[VoodooJuJu]

Pristine wilderness is not a myth, it's an ideal.

It's an ideal appreciated by Europeans, but especially by Americans. We don't like people spreading to every single uninhabited nook & cranny and consuming every possible resource. America has a lot of uninhabited places. That's not an invitation for people the world over to consume and devour and combust and mine and destroy these places, as many of them have done to their own homes.

You've seen the headlines plenty of times: declining populations of species, particularly insects, bees. The natural world deserves some refuge and respite from human colonization. We've cultivated crops and powerful technology, let's cultivate some wilderness too. Wild growth is beauty and temperance. It's saying, "I've eaten enough, that I don't need to eat this, let wild beauty flourish here." Do not strive to eat the world, eat just enough.

Wilding and rewilding is an ideal.

[bombcar]

And indigenous populations were comparatively small, and there were vast areas they simply didn't go (or need to go).

I think the wild needs the respect of Gimli toward the Glittering Caves - we can help it, we can improve it, but only slowly and carefully (partially because we don't know what we don't know).