Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?
Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another.
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.
Camp-keeping in the Delta was not all beer and skittles.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.
Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.
Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
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.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
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 face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one’s own land?
When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.