And it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all,...

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

Keep calm. You have the forest in your blood.

Naysayers at their polite best chided the rewilders for romanticizing the past; at their sniping worst, for tempting a ‘Jurassic Park’ disaster. To these the rewilders quietly voiced a sad and stinging reply. The most...

He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain – dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world...

…returning to nature has been a dream present in the minds of every generation since mankind first left nature.

We walk alone in the wilderness.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river’s edge; around them eight hundred species...

We are the wilderness withinScreaming out for true expression.Even when we’re sleeping,There’s no escape from this obsession.

flavor of the wilds.

…William Stegner…coined the term ‘the geography of hope,’ countering the argument that wilderness preservation served elites with the assertion that wilderness could be a place in which everyone could locate their hopefulness even if few...

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex...

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty.

Have faith my friends, because love will find you eventually. It found me, and I was wearing camouflage clothing, face paint, and cologne that smelled like the wilderness.

Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our...

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts...

This is not wilderness for designation or for a park. Not a scenic wilderness and not one good for fishing or the viewing of wildlife. It is wilderness that gets into your nostrils, that runs...

I walked slowly to enjoy this freedom, and when I came out of the mountains, I saw the sky over the prairie, and I thought that if heaven was real, I hoped it was a...

Among wilderness survival tips, punching a wild animal in the face probably isn’t on a checklist.

If you reconnect with nature and the wilderness you will not only find the meaning of life, but you will experience what it means to be truly alive.

A flower’s structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don’t know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its...

Since well before the Kung’s engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian or Chinese but it is a...

I didn’t say a word. He wouldn’t be using oxygen. K2 is more dangerous than Everest.

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

As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night.

The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

Our incredible bewilderment (wilderness separation) blinds us from seeing that our many personal and global problems primarily result from our assault of and separation from the natural creation process within and around us. Our estrangement...

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

Today I am an unemployed writer living as a recluse in the great Northwoods.

We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.

The old school of thought would have you believe that you’d be a fool to take on nature without arming yourself with every conceivable measure of safety and comfort under the sun. But that isn’t...

Forgiveness is alchemy of the soul in which the feeling of possibility returns to the human spirit.

There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity’s control.

The writer Richard Manning has argued that ‘the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.

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

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don’t understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world...

Life in the wild, as I’m observing, is about survival as much as pleasure.

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness, Her soul was taken from sanity.

Unlike the majority of people, he did not hate or fear the wilderness; as harsh as the empty lands were, they possessed a grace and a beauty that no artifice could compete with and that...

When I returned to camp, they walked behind me on the trail, and we spoke not a word about getting skunked today, but rather talked about the days we returned with a stringer full of...

Anthropocentric as [the gardener] may be, he recognizes that he is dependent for his health and survival on many other forms of life, so he is careful to take their interests into account in whatever...

One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments…is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is ‘dis-ease.

At which point, at long last, there was the actual doing it, quickly followed by the grim realization of what it meant to do it, followed by the decision to quit doing it because doing...

For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;And men are whithered before their primeBy the curse paved in with the lanes and streets.And lungs are poisoned and...

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity

They are beautiful, heart-rendingly beautiful, those wilds, with a quality of wide-eyed, unsung, innocent surrender that my lacquered, toy-bright Swiss villages and exhaustively lauded Alps no longer possess. Innumerable lovers have clipped and kissed on...

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...