The richest values of wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future.
To look into the eyes of a wolf is to see your own soul – hope you like what you see.
How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility.
Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing.
We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.
Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.
In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not...
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush and it is the same river who before I can bring my friends to view his work erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind’s eye.
What a dull world if we knew all about geese!
How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook!
O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me.
Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.
Teach the student to see the land, understand what he sees, and enjoy what he understands.
It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature.
Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.
Mechanized recreation already has seized nine-tenths of the woods and mountains; a decent respect for minorities should dedicate the other tenth to wilderness.