“What has been an ancient spiritual truth is now increasingly verified by science: We are all indivisibly part of one another. We share a common ancestry with everyone and everything alive on earth. The air we breathe contains atoms that have passed through the lungs of ancestors long dead. Our bodies are composed of the same elements created deep inside the furnaces of long-dead stars. We can look upon the face of anyone or anything around us and say—as a moral declaration and a spiritual, cosmological, and biological fact:
“As our world becomes increasingly polluted with noise, silence is becoming our rarest commodity. Through all the madness, how can we possibly hear what the Earth is so patiently trying to tell us? Wilderness is our only hope. The one place we can always come back to.”