|
|
|
|
|
"I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately,
Henry David Thoreau, "Walden", 1854
"A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most non-privileged
of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of army
surplus combat boots may enter."
"But love of the wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always
beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore
us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise
we ever need - if only we had eyes to see."
“Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast…a
part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of
yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough
to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While
you can. While it is still there. So get out there and hunt
and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore
the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks.
Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly
for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious
and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head
and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and
I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our
enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit
box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you
this: You will outlive the bastards.”
“But the love of wilderness is more than hunger for what is always beyond
reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the Earth, the Earth which
bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise
we ever need – if we had the eyes to see.”
"No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human
spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which
destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting
itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself. "If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his
operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from
the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He
will make himself an exile from the earth and then will know at last, if he is
still capable of feeling anything, the pain and agony of final loss. He will
understand what the captive Zia
Indians meant when they made a song out of their
sickness for home: My home over there, Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”
"Some people who think of themselves as hard-headed realists would
tell us that the cult of the wild is possible only in an atmosphere of comfort
and safety and was therefore unknown to the pioneers who subdued half a
continent with their guns and plows and barbed wire. Is this true? Consider the
sentiments of Charles Marion Russell, the cowboy artist, as quoted in John
Hutchens' One Man's Montana: I have been called a pioneer. In my book a
pioneer is a man who comes to virgin country, traps off al the fur, kills off
all the wild meat, cuts down all the trees, grazes off all the grass, plows the
roots up and strings ten million miles of wire. A pioneer destroys things and
calls it civilization. Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”
"The love of
wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond
reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which
bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only
paradise we ever need - if only we had the eyes to see ... No, wilderness
is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives
as water and good bread."
"Suppose we say that wilderness invokes nostalgia, a justified not
merely sentimental nostalgia for the lost America our forefathers knew. The word
suggests the past and the unknown, the womb of earth from which we all emerged.
It means something lost and something still present, something remote and at the
same time intimate, something buried in our blood and nerves, something beyond
us and without limit, Romance--but not to be dismissed on that account. The
romantic view, while not the whole of truth, is a necessary part of the whole
truth. "But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is
always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth
which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only
paradise we ever need--if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true
original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural
paradise which lies all around us--if only we were worthy of it." Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”
“All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in
secret it were not true. But
perhaps it is true. And is the
evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain?
That also may be true. We
are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be
for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.” Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire” “A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in
his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines and right angled
surfaces. We need wilderness
whether or not we ever set foot in it. We
need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life go to Alaska, for example, but I am
grateful that it’s there. We need
the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the
cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.” Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire”
“The highest treason, the meanest treason, is
to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the
cold void of space.”
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." Edward Abbey
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the
environment.”
“A huge mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very
core of your being.” Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1932 “No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot
be denied--it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”
"It is easy to recount that I camped many times at Merced Lake, but
it is difficult to explain the magic: to lie in a small recess of the granite
matrix of the Sierra and watch the progress of dusk to night, the incredible
brilliance of the stars, the waning of the glittering sky into dawn, and
the following sunrise on the peaks and domes around me. And always that
cool dawn wind that I believe to be the prime benediction of the Sierra.
These qualities to which I still deeply respond were distilled into my
pictures over the decades. I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite."
“I believe in growing things,
“Everything I have done or felt has been in some way influenced by the
impact of the Natural Scene.”
"I constantly return to the elements of nature that surrounded me in
my childhood, to both the vision and the mood. More than seventy years
later I can visualize certain photographs I might make today as equivalents
of those early experiences. My childhood was very much the father to the
man I became."
Loafing in the Wilderness [Ansel Adams' first letter to his future wife, Virginia Best (pp. 97-98)]
The Spirit of the Mountains [by Ansel Adams, article in the Sierra Club Bulletin, February 1932 (p. 143)]
"Wilderness is an anchor to windward. Knowing it is there, we
can also know that we are still a rich nation, tending our resources as
we should - not a people in despair searching every last nook and cranny
of our land for a board of lumber, a barrel of oil, a blade of grass, or
a tank of water."
“Wolves: The wolf is so cautious that, aided by a high order of intelligence,
it will put forth every effort not to be seen by man. Its correspondingly
keen curiosity, however, will sometimes lead to close investigations especially
during protective darkness, and this has stimulated some of the tales about
wolves trailing individuals with the alleged motive of eventually attacking.
Whenever I hear such accounts I think of many nights in the Continental
Northwest when I’ve gone to sleep wherever in the wilderness I have happened
to be, many times listening as I dozed off to a wolf chorus and often as
not hearing the wild music when half-awakened during the night but – except
for the thrill it still never ceases to arouse – having no particular emotion
except the pleasure of feeling more closely attuned to the unspoiled places;
not because of any daring but because I soon realized, both from observation
and from what others told me, that no wolf will harm a human being”
“All men by nature desire to know…Since we are seeking knowledge, we
must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles, the knowledge
of which is wisdom.”
"Nature makes nothing in vain."
“Wilderness is the violin, wilderness is the music. Wilderness
without wildness is like a Stradivarius lying on a museum shelf – inert,
lifeless… And it is contact with wildness that heals us, that makes us
whole – that might in the end preserve the world.”
"I know of no pleasure deeper, than that which comes from contemplating the natural world and trying to understand it." Sir David Frederick Attenborough
”There is a single light of science, and to brighten
it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.”
"...for humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God's creation, for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands, for humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air and its life with poisonous substances, these are sins." Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians, declared this in the clarion tones of an Old Testament prophet.
"To commit a crime against the natural world is a sin."
"Human beings and the environment compose a seamless
garment of existence ... woven in its entirety by God."
“…Nature is not wasteful. If
she creates beautiful things, it is to serve some ultimate end; it is her whim
to walking obscure paths, but her goal is fixed and immutable.
However, her designs are hidden and not easy to decipher; at best, on
achieves, not knowledge, but a few isolated facts.” William Beebe from “The Edge of the Jungle” (1921)
"When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more,
another Heaven and another Earth must pass before such a one can breathe
again."
“When despair for the world grows in me
"Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man
in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge
and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion.
We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having
taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly
err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world
older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted
with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by
voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings;
they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time,
fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth."
"The seas are the heart's blood of the earth."
“We are molded, we say, by the conditions and the surroundings in
which we live; but too often we forget that the environment is largely what we
can make it.” C. Bliss, "The Kinship of Nature”
"What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any
doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go
anywhere else."
"Without wilderness, the world is a cage."
"Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind
blow."
“To him who, in the love of Nature, holds
"The song of the river ends not at her banks, but in the hearts of those
who have loved her."
"Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they
are sunshine, food, and medicine to the soul."
"I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
"Little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the mighty ocean,
and the pleasant land. So the little minutes, humble though they be, make
the mighty ages of eternity.."
"For all of the wildlife on earth, their future must depend on the conscience on mankind.” Dr. Archie Carr, sea turtle conservationist
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and
excitement. For most of us that clear-eyed vision is dimmed before
we reach adulthood.”
"place of the meeting of land and
water... keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and the relentless drive
of life. Each time I enter it, I
gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that
intrinsic fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each
with its surroundings" Rachel Carson, "The Edge of the Sea"
“Wild creatures, like men, must have a place to live. As civilization
creates cities, builds highways, and drains marshes, it takes away, little
by little, the land that is suitable for wildlife.”
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength
that will endure as long as life lasts.”
“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to
live than other things do.” Willa Cather
"We manipulate nature as if we were stuffing an Alaskan goose. We create
new forms of energy; we make new elements; we kill crops; we wash brains.
I can hear them in the dark sharpening their lasers."
“An old Cherokee is telling his grandson about a fight that is going
on
"We call upon the waters that rim the earth, horizon to horizon, that
flow in our rivers and streams, that fall upon our gardens and fields,
and we ask that they teach us and show us the way."
“Nature will not be admired by proxy.”
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean."
“And on the other side you have sort of the accumulated history of this
country and many others in the world. [...] There were plenty of
times when we did not live up to our creed but at least we had the right
creed, so for quite a long while now America has been stumbling along in
the right direction.
"Nature seems to have retreated into a private sanctuary, where she could work on different models from any she used elsewhere. There, you meet bizarre and marvelous forms." Philibert de Commerson, 1771
"We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one."
"It is the contemplation of life that inspired
Father Teilhard de Chardin to envision three infinities: In addition to
the infinitely big and the infinitely small, Teilhard told us there also
was the infinitely complex - life. This is what we should all be
fighting for."
“The road to the future leads us smack into the wall. We simply ricochet
off the alternatives that destiny offers. Our survival is no more than
a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years.”
“If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed [and] if we are
not willing [to change], we will disappear from the face of the globe,
to be replaced by the insect.”
“Each time I reason, each time I try to use logic, I’m extremely pessimistic.
When I use my heart, when I use my faith – and I have a stainless faith
in mankind – then I become optimistic. A situation will arise that
will awaken people, and we will suddenly understand that we have to join
forces.”
“From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He
is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he
is free. “
"If human civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, than
let it be first of all to carry a message of respect - respect for all
life."
"I am not a scientist. I am, rather, an impresario of scientists. “
“What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through
a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.”
Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction-up, down, sideways-by merely
flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.
"...the sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder
forever."
“If we were logical, the future would be bleak, indeed. But we are more
than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope,
and we can work.”
“Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize that we can’t eat money”
“We live in mystery. Our lives have flowed from exploding stars,
from tides of time and gravity beyond our ken. Nothing in nature
can tell us our story, can explain why today some die while others live
on, why some create and others kill, why we die at all, or live.
The river does not choose. The river gathers all it touches and finds
its way. In surging falls and deep green pools, in chutes and riffles
and silent swirls, the river bears us on through winding passages of grace
and fury, until once, perhaps, in a stab of sun on streaming water, the
entire aching beauty of being comes clear-because we ask, because we care,
because we know and cannot know-and the river, the good, green, terrible
river, flows on.
"When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that
has gone before and the first of what is still to come."
"Consult Nature in everything and write it all down. Whoever thinks
he can remember the infinite teachings of Nature flatters himself. Memory
is not that huge."
“Nature gives to every time and season some beauties
of its own.”
“In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what
we understand, and we will only understand what we are taught.”
“You’ve probably heard people talk about conservation.
Well, conservation isn’t just the business of a few people. It’s
a matter that concerns all of us. It’s a science whose principles
are written in the oldest code in the world, the laws of nature.
The natural resources of our vast continent are not inexhaustible.
But if we will use our riches wisely, if we will protect our wildlife and
preserve our lakes and streams, these things will last us generations to
come.”
"There is a balance in man also, one which has set against his greed and his inertia and his foolishness; his courage, his will, his ability slowly and painfully learn, and to work together." Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1891-1999)
"To be whole and harmonious, man must
also know the music of the beaches, and the woods. He must find the thing, which he is only an infinitesimal
part nurture it and love it, if he is to live." Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, "My Wilderness, 1960
“There is hope that we can find an enduring place for ourselves within
the natural system that sustains us. As never before, we have a chance
to get it right.”
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics which
is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living
beings, we are still savages."
"To trace the history of a river or a raindrop…is also to trace the
history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in
the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble upon divinity, which
like feeding the lake, and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills,
falls, and feeds itself all over again."
“There are two ways to live, one is as though
nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us
the "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself,
his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind
of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison
for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few
persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison
by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and
the whole of nature in its beauty."
“We learn that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread
universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but
all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and
that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout
nature; spirit is present; one and not compound, it does not act upon us
from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves:
therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature
around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth
new branches and leaves through the pores of old. As a plant upon
the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing
fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.”
"Beauty rests on necessities."
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn."
“A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and of virtue, will
purge the eyes to understand her text. By degrees we may come to
know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the
world shall be to us an open book; and every form significant of its hidden
life and final cause.”
“The aspect of nature is devout. Like the figures of Jesus, she
stands with bended head, and hands folded upon the breast. The happiest
man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
"To the dull mind all nature is leaden.
To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with
light." Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,
we must carry it with us or we find it not…”
"Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"All sensible people are selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of it fair." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nature always wears the colors of the spirit." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization" Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The method of nature: who could ever analyze it?" Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Under the general name of Commodity, I rank all
those advantages which our senses owe to nature. This, of course,
is a benefit which is temporary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service
to the soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in kind, and is the
only use of nature which all men apprehend."
"If you have men who will exclude any of God's
creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who
will deal likewise with their fellow men."
"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go
outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature
and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and
that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.
As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then
there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances
may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles."
"Little Strokes, Fell great Oaks." Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
"Nature's first green is gold"
"Till now man has been up against Nature, from
now on he will be up against his own nature."
"Circling the Earth in the orbital spaceship I
marveled at the beauty of our planet. People of the world! Let us safeguard
and enhance this beauty - not destroy it!"
"The greatness of a nation and it's moral progress
can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
"For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed
unfold its wings but will not fly."
"So let us move into the next
millennium with hope,
for without it all we can do is eat and drink the last of our resources
as we watch our planet slowly die. Instead, let us have faith in
ourselves, in our intellect, in our staunch spirit. Let us develop
respect for all living things."
"...we have assumed that our lives need have no real connection to the
natural world, that our minds are separate from our bodies, and that as
disembodied intellects we can manipulate the world in any way we choose.
Precisely because we feel no connection to the physical world, we trivialize
the consequences of our actions. And because this linkage seems abstract,
we are slow to understand what it means to destroy those parts of the environment
that are crucial to our survival. We are, in effect, bulldozing the
Gardens of Eden."
"We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it,
or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children
to inherit our legacy."
"I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water…has a
fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a
thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest streamlet
is an exact replica of a great river."
“Nobody can be in good health if he does not have
all the time fresh air, sunshine, and good water.”
"It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term
survival value."
"What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them
be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and
the wilderness yet."
"You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you
really need."
"Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till
there be no place that they be placed alone in the midst of the Earth."
"You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands." Isaiah 55:12
"The Earth belongs...to the living...no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.
“I am not an advocate for frequent changes in
laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in
hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed,
more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and
manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions
must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require
a man to wear still the coat fitted him when a boy as civilized society
to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
“Our very contact with nature has a deep restorative
power.”
"Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere
are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the
earth as we have in the past...a new ecological awareness is beginning
to emerge which rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to
develop into concrete programs and initiatives...brothers and sisters in
the Catholic church, in order to remind them of their serious obligation
to care for all of creation...Respect for life and for the dignity of the
human person extends also to the rest of creation, which is called to join
man in praising God."
"If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than with
sorrow, we must achieve more than just miracles of technology. We
must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just
as it looked when we got through with it."
"Something hidden.
“It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share
this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not
be able to live on it for long.”
"Not to have known; as most men have not, either the mountains or the
desert, is not to have known oneself."
“The wilderness and the idea of wilderness are one of the permanent
homes of the human spirit.”
"Rivers run through our history and folklore, and link us as a people.
They nourish and refresh us and provide a home for dazzling varieties of
fish and wildlife and trees and plants of every sort. We are a nation rich
in rivers."
“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.”
"A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience,
and this in turn reelects a conviction of individual responsibility for
the health of the land...It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation
to land can exist without love, and a high regard for its value.
By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value;
I mean value in the philosophical sense."
“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the
first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown
to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers
with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge
should have been given to us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures;
a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration
of the biotic enterprise.”
"The life of every river sings its own song, but
in most the song is long marred by the discords of abuse."
“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 the thing children lack, is not actually a progressive
dilution of the essentials by the trivialities of living.”
“...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?”
“I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.
Of what avail are to freedoms without a blank spot on the map.”
“A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary.”
“We shall never achieve harmony with land, any
more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people.
In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but
to strive. It is only in mechanical enterprises that we can expect
that early or complete fruition of effort which we call ‘success’”
“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.”
“I have purposely presented the land ethic as
a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic
is ever ‘written’. Only the most superficial student of history supposes
that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking
community, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a ‘seminar’.
I say tentative because evolution never stops.”
“Recreational development is a job not of building
roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely
human mind.”
"The rich diversity of the world's cultures reflects a corresponding
diversity in the wilds that gave them birth."
“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress
began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still
higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its costs in things natural, wild
and free.”
"We have to learn to think like a mountain, to see with the green fire
in the eyes of a wolf, to become plain citizens again of the land, and
have the generosity of spirit and greatness of heart to live with all our
neighbors"
"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."
“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.”
“… A militant minority of wilderness-minded citizens
must be on the watch throughout the nation and vigilantly available for
action.”
“Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness
boils, 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 already discovered what is important; it is such who prate
of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years.
It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive
excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and
again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.
It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition
and meaning to the human enterprise.”
"Water is the most critical resource issue of our lifetime and our children's
lifetime. The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live
on the land."
"The land belongs to Me, for you are only strangers and guests."
“The road took us to the most distant fountain of the waters of the
Mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and
wristless nights. Thus far I had accomplished one of those great
objects on which my mind has been unalterably fixed for many years, judge
then the pleasure I felt in allaying my thirst with this pure and ice cold
water.”
"In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific
accomplishments fade to trivia."
"From time immemorial people of indigenous or land-based cultures have
celebrated their connectedness with nature as an integral part of their
daily lives. Free and enduring access to air, water and land assured
their sustenance and survival."
"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.
The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement
of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops -- under the rocks
are the words and some of the words are theirs."
"Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of
death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience,
in which body, mind and nature are the same.
And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing
away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate
instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without
joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water
from which we came.” Peter Matthiessen, “The Snow Leopard”
"The variety of life in nature can be compared
to a vast library of unread books, and the plundering of nature is comparable
to the random discarding of whole volumes without having opened them.
Our critical dependence on the great variety of nature for the progress
we have already made has been amply documented. Indifference to the
loss of a species, in effect, indifference to the future, and therefore
a shameful carelessness about our children."
"Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another
troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered
and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast,
rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of
blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers
of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into a mountain's
belly, sculpted the land. Peeled back the planet's history exposing the
texture of time itself."
“Although it is not true all conservatives are stupid people,…it is
true that most stupid people are conservatives.” John Stuart Mill (1806-1893)
"A river sings a holy song conveying the mysterious truth that we are
a river, and if we are ignorant of this natural law, we are lost."
"We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people
living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its blessings
the people have no source of soul."
“If you love something hotly enough, consciously, with care, it becomes
yours by symbiosis, irrevocably.”
“There is no aristocracy in trees.
They are not haughty. They
will thrive near the humblest cabin just as well as they will in the shadow of a
king’s palace. There is a true
triumph in the unswerving integrity and genuine democracy of trees.” J. Sterling Morton, founder of Arbor Day
"God has cared for these trees, saved
them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling
tempests, and floods; but He cannot save them from fools." John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
"The last days of this glacial winter are not yet past, so young is
our world. I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he
did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so
no more, because I have discovered that I also live in 'creation's dawn'.
The morning stars still sing together, and the world not half made, becomes
more beautiful every day."
“How hard to realize that every camp of men or beast has this glorious
starry firmament for a roof! In such places standing alone on the
mountaintop it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make –
leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone – we
all dwell in a house of one room – the world with a firmament for its roof
– and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.”
"Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot
run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and
hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides,
branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones...It took more than three
thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods...God has
cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, a thousand straining,
levelling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from the fools."
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.
Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The
winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,
while care will blow away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
"Keep close to Nature’s heart …and break clear away, once in a while,
and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean."
"Wilderness is a necessity...They will see what I meant in time.
There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food
and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is
only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow."
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread,
"Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine
trees. Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in
general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak
for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would
vanish."
“O these vast, calm measureless mountain days…
Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand
windows to show us God.”
“Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of the pine trees…if people
can be gotten to the woods…all the difficulties in the way of forest preservation
would vanish.”
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything
else in the universe"
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray
in, where Nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”
"Wilderness itself is the basis of our civilization. I wonder
if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right
to live on."
"Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams
and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we
afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the
waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to
restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves." "Our planet
is beset with a cancer which threatens our very existence and which will
not respond to the kind of treatment that has been prescribed in the past.
The cancer of water pollution was engendered by our abuse of our lakes,
streams, rivers, and oceans; it has thrived on our half-hearted attempts
to control it; and like any other disease, it can kill us. We have ignored
this cancer for so long that the romance of environmental concern is already
fading in the shadow of the grim realities of lakes, rivers and bays where
all forms of life have been smothered by untreated wastes, and oceans which
no longer provide us with food."
"(Human)
inflexibility - it was the worst human
failing: you could learn to check impetuously, you could overcome fear
through confidence and laziness through discipline, but rigidity of mind
allowed for no antidote. It carried the seeds of it's own destruction."
“With beauty before me, May I walk
"The wilderness holds answers to more questions than we have yet learned
to ask."
“I am convinced that ecology cannot be secret. Environmental openness
is an inalienable human right. Any attempt to conceal any information
about harmful impacts on people and the environment is a crime against
humanity.”
"O Great Spirit, whose breath gives life to the world and whose voice
is heard in the soft breeze...make us wise so that we may understand what
you have taught us, help us learn the lessons you have hidden in every
leaf and rock, make us always ready to come to you with clean hands and
straight eyes, so when life fades, as the fading sunset, our spirits may
come to you without shame."
“All other creatures look down toward the earth, but man was given a
face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and his gaze upon the
sky.” Ovid, "Metamorphosis"
"Rediscovering Nature is in a way a partial return to the awe and innocent
of childhood."
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new land, but in seeing with new eyes.”
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”
“There is so much smoke all the animals are being killed.
The rivers as well. That is
why I am very worried about my people. My
spirit is always warning me that when the forest is destroyed there will be no
more shade. There will be very
strong winds. The sun will get very
hot. And it will be difficult to
breathe. Then everybody will die.
This is my concern. I am
warning you. You have to think. You
have to change your ideas. Leave
the jungle alone.” Chief Raoni
“If you clear a forest, you'd better pray continuously. While you're pushing a road through and rigging the cables and moving between trees on the dozer, you'd better be talking to God. While you're cruising timber and marking trees with a blue slash, be praying; and pray while you're peddling the chips and logs and writing Friday's checks and paying the diesel bill - even if it's under your breath, a rustling at the lips. If you’re manning the saw head or the scissors, snipping the trees off at the ground, going from one to another, approaching them brusquely and laying them down, I'd say, pray extra hard; and pray hard when you're hauling them away. God doesn’t like a clearcut. It makes his heart turn cold, makes him wince and wonder what went wrong with his creation, and sets him to thinking about what spoils the child.” Janisse Ray, a young poet from southern Georgia, who in her 1999 memoir Ecology of a Cracker Childhood decried the destruction of the region’s longleaf pine forests.
“…in a place protected, there is a permanence, a kind of wilderness
that knows nothing of human perception or concerns, a wildness that will
not be affected by proposals and counterproposals or claims, only by what
the land is, and remains.”
"We live in a world in which we need to share
responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my
problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider
those people my heroes."
"There's a generous current in the American spirit.
And if we can simply give voice to that once in a while, I think it's a
good message."
"[M]y conception of liberty does not permit an individual citizen or
a group of citizens to commit acts of depredation against nature in such
a way as to harm their neighbors and especially to harm the future generations
of Americans."
“It is safe to say that the prosperity of our people depends on the
energy and intelligence with which our national resources are used.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1909
"A nation behaves well if it treats the natural
resources as assets, which it must turn over to the next generation increased
and not impaired in value."
“The man should have youth and strength who seeks adventure in the
wide, waste spaces of the earth…He must long greatly for the lonely winds that
blow across the wilderness, and for sunrise and sunset over the rim of the empty
world.” Theodore Roosevelt
“I hate a man who skins the land.”
“Every man who appreciated the majesty and
beauty of the wilderness and of wild life, should strike hands with the
farsighted men who wish to preserve out material resources, in the effort to
keep our forests and our game beasts, game-birds, and game-fish – indeed all
the living creatures of prairie and woodland and seashore – from wanton
destruction… Above all, we should realize the effort toward this end is
essentially a democratic process.”
"Not only is he the author to whom all men turn when they think of the
Sierras and Northern glaciers... but he was also - what few nature-lovers
are - a man able to influence contemporary thought and action on the subjects
to which he had devoted his life."
“To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the
land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result
in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we
ought by right to hand down to them.”
“The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute
the fundamental problem, which underlies almost every other problem of
our national life.”
"Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't
breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something.
You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the
history of our planet."
“These are my jungles. I
only hope that one day you may be able to visit them, before they are all
bulldozed or atomized, to see for yourself their astonishing plants and animals
and meet their wonderful human inhabitants face to face.” Ivan T. Sanderson
“The environment is man’s first right”
"How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is
strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the
sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth
is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore,
every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect.
All are holy in the memory and experience of my people... If we sell
you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares
the spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our
grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind
also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our
land, you must keep it apart and sacred, a place where man can go to taste
the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers. Will you teach
your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is
our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.
This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did
not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever
he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: Our God
is also your God. The earth is precious to Him and to harm the earth
is to heap contempt on its Creator."
“Until he extends the circle of his compassion
to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”
"A thinking man feels compelled to approach all
life with the same reverence he has for his own."
"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth" Albert Schweitzer
“Future generations would be truly saddened that mankind as so little
foresight, so little compassion, such a lack of generosity of spirit for
the future that it would eliminate one of the most dramatic and beautiful
animals this world has ever seen.”
"There
are more things in heaven and earth...than are dreamt of in your philosphy."
“Dear old world you are very lovely, and I am very glad to be alive
in you.”
“Each small island was black with trees.
They grew to the rough edges of each island, where the water boiled and
crashed against a narrow rim of rocks. It was as if the trees had
erupted from the sea itself – as if the sea were filled with trees, and
here and there they burst out in tall pockets we call islands. Not
an inch of land was visible, but trees were everywhere.”
"Man's heart away from nature becomes hard. "
“Something will have gone out of us as a people
if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the
last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette
cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos
or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean
streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that
never again will Americans be free in their own country from noise, the
exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.”
“We simply need that wild country available to
us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope.”
"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining
wilderness be destroyed. We simply need that wild country available
to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope."
"I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river
with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green
glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how
it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and
me."
"I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees
“Let
us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.”
“A lake is the landscapes’ most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth
of his own nature.”
"Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the
first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow by our doors,
to distant enterprise and adventure, and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers
on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands
of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents."
"In wilderness is the preservation of the world."
"Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down."
"It is some advantage to lead a primitive life if only to learn what
are the necessities. Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called
comforts of life are not only indispensible, but positive hindrances to
the elevation of mankind."
"Every creature is better alive than dead - men, moose and pine trees
- and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy
it."
"If a man aspires toward a righteous life, his
first act of abstinence is from injury to animals"
"Who will open up Tibet, or claim the last acre of the Amazon, the hills of central India, the jungles of Borneo, the steppes of Siberia-the merchant or the missionary?" William Cameron Townsend, 1942
"We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who
would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such
raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative.
They are attempts to take from all the people for the benefit of a few."
“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.” Mark Twain "It was a kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying
on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't even feel like talking
loud, and it wasn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle."
"Although it was wonderful to see all that water tumbling down, it would
be even more wonderful to see all that water tumbling up."
“A nation that for a hundred years has recognized and supported an obligation
to the other beings on this planet is a nation that is truly enlightened
– because its people understand.”
"Increasingly, the world looks as if we hated it."
"I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially." E. B. White
"Every morning I wake up torn between the need to save the world and the desire to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day." E. B. White
“The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough,
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons; it is to grow
in the open air and eat and sleep with the Earth."
"Without enough wilderness America will change. Democracy, with
its myriad personalities and increasing sophistication, must be fibred
and vitalized by regular contact with outdoor growth - animals, trees,
sun warmth and free skies - or it will dwindle and pale."
"If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be
unwilling to let it go... This is the story of our past and it will be
the story of our future."
“I believe we are capable of creating a world that can accommodate the
tamed and untamed life, that we can in fact see ourselves as a part of
a larger biological community, that it is not at odds with a sense of deep
democracy, but compatible with it.”
“A civilization able to envision God and to embark on the colonization
of space will surely find a way to save the integrity of this planet and the
magnificent life it harbors.” E.O. Wilson, “The Future of Life”
“Each species, to put the matter succinctly, is a masterpiece.
It deserves that rank in the fullest sense; A creation assembled
with extreme care by genius.”
“The wildernesses of the world have shriveled into timber leases and
threatened nature reserves. Their
perilous state presents us with a dilemma, which the historian Leo Marx has
called the machine in the garden. The
natural world is the refuge of the spirit, remote, static, richer even than the
human imagination. But we cannot
exist in this paradise without the machine that tears it apart.
We are killing the thing we love, our Eden, progenitrix, and sibyl.” E.O.Wilson, “Biophilia” (1984)
“Environmentalism is something more central and vastly more important.
Its essence has been defined by science in the following way. Earth,
unlike the other solar planets, is not in physical equilibrium. It
depends on its living shell to create the special conditions on which life
is sustainable. The soil, water, and atmosphere of its surface have
evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their present condition by
the
activity of the biosphere, a stupendously complex layer of living creatures
whose activities are locked together in precise but tenuous global cycles
of energy and transformed organic matter. The biosphere creates our
special world anew every day, every minute, and holds it in a unique, shimmering
physical disequilibrium. On that disequilibrium the human species
is in total thrall. When we alter the biosphere in any direction,
we move the environment away from the delicate dance of biology.
When we destroy ecosystems and extinguish species, we degrade the greatest
heritage this planet has to offer and thereby threaten our own existence.”
“There is an implicit principle of human behavior important to conservation:
the better an ecosystem is known, the less likely it will be destroyed.”
“The most wonderful mystery of life may well be the means by which it
created so much so much diversity from little physical matter.”
“The goal of life is living in agreement with
Nature.”
"A true conservationist is a man who knows that
the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."
"For our families, for our future,"
"I pledge to make the Earth a secure and
hospitable home for present and future generations." The Earth Summit, 1992
"A wilderness...is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and
its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor
who does not remain."
“The good Lord didn't create anything
without a purpose, but mosquitoes come close.” Unknown
"A nature lover is a pers |
