Why Write?

The previous post is from the beginning of my book The Entire Earth and Sky. I think about Antarctica every day and usually try to begin my day by looking at photos of the ice and seas. For some reason, and I don't know why, I feel very much at home in Antarctica, and did from the first time I went there in 1988. I remember quite clearly when my first sighting of the continent. Words fail me when I try to lay down that feeling as type.
Later, when I read accounts of similar moments -- when James Clark Ross first spotted the Ross Ice Shelf and compared it with the White Cliffs of Dover, it occurred to me how few places on Earth offered this view: Unaltered wilderness, one that looked precisely today as it did when another was there in the mid-19th century. Lately, this idea has come to occupy my mind. The question is, how can we begin to understand the history of a place, to bridge present and past with narrative, when the facts of place shift because of human culture?
These days, I live on a dune above the Pacific Ocean and walk the beach each day. Some days, it is only me and people who are paid to walk other people's dogs -- odd as this seems to me, it is rather common in San Francisco. One of the regular dog walkers, a large, red-faced young man chasing 10 dogs around the beach, talks to his dogs like this: OK! You are not supposed to run. You have a hip problem! No more running!
I think about this young man, the dogs, the absent people who own the dogs, and the largely empty beach. Inside the huge homes overlooking the Pacific, I imagine dog owners getting pedicures, selling stocks, and never looking out the window. Except when they have guests over.
Then they need the Earth to work for them. Look, they say, look at how beautiful the ocean and beach are, as though the world exists in a snow shake.