"Look at the birds of the heavens," the Teacher said. "Consider the lilies of the field." For the Teacher there were lessons to be learned from life in all of its forms. The Teacher was in the truest sense an apprentice, and the skies and fields were his masters. By carefully studying the rich diversity of life he found helpful patterns for living, and he exhorted his followers to learn how to sit under life's careful instruction.

There are those for whom non-human life represents an obstacle to human well-being. Forests are cleared and leveled to make way for housing divisions ironically named The Wilds or Paradise Acres or Evergreen Hills. For them, meadows and grasslands are no classroom, no place to learn how to prosper according to the requirements of seasons, no place to discover a way to thrive in cooperation with other species, no place to study life's deeply rooted rhythmic constitution. Instead our forests, grasslands, rivers, and mountains are alien landscapes waiting to be colonized by the tribe with the Divine Mandate to dominate and subdue the earth and every non-human form of life we encounter, based on a Genesis edict which has been misread with shameful and lethal consequences. In the imagination of "developed" human societies, our work as the industrialized subduing species will not be finished until we have rooted out all other living things - plant and animal - who continue to exist on their own terms, until we have determined whether or not they pose any sort of menace to us, and until we have decided whether to exterminate them, sequester them into various parks, or commodify them to serve us in the marketplace. Only after such rigorous assessment of each species - Is this animal wildlife, pet, or food? - might we allow them to live independently. (Imagine here Adam naming all of the animals as they pass in procession, providing a picture of human superiority to our ancient Mediterranean ancestors.) That is, so long as they learn to stay out of our way. This is beyond irresponsible. It is in fact the inverse of the mythical decree to practice dominion as icons of the gods on the earth.

The Teacher's lessons are incredibly practical, and so are the lessons of the sparrows and the lilies.

We need wilderness to serve as the measure against which we appraise our customs and values. If we live in such a way as to avoid interaction with wilderness, or to intentionally distance ourselves from it (except on the rare occasions when we temporarily visit a place where wilderness has been "preserved"), or worse yet to demolish it altogether, then we will be silencing the voices of our instructors.

We need wilderness to teach us how to live. Our agricultural practices need to be informed by the biodiversity of the prairies. If we would listen to them, we would hear their counsel against our short-sighted monocultures which disregard the evolutionary stories of area soils. Our economic practices need to be informed by the ways that forest animals use the commons. If we would listen to them, we would hear their counsel against our violent market strategies which turn the task of working for our daily bread into unbridled war. Our political practices need to be informed by the ecological boundaries within which nearly every other species restrains itself. If we would listen to them, we would hear their counsel against our disregard for local carrying capacities and our imperial compulsion to conquer our neighbors in order to expand our dominion.

This will not happen unless and until we understand ourselves to be within the category of Nature and Wilderness and all of the other labels we've used historically to distance ourselves from the non-human world. We have created an artificial boundary between human life and everything else. If we pause just long enough to open our eyes we will see the boundary disappear. We will call ourselves natural. Then we will be ready look at the birds of the air, to consider the lilies of the field, and to learn from our place.