One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

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

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

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.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes

Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

...it is disquieting to feel that the conversion into a National Forest or Park always means the esthetic death of a piece of wild country.

That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.

What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.