All nature smiles, and teems with health and brightness and fragrance, where you are, but over the valley before you rests an awful, impenetrable, dark, black cloud, . . . approximating to a realization of your ideal of the "dark valley of the shadow of death.". . . You walk down the hillside, and, as you enter the thick, dark cloud, . . . you feel no more the invigorating influences [of the sun], . . . a sense of oppressiveness falls upon you, and you realize, to your unmistakable discomfort, that the darkness around [you] can not only be seen, but felt and tasted. Suddenly, to your great astonishment, you discover that this dreary spot is inhabited by human beings!

You are here commencing anew. The soil, the air, the water are all pure and healthy. Do not suffer them to become polluted with wickedness. Strive to preserve the elements from being contaminated by the filthy, wicked conduct and sayings of those who pervert the intelligence God has bestowed upon the human family.

One man has his eye on a gold mine, . . . another for selling his cattle, . . . another to get a farm, or building here and there, and trading and trafficking with each other, just like Babylon. . . . Babylon is here, and we are following in the footsteps of the inhabitants of the earth, who are in a perfect sea of confusion. Do you know this? You ought to, for there are none of you but what see it daily

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

But there’s another trove of wealth that’s not so well-known: our common wealth. Each of us is the joint recipient of a vast inheritance. This shared inheritance includes air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems, and quite a bit more. Though the value of these manifold gifts is hard to calculate, it’s safe to say they’re worth trillions of dollars. Indeed, according to Friends of the Commons, their aggregate value probably exceeds that of everything we own privately.

We need to speak up, to say boldly why we fight for good schools, why we build houses for the homeless, why we protect open space, why we look after the ailing and the elderly, why we pay taxes without grumbling, why we honor government as a force for public good. In a society obsessed with competition, we need to say why we practice cooperation. In a culture addicted to instant gratification, we need to champion long-term healing and the welfare of coming generations.

We need a new vision of the good life. We need a dream worthy of grown-ups, one that values simplicity over novelty, conservation over consumption, harmony over competition, community over ego.

The work of creating wise and loving communities begins with cherishing our common wealth. I speak of it as “common” because it’s ordinary and because it’s shared. By “wealth” I don’t mean money, but the actual sources of well-being. I mean the soils, waters, and atmosphere; the oceans and prairies and forests; the human gene pool and the plenitude of species. I mean language in all its forms, including mathematics and music; every kind of knowledge, from folklore to physics; and all manner of artifacts, from satellites to shoes. I mean practical arts such as cooking, building, herding, and farming; the art of medicine; the traditions of civil liberty and democratic government. I mean wildlife refuges, national parks, and wilderness areas, as well as schools, museums, libraries, and other public spaces.

There is some hope, I think, in the idea of the commonwealth, which seems to acknowledge than we all have a common interest or share in the land, an interest that precedes our interest in private property. Of the precedence of our share in the common wealth the best evidence is that we share also a common health; the two, in fact, are inseparable. If we have the "right to life," as we have always supposed, then that right must stand upon the further right to air, water, food, clothing, and shelter.

I am an uneasy believer in the right of private property because I know that this right can be understood as the right to destroy property, which is to say the natural or the given world. I do not believe that such a right exists, even though its presumed existence has covered the destruction of a lot of land.