Wildness is everywhere. Yes, even on the grittiest urban brownfield site and in the middle of vast parking lots. The wild gives ground reluctantly, and it’s quick to reclaim anything it loses. The Roman poet Horace summed this up about as neatly as anyone has: Naturam expellas furca, he wrote, tamen usque recurret. “Chase nature out with a garden fork if you will, but don’t be surprised when she comes charging back.” (That’s not an exact translation, I’m afraid, but I think it captures the sense of the Latin.) Of course, we’ve moved on a bit from Horace’s country garden. Even the Roman engineers—and they weren’t slouches; some of their roads and aqueducts do good service even today—would probably be amazed at the scope of our planetary tinkering. Still, Horace had been a soldier before he took up poetry. He understood turf wars, and he knew that nature is a patient adversary. Cracks appear on newly paved parking lots within weeks, and weeds spring up through those selfsame cracks soon afterward. These first green shoots may not look like much, but they’re the advance guard of nature’s army. And nature can afford a long campaign.

 
You don’t need to go far to find wildness. You can seek it in vast undeveloped tracts at the end of a flight on a jetliner, or you can discover it right on your doorstep. Large or small, all wild areas are important. “Underdeveloped land” might be an affront to the sensibilities of land speculators, suburban developers, and highway planners, but to anyone who cares about the fragile fabric that supports life on this planet—and that includes more than six billion human beings—all of this “wasted” land is plenty valuable just the way it is.

To my mind, there’s simply no such thing as a wasteland. There are only opportunities for life to flourish anew. Res firma mitescere nescit. And that’s only natural. Read more…

 

 
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