A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. Fifty years ago Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, making the United States the world's first country to designate wilderness areas for permanent protection. (The law came only two months after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two momentous pieces of legislation that would have been impossible without forceful federal leadership.) The world’s population then was 3.2 billion. Today it is 7.2 billion. Humans have spent millennia carving civilization out of the wilderness, and there is unrelenting pressure to open what’s left of our wild places to drilling, lumbering and farming, to be less concerned about protecting animals that would eat us if they had half a chance and more about the needs of people.

As I walk in the national park, where, it is true, my chances of being eaten by a bear are slim, I think of Thoreau’s words, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Most people will never visit the wilderness, perhaps have no interest in doing so. Yet we need those places, even if only in our imaginations, where we set aside our impulse to dominate and reflect on living in harmony, not just with nature, but with each other – which seems a tonic in these post-election days.