That margins should be a redoubt of wildness, I knew, was proof of the deverstation of the land: the extent to which nature had been squeezed to the territory's edges, repressed almost to extinction. But it seemed like proof, as well, of the resiliance of the wild - of its instinct for resurgence, its irrepressibility. And a recognition that wildness weaved with the human world, rather than existing in cleaved-off areas, in National Parks and on distant peninsulas and peaks.

from The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane