Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility.
Author and conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote these words in 1949, and they are all the more important today.
As we enter the 21st century and today’s children look forward to living in the 22nd, this lack of intellectual humility is harming us in a number of ways.
Most notably, humanity is fundamentally and unintentionally changing the shape of the natural world. But the scientists who best understand this shift typically use only the language of science and reason – data and models – to explain it.