Hands down my best experience with nature was in the spring of 2007 when i spent about a month and a half traveling around Siberian villages. I vividly remember driving from the airport in the city down to the lake to catch a fairy accross, we drove for a couple hourse with forest on either side of us and when the lake came into view it was so white and covered in snow that you couldn't see the horizon line, the sky was white the ground was white, the lake was white, it may sound boring, but it was unlike anything i'd ever seen, it was completely untouched. In the following parts of the trip I lived with an elderly woman in a tiny tiny village where everyone supported themselves through farming (one woman even thought that Americans were very rich and that they must all have really big potato fields and cows...oh if she only knew) and bartering, a mountain village where the cow to human ratio is 3:1 (the cows all 'hang out' on the main street and wander around, when i didn't see any branding or tagging i asked how people know which cows are theirs, i was informed that the cows know who they belong to, i'm still a little skeptical about that) as well as a village on the lake, full of superstitions, that lives in harmony with the water and the world around them. I even got to participate in the traditional (yet not outdated) slaughtering of a sheep, it was incredibly methodical and bloodless and to be honest the meat tasted great. My experiences with nature are few and far between, but each one has stayed with me and opened my eyes to something new. So, i suppose it is worth protecting, but with so many battles to fight, who fights them and which comes first? And so we get into the complicated part, as always seems to happen...