The Poisonwood Bible and Harmony with Wilderness--by Lindsey Wiker

"Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened.
First, picture the forest. I want you to be its conscience, the eyes in the trees. The trees are columns of slick, brindled bark like muscular animals overgrown beyond all reason. Every space is filled with life: delicate, poisonous frogs war-painted like skeletons, clutched in copulation, secreting their precious eggs onto dripping leaves. Vines strangling their own kin in the everlasting wrestle for sunlight. The breathing of monkeys. A glide of snake belly on branch. A single-file army of ants biting a mammoth tree into uniform grains and hauling it down to the dark for their ravenous queen. And, in reply, a choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. This forest eats itself and lives forever."

This is how one of my favorite novels begins.

It is Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and it powerfully shows the tragedy as well as the blessings that can occur when people are thrown into an unfamiliar wilderness. The danger and beauty of the wild are portrayed perfectly. It provides an example of what happens when one tries to go against nature, and when the environment is ultimately embraced.
The basic plot involves a Baptist preacher and father, Nathan Price, who feels it is his duty to convert "savage" native peoples to Christianity. He drags his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959. Not only does he attempt to change the people and their ways of life, he works against the environment. His actions ultimately lead to disastrous results. The reader observes the family fall apart along with the Congo.
Specifically, one of the ways that Nathan refuses to adapt is the way he insists on planting his vegetables the way it is done in the U.S. A native person attemps to change this, making the dirt form into steps, but Nathan angirly flattens the earth out again. Needless to say, the food wouldn't grow.
An interesting thing that Kingsolver does is that she gives Nathan a counterpart: Brother Fowles, a fellow missionary who is also attempting to do some good in the Congo. He provides an example of how to appropriately exist in the wild. Unlike Nathan and his family, he lives with the land like the natives. He has been living there, not converting people but studying the land. At one point he pleasantly states to Nathan, "I study and classify the fauna. I observe a great deal, and probably offer very little salvation in the long run."
This attitude seems to be the right one when it comes to interacting with wilderness. Observe, and allow it to be the teacher.