Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to perserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the...

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.

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...

This whole effort to rebuild and stabilize a countryside is not without its disappointments and mistakes… What matter though these temporary growing pains when one can cast his eye upon the hills and see hard-boiled...

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… The land is one...

The mouse is a sober citizen who knows that the grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks, and that snow falls in order that mice may build subways from stack...

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.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has...

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden...

They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as...

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.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced...

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

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. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long...

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: ‘What good is it?

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the...

The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the...

We shall never achieve harmony with the land, anymore than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.

One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it...

To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.

There is an allegory for historians in the diverse functions of saw, wedge, and axe.The saw works only across the years, which it must deal with one by one, in sequence. From each year the...

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow… creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

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.

Do not let anyone tell you that these people made work of play. They simply realized that the most fun lies in seeing and studying the unknown.