“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” – John Muir

John Muir wrote those words more than a century ago, and they still cut to the point.

We need wild places the way we need food – not as a weekend indulgence, but as something closer to a baseline requirement for living well. Muir wasn’t being poetic for its own sake. He was making an argument: That our tie to the land is not optional, and that severing it costs us our identity – our connection to the food we eat, the places we call home, our mental health, and our sense of place.

That argument didn’t start with Muir. It runs back to our founding. George Washington, in his Circular to the States, recognized America’s natural endowment as foundational to its purpose.

He wrote: “The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World…Heaven has crowned all its other blessings, by giving a fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other Nation has ever been favored with.”

Washington wasn’t just cataloging resources. He was staking a claim – that the land itself was bound up in what this country was supposed to become.

Now 250 years later, we can see how much of that inheritance we’ve spent down.

Waterways choked with runoff. Soil stripped of the biology that once held it together. Air quality in dozens of American cities that fails basic health standards. A climate shifting faster than most ecosystems can adapt to. These aren’t abstractions. They’re measurable losses, and they compound.

That’s a grim list, but it’s not the whole story.

Americans have faced this kind of damage before and decided to do something about it. The national parks exist because people fought for them. The Clean Water Act passed because rivers were catching fire and the public said enough. None of that happened automatically. It happened because ordinary people treated stewardship as serious civic work.

Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin senator who founded Earth Day in 1970, understood what that work required.

As Nelson said, “The battle to restore a proper relationship between man and his environment will require a long, sustained, political, rural, ethical and financial commitment far beyond any effort we ever made before.” He wasn’t calling for gestures; he was describing a generational project.

This is our patriotic obligation. Not in some vague, hand-over-heart sense, but in the most concrete way possible: The founders staked this country’s future on its land, and what we do with that land now tells the truth about whether we meant any of it.

It’s our turn now.

Connect with nature. Start close to home. Take your kids to the woods and let them get hopelessly, gloriously dirty. Plant something native in your yard. Show up to a city council meeting when a zoning decision threatens a watershed; volunteer for a cleanup crew and get mud on your boots. Vote for your identity, for your values, for our responsibility to the land.

The work is unglamorous and ongoing, and we owe it to every generation that comes next.

Shaun Langley is a member of the DeKalb Citizens’ Environmental Commission.