“We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time” (Leopold 141).

This quote from Leopold’s work struck me and left me thinking about it well after I had finished the assigned reading. Every living being strives for all of these components to a successful and happy life, and all of it boils down to peace. People have taken this to many different levels throughout history, including peaceful activism through demonstrations or extreme actions through war. Many conflicts have started, at least in part, over different ideological views, as people hope to achieve a world where their perspectives and desires reign successfully. The notion of peace in our time is then followed up by a quote from Thoreau: “In wildness is the salvation of the world.” Leopold addresses the importance of each component of an ecosystem, such that the presence of wolves does indeed matter. The mountains understand the integral value of the wolf, while others may not be able to perceive the connection between the wild and this “salvation” or greater appreciation. To understand this is to “think like a mountain” as the title of the passage suggests. Leopold communicates this as a deep interconnectedness of all elements in the ecosystem, and this may not be apparent when humans think of themselves solely as individuals, rather than a piece of this greater system. To have peace in our time, we must think of the world as an interconnected system of the wild and the world in which we reside.