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.
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.