New York Times Magazine: Watching the Planet Burn

‘‘In wildness is the preservation of the world.’’ Henry David Thoreau coined this adage in the 1850s, the same decade during which Edwin Drake drilled America’s first oil well in Titusville, Pa. Wilderness conservation and the hydrocarbon economy have been uneasy bedfellows ever since, with protected lands often viewed as compensatory gestures for our voracious remaking of the landscape elsewhere. Read more …