Every region should retain representative samples of its original or wilderness condition, to serve science as a sample of normality. Just as doctors must study healthy people to understand disease, so must the land sciences study the wilderness to understand disorders of the land-mechanism.
Conservation is a positive exercise of skill and insight, not merely a negative exercise of abstinence and caution.
A river or stream is a cycle of energy from sun to plants to insects to fish. It is a continuum broken only by humans.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
We face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
Like all real treasures of the mind, perception can be split into infinitely small fractions without losing its quality. The weeds in a city lot convey the same lesson as the redwoods; the farmer may see in his cow-pasture what may not be vouchsafed to the scientist adventuring in the South Seas.
Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education.
What more delightful avocation than to take a piece of land and by cautious experimentation to prove how it works. What more substantial service to conservation than to practice it on one’s own land?
When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: He could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: He could chop it down. Whoever owns land has thus assumed, whether he knows it or not, the divine functions of creating and destroying plants.
Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.
Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.
Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.
No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them.
Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf.
The hope of the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy – it is already too late for that – but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.
Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal.