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.
The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody’s nose.
There is value in any experience that exercises those ethical restraints collectively called sportsmanship.
Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.
The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land, but not by the land.
The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.
It must be poor life that achieves freedom from fear.
Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.
Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness heaven; one may never get there.
What conservation education must build is an ethical underpinning for land economics and a universal curiosity to understand the land mechanism. Conservation may then follow.
All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.
Man brings all things to the test of himself, and this is notably true of lightning.
If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me.
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism.