In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world—the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.

John Muir (1838–1914), the naturalist and leading advocate for wilderness preservation, wrote this line during the late 19th century as he argued that wild landscapes possess spiritual and moral value beyond their economic “use.” The phrasing reflects Muir’s characteristic fusion of Protestant-inflected religious language with firsthand experience of the Sierra Nevada and other American wildlands. It belongs to his broader campaign—through essays, lectures, and political organizing—to protect remaining “unblighted” places from logging, grazing, and development, a movement that helped shape the early U.S. conservation and national parks ethos.

Muir frames wilderness as a kind of sacred reservoir: “God’s wildness” suggests that the divine is encountered most vividly in untamed nature rather than in human institutions. Calling it the “hope of the world” implies that renewal—ethical, spiritual, even ecological—depends on preserving places not yet “blighted” by exploitation. The paradoxical “unredeemed wilderness” hints that wild nature does not need human salvation; instead, it is humanity that needs the corrective and restorative power of the wild. The line encapsulates Muir’s preservationist conviction that protecting wilderness is a moral imperative, not merely a practical policy choice.