One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.
There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
I am convinced that most Americans of the new generation have no idea what a decent forest looks like. The only way to tell them is to show them.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how.
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators… The land is one organism.
In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries no man can ignore all of them.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.