Last night a thought came to me. It soon grew into an idea.
I am a wilderness seeker. I need the mountains. I need the trees. I need the birds as much as I need air. However, I live thirty minutes from everywhere I need or want to be. I spend more time in my car heading to work, school, or dinner than I get to spend reading, walking, or taking photos of birds or dogwood blooms. I live in Northeast Georgia in a small town called Pendergrass. I work in Buford, which is just north of Atlanta, and spend a good bit of my time in Athens. Wherever I am I look up, down, and around for remnants of nature. I prefer the native unimpaired type, but I will take an invasive tree over none any day. As I commute, the words of Edward Abbey and Aldo Leopold swirl in my head weaving an understanding of the wilderness that was and a longing for what survives. What I find in the cities and through my car’s window is evidence. Evidently, if you look up, down, and around wherever you are, wilderness exists. Although I long for the Smoky Mountains each day I wake, I do not wait until I can be there to appreciate the forest community. The birds who nest in the gutter of a coffee house are just as brave and beautiful, or maybe more so than those in an Appalachian oak.
We all have a dependence upon nature whether we admit it or not. Most of us are not in touch with our emotional attachment to it. In a city, nature has lost the battle. Concrete far outnumbers grass. Signs are much more numerous than trees. It takes an effort to find the wilderness in such a place, but it is there. When you find it, you will enjoy it. When you enjoy it, you may realize how rare it is. Then you may want to protect it.
Anthony Sadler 