All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.
We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses.
Wildflower corners are easy to maintain, but once gone, they are hard to rebuild.
Wilderness, then, assumes unexpected importance as a laboratory for the study of land – health.
I confess my own leisure to be spent entirely in search of adventure, without regard to prudence, profit, self improvement, learning, or any other serious thing.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say ‘yes’ to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared.
Never did we plan the morrow, for we had learned that in the wilderness some new and irresistible distraction is sure to turn up each day before breakfast. Like the river, we were free to wander.
Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.
Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
That dark laboratory we call the soil.
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left worth fighting for.
Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.
The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills. They represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave those rewards and penalties, for wise and foolish acts against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.
Hydrologists have demonstrated that the meanderings of a creek are a necessary part of the hydrologic functioning. The flood plain belongs to the river. The ecologist sees clearly that for similar reasons we can get along with less channel improvement on Round River.
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.
To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs.
Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind; I have no hope for conservation born of fear.
At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant.