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.
The problem, then, is how to bring about a striving for harmony with land among a people many of whom have forgotten there is any such thing as land, among whom education and culture have become almost synonymous with landlessness. This is the problem of conservation education.
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring.
There are some of us who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese or wild flowers is a right as inalienable as free speech.
Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.
The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides, but they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history, to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.
Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.
He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unknowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance.
Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.
I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory.
What avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?