Nature reaches out from across the millennia and astounds us with a rock formation carved by wind and rain out of sandstone into a fantastic shape to remind us of fairies, demons, or the very face of God. Some are touched by this and brought to tears as they contemplate the ages. Some feel the presence of something holy or sentient. Some feel compelled to carve their initials into the soft stone.

These small desecrations are the legacy of a culture that does not respect nature. Always have the trees stood at the edge of our settlements. Once we said, “let each man take from nature according to his need” and set forth with our stone axes to gather firewood to last through the cold night. At some point in our distant past one of our ancestors, with a small and greedy mind, looked upon a vast primeval forest and said to himself, “I could sell some of this.”

The park so fresh in my mind is owned by the nature conservancy. It is land set aside by conservationists to preserve rare flora and fauna. Tucked away in a small town where Confederate flags fly proudly in people’s yards and “League of the South” signs welcome you as if they are the local Chamber of Commerce instead of a political front for the Klu Klux Klan, you would not expect to find something so liberal as land set aside for protection. Yet the need to preserve something of nature for our children and children’s children is common to all strains of man, regardless of his religion, level of tolerance for others, or social and economic status.

To carve your name on one of the gifts of nature, or to leave so much as a soda top behind as litter, is a theft from future generations. Perhaps it is not as big of a theft as those who do mountain-top removal to get at the coal within, or those who drill for oil and rape the land for the sake of its mineral wealth, but it is the tolerance of such small desecrations that allow the greater ones to happen.