If you’ve ever read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, then you know very well the importance of the sanctity of wilderness. Abbey spent years working as a Ranger in what is now Arches National Park, and came to experience both a spiritual awakening and a contempt for modernity in the emptiness of the desert southwest. Spend a week in the desert away from contrived human experiences, and soon you will learn what it is to wander and to wonder. Gaze through arches 65 million years in the making, and ponder the infinitude of starlight older than the earth itself. Modern pretenses fall away like loose rock in  a storm, and time, whatever time means, goes on.