I have come to believe that we humans have severed ourselves so profoundly from the natural world—and marked it so indelibly—that the notion of "pristine wilderness" has become a beautiful fiction. There is no escape, no sanctuary untouched by our hand.

Millions of fragments orbit silently above us, a glittering belt of refuse. Below, climate changes with our breath, while microplastics infiltrate the deepest trenches and most remote peaks. Forests shrink before our appetites. Even silence has been colonized; our noise ripples through landscapes that once knew only wind and birdsong.

There is nowhere left to go where we have not already been, no corner of Earth that does not bear the fingerprint of humankind. We have made the world over in our image, and now we wander through it, searching for something we ourselves have erased.