During off hours, I have been watching the spectacular BBC series Planet Earth. Just seeing an episode is almost sufficient to make a person turn to a life of nature videography. Whether other viewers feel the same compulsion or not, it does seem reasonable to call the series mandatory viewing for human beings. It is both awe inspiring, insofar as it demonstrates the enduring richness of truly wild places, and chastening, insofar as it demonstrates their wholesale slaughter.
A book I am reading captures it well:
Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
Curious, how powerful and helpless we seem to be, in the end.