What do we mean by living in harmony with the earth? Does it mean that you never kill, that you live in a log cabin, that you don’t reproduce, that you own nothing? Of course it doesn’t. In practice, what it means is that each of us keeps trying (in our own ways and at our own pace) to lessen our impact upon the earth and its life.
In wildness is the preservation of the world… Life consists of wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a ‘sanctum sanctorum’. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. In short, all good things are wild and free.
Henry David Thoreau