Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
On motionless wing they emerge from the lifting mists, sweep a final arc of sky, and settle in clangorous descending spirals to their feeding grounds. A new day has begun on the crane marsh.
The good life of any river may depend on the perception of its music; and the preservation of some music to perceive.
The life of every river sings its own song, but in most the song is long marred by the discords of misuse.
Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.
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!