Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.
Patriotism requires less and less of making the eagle scream, but more and more of making him think.
In farm country, the plover has only two real enemies: the gully and the drainage ditch. Perhaps we shall one day find that these are our enemies, too.
Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.
The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not.
Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels.
Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.
The only true development in American recreational resources is the development of the perceptive faculty in Americans. All of the other acts we grace by that name are, at best, attempts to retard or mask the process of dilution.
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.