“Muir's spiritualized version of the natural world as a place of luminous order was something he could and did rally people like him to defend. It had a constructive side, but it is no longer possible to ignore its destructive side. If getting over the idea that much of this continent was wild in the old sense of untouched or uninfluenced by human beings feels like a loss for those raised on that vision, it brings with it a far greater gain: the realization that there is no inevitable nature-culture dichotomy and that the example of people living on the land—or of many peoples living on many kinds of land, from the Arctic to the Everglades—without devastating it has always been here.”