increasing our stock of images, material for envisioning and designing new creations (Pierre Auguste Renoir, Gustave Flaubert, Joseph Addison). Wilderness promotes the flow of creative ideas from the subconscious to the conscious (Eugene Delacroix, William Hazlitt, Richard Jefferies). Wilderness brings us spiritual refreshment, vitalizing the creative impulse, motivating us to create (Rupert Brooke, Rachel Carson, Hans Hofmann, Odilon Redon).
This all enters into a subtle but real chain by which wilderness promotes social and economic well-being. It begins with wilderness feeding the creative processes of artists and consumers of the arts. In turn, the nonmaterial values produced by the arts, including painting, music, poetry, essays, literature, dance, film, and theater, seep into the everyday world, giving rise to material values, affecting our attitudes and the decisions we make, having formative effects on political values, scientific values, religious values, family values, health-care values, and educational values, partly determining the subjects we teach in schools, the scientific knowledge we seek, the ways we treat each other, and the products that are made (Wassily Kandinsky, M. C. Escher).
There are two conditions to this. One, only large tracts of wilderness can give these benefits; pocket wildernesses can’t (Margaret Fuller). Two, the large tracts must be free of both human-made things and of signs that such things have ever been there (John Ruskin, William Wordsworth).
(The cited creators’ credos are in my book, The Life of the Creative Spirit.)
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