How does one make an argument for the preservation of vast tracks of wilderness to those who historically only hear/care about utilitarian arguments and values?

The loss of vast wilderness areas would be devastating to mans futures as "the thinking animal." Preservation of SPECIFIC, but large, wild, locations can easily be argued for philosophically and spiritually and even nationalistically (mostly in the states), but considering those with the power to actually protect land operate in the utilitarian terms of politics, how can the argument be really made? This is a question men from Thomas Cole to Thoreau to Muir have struggled with and have never been resolved. Thoughts /out/?

>the Wilderness Act of 1964, which describes [wilderness] as “in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape … as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

>http://www.iep.utm.edu/am-wild/