I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.
To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
The worthiness of any cause is not measured by its clean record, but by its readiness to see the blots when they are pointed out, and to change its mind.
There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.
Land health is the capacity for self-renewal in the soils, waters, plants, and animals that collectively comprise the land.
We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.
There are two things that interest me: the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.
For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.
I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey.
The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important.
Our remnants of wilderness will yield bigger values to the nation’s character and health than they will to its pocketbook, and to destroy them will be to admit that the latter are the only values that interest us.
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.
Do we realize that industry, which has been our good servant, might make a poor master?
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct.
No one would rather hunt woodcock in October than I, but since learning of the sky dance I find myself calling one or two birds enough. I must be sure that, come April, there be no dearth of dancers in the sunset sky.
Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.
The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Keeping records enhances the pleasure of the search and the chance of finding order and meaning in these events.
There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.