Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.
Why would anyone believe it is possible to lay down such barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called insecticides, but biocides.
Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.
Nature reserves some of her choice rewards for days when her mood may appear to be somber.
Our attitude towards plants is a singularly narrow one. If we see any immediate utility in a plant we foster it. If for any reason we find its presence undesirable or merely a matter of indifference, we may condemn it to destruction forthwith.
We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?
In an age when man has forgotten his origins and is blind even to his most essential needs for survival, water along with other resources has become the victim of his indifference.
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.
But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force.
The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.
When any living thing has come to the end of its cycle, we accept that end as natural. When that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.
Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.
And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality – earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea.
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.
Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
Conservation is a cause that has no end. There is no point at which we will say our work is finished.
We are not truly civilized if we concern ourselves only with the relation of man to man. What is important is the relation of man to all life.
For the sense of smell, almost more than any other, has the power to recall memories and it’s a pity we use it so little.
The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife.