this is it...

I am reading a book called "Arctic Dreams" that I found in a local used book store. I almost didn't buy it because the word "dream" was in the title and it seemed that it would be a little too....romanced? And I know not to judge a book by its cover, but what about the title? But it was only $2.00 so what the hey.
Lately, I've been incredibly intrigued, borderline obsessed with the arctic. As I've done a few large-scale road trips, I find myself having unnatural urges to continue these explorations and they are getting more remote. I don't know what I'm searching for but this lparagraph in this book sort of sums it up.Its thought provoking and at the same time simplified, yet complex wisdom. It is sad to think that society has dulled this understanding. This book was a New York Times bestseller in 1986, Author Barry Lopez.
The next few paragraphs are as follows:

"For some reason I brooded often about animal behavior and the threads of evolution in the Arctic. I do not know whether it was the reserves of space, the simplicity of the region's biology, its short biological history, striking encounters with lone animals, or the realization of my own capacity to annihilate life here. I wondered where the animals had come from; and where we had come from; and where each of us was going. The Arctic ecosystem itself is only 10,000 years old, the time since the retreat of the Wisconsin ice. The fact that it is the youngest ecosystem on earth gives it a certain freshness and urgency. (Curiously, historians refer to these same ten millennia as the time of civilized man, from his humble beginnings in northern Mesopotamia to the present. Arctic ecosystems and civilized man belong, therefore, to the same, short epoch, the Holocene. Mankind is, in fact, even older than the ARctic, if you consider his history to have begun with the emergence of Cro-Magnon people in Europe 40,000 years ago.)
Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution. With the development of various technologies - hunting weapons, protective clothing, and fire-making tools; and then agriculture and herding - mankind has not only been able to take over the specific niches of other animals but has been able to move into regions that were formerly unavailable to him. The animals he found already occupying niches in these other areas he, again, either displaced or eliminated. The other creatures have had no choice. They are confined to certain niches- places of food (stored solar energy), water, and shelter- which they cannot leave without either speciating or developing tools (evolution). To finish the thought, the same technological advances and the enormous increase in his food base have largely exempted man from the effect of natural controls on the size of his population. Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (which now includes oil, exotic minerals, fossil ground water, huge tracts of forests, and so on, and entails the continuing , concomitant, loss of species is human wisdom.
Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way to behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependant. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer.
A Yup'ik hunter on Saint Lawrence Island once told me that what traditional Eskimos fear most about us is the extent of our power to alter the land, the scale of that power and the fact that we can easily effect some of these changes electronically, from a distant city. Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, "the people who change nature".