The Sanctuary of Freedom  

Here's one from FTW on the value of the wilderness (via FTD).

Ethics often gets mentioned in connection with the wilderness, usually in the form of the truism that destroying the remainder of the natural world is morally wrong.

But I want to emphasize a different ethical dimension of the wilderness: it is the sanctuary of freedom, and that this is its greatest value. If we are to take seriously the founding images and stories of American identity, we must regard the wilderness as the soul of America: it gave the native peoples their ways; it called to the frontiersmen, the mountainmen and the explorers; and because it bespoke a dignity and self reliance that Europe had lost, it was the source of an American spiritual strength that found expression in the Declaration of Independence and in Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

In the American lexicon, freedom has come to mean the freedom of corporations to generate profit and the freedom of the public to consume. The ugly irony here is that consumption itself is antithetical to freedom, because chasing the illusory fulfillment of artificial needs prevents us from determining our own real needs. If you own a car, or a house, or any other possessions, then you are tied down by your car insurance, your mortgage, your bills, your consumer debt, and the material things themselves. If freedom is measured by the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want and wherever you want, the freest person you are likely to see is that homeless guy riding his bicycle and rifling through garbage bins. He has his risks and his limits, but he isn't toiling for a salary, servicing debt, or storing possessions. Is he free?

As Thoreau understood, those who have lived in the wilderness are the freest people on the planet. So long as there remains some wilderness where people can go to escape the ties that bind, freedom will retain some of its former meaning.