The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupid… - Wallace Stegner

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.

It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.